Learning Methodologies and Teaching Methods

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Short Answer

“And such teachings and their teachers is why I harbour doubts, why I wonder if something is missing from the Jedi Code. There is no blame - all must accept. But, at its core, one must wonder if it was the failure of the Jedi teachings… or the teachers themselves. Many of the Jedi Council trained Exar Kun, Ulik… Revan and Malak. How could they not see the danger they posed? And if they could not… perhaps there was some essential part of their teachings that was flawed. Something beyond the Jedi Code that they were missing.”

Mical, Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords (2004)

Andragogy: Learning, and theories, related to instruction catered towards adult, postgraduate, and professional audiences.

E.g. Professional development and continuing education.
From personal experience, I rarely hear this term outside of talking to other adults in education.

Pedagogy: Learning, and theories, related to instruction catered towards children, teen, and sometimes college undergraduate audiences.

E.g. Primary and secondary education.
Pedagogy is often used in place of andragogy as pedagogy is more commonly known.

It is in the nature of learning to get confused along the journey. That’s normal.

In general:

If the educator is working harder than the students, there might be a problem.
- Do NOT “meet them where they’re at.”
Every method can be questioned. Without questioning methods, we cannot improve methods.
Both motivation and intelligence are important to learning. Even if a student is smart, if they don’t want to be motivated, then they cannot be motivated.
You should hold back students from moving on if they’re not ready to move on.
- The social stigma alone may be enough motivation to perform well.
- It mitigates the issue down the line where information is read, skips processing in the brain, and goes straight to work with hands.
- This doesn’t mean avoiding throwing them into the fire for learning.
Mastery isn’t achieved after doing something right just once. It’s achieved when you can do something consistently well across multiple scenarios.
You could be an amazing teacher, but if the system doesn’t support you and/or students don’t engage with your teaching, then you’re fighting an uphill, or even losing, battle constantly.

Lessons should NOT be differentiated without good reason. When designing learning for any given content, you only have a limited amount of time and resources to cover what you need to cover. This means fighting depth vs breadth (how much and how detailed) and academic rigor vs inclusion (for whom), which means you’re defining scope… like a manager would. Differentiation fights against scope and risks affecting educational quality negatively and not following standards.

Decide between covering a few topics deeply vs many topics broadly.
An inclusive curriculum is extremely unlikely to be a rigorous curriculum.
An every flavor cake doesn’t taste that great.
- i.e. it’s practically impossible to scaffold and differentiate for every student.

Long Answer

I hold a lot of opinions about learning. For example, students with behavior problems should be outright separated from those without behavior problems and capable of controlling themselves. Educators are also not there to “entertain” students for their amusement or constantly provide updates to people (like parents) who already have 24/7 access to student performance records and grades. I could also say any inclusion without appropriate support is tantamount to neglect.

I’m not a proponent of “individual learning styles” (see here for further evidence (Riener, Willingham, 2010)). There are optimal ways to learn topics, but the best way varies from topic to topic and you can teach in multiple ways at once. Direct instruction is an effective way of learning when done well.

There are many ways to learn, such as the Feynman technique (Parrish, n.d.) by explaining concepts simply, flashcards with the Leitner system (Kansas State University, n.d.), or applications like Anki.

Sleep is also important. Both students and teachers should not neglect it because it affects learning. If you don’t get enough sleep, you won’t enhance your learning ability (Walker, 2017).

Sometimes a student might complain that all they ever do is work.

They’re right. That’s the teacher’s job, to teach in a class.

Learning is work. Were every day a free day, students wouldn’t get any real learning done. If you’re a teacher who’s diligent, but other teachers provide too much free time or leeway, you might dislike the other teachers too.

Students may even complain if you give a free day too, despite it not being a “work” day, because it’s boring. At that point, I’d say resort to more work so they have something else to do instead.

Lastly, I’d also say to focus on the knowledge and not on the job. If you learn the knowledge behind how education works, then doing a job with education and offers for work come easier.

If you’re asked about something you don’t know, just say you don’t know and will work on it in the future. People can tell you’re lying better than you may think.

All that said, let’s approach this subject carefully.

Before we dive into further topics, I want to emphasize one point: It is significantly easier to teach multiple students at the same level vs multiple students across widely different levels. If this sounds “harsh,” consider these other parallels:

It is easier (and lower cost) to make and serve 1 type of hamburger to customers vs 30 types of hamburgers.
Logistics are typically easier transporting 60 people to one location vs 60 people to multiple locations.
It’s less taxing on employees to maintain one version of an application rather than developing backwards compatibility on multiple, different operating systems.
Assembly lines are easily configured to optimize production on one product compared to setting up multiple production lines for multiple products.

What About Homeschooling?

Notice: This section primarily aimed at parents/guardians.

To state my opinion, I’d generally advise against homeschooling a student and I’ll state my reasons below. To put it simply from a teacher/manager perspective: there’s too much risk for its payout.

Can it perform better than private/public schools? Yes, it can.

Will it perform better than private/public schools? It depends. There’s evidence where well-structured homeschooling does better than institutional (public/private) schooling, but also shows unstructured homeschooling does significantly worse (Martin-Chang et al., 2011).

The biggest deterrant to homeschooling is if it goes badly, it goes very badly. Firstly, you cannot replace a bad parent/guardian in a home setting as easily as you can a bad teacher in any education setting. Secondly, the potential for learning in homeschool has a floor somewhere under the sea and a ceiling up in the stratosphere. A student can perform extremely well; I’m not denying the possibility entirely, but affirming the possibility is really low.

One major problem is when you take a student away from a facility, organization, etc. that utilizes the organization’s resources to educate them. There’s multiple sources of funding going into established schools; not just income from one source. If parents/guardians decide to homeschool, the monetary and resource burden is more on them, not the schools. Additionally, you’ll still probably have stringent laws specifically covering homeschooling based on your location (e.g. Colorado or New York in the United States).

I won’t go into details on homeschooling laws here because there’s a lot of them. For the United States, they’re typically found online by searching for “homeschool” + name of state + “Department of Education.”

If a parent/guardian cannot provide the following at a minimum, homeschooling risks being a disaster for learning:

Parents/guardians not being abusive or neglectful of their children nor wanting to indoctrinate them.
The time (40+ hours/week) for parents/guardians to commit to their child’s education for many (10+) years.
Enough money to spend on it, often at the loss of 1 or more income streams.
A sufficient education to differentiate between good and bad learning materials across ALL required subjects at ALL grade levels.
The means to get a student proficient in every core subject, not just 1.
Developed an environment learning can safely and effectively happen in.
Opportunities for social interactions among the student’s peers.
Providing ways to incorporate extracurricular activities.
The backbone to enforce regulations and standards in behavior, education, and conduct.
The ability to accommodate any disabilities, special needs, etc. if applicable.

Dedicated school environments have the means and resources to at least meet every item in this list. Parents/Guardians more often than not do not have those means and resources. Additionally, much advice that applies to standard education systems may not apply to homeschooling systems due to a (admittedly presumed) lack of peers and social interactions among the student(s).

As time goes by, you’ll also need to consistently re-evaluate and judge the situation of the students involved in homeschooling. One cannot reasonably expect to develop a learning plan and expect it to hold 1, 5, or even 10 years without some modifications along the way. For the best interests of the student(s), you may need to abandon homeschooling and opt into school systems instead.

Of particular note, homeschooling may suffer when you go into advanced/specialized subjects like Calculus and Physics, as the teacher-parent may lack content mastery. This can, however, be alleviated through utilizing multiple community resources.

Self-Study Primer

Notice: This section aimed towards adult learners, students, and continuing education.

Thanks to modern technology and the Internet, scores of educational content are free and available to the masses. Self-study is a valid way of learning new things and is what I’m doing as an adult outside of formal education too.

The biggest advantage to self-study is you can go straight to the resources and determine how you want to learn on your own time. Many resources posted online are posted by instructors who don’t have to spend time managing students, which means more time dedicated to teaching students and perfecting quality content. It’s part of the reason “Why can’t I use YouTube (or similar online resource)” is a valid question I got from students. The instructor in the video doesn’t have to manage people at the same time like a teacher does, so those instructors have more resources and time to make better learning materials more often than not.

The disadvantages to self-studying cannot be neglected though. While some self-study resources may provide curriculums and guidelines to assist you, you rarely have someone prodding you to stay on task and be held accountable. Additionally, the learner also assumes responsibility for what they learn and how they learn. You might have the perfect learning materials, but if you don’t practice proper learning methods it won’t help you.

If you needed reasons to determine whether you should self-study or seek formal education, here’s what I’d figure matters:

Whether or not you can establish a clear goal, direction, plan, etc. for said learning.
Whether or not you can self-discipline yourself for long periods of time (beyond 2 weeks!)
There’s sufficient motivation (i.e. a WANT to learn) from within to get through learning the material.
You can manage distractions and focus 100% of attention on doing something.
- Doesn’t have to be for a full day, but at least part of a day across multiple days.
Knowing how to pace your learning (e.g. small steps daily, bite at a time, etc.).
Whether you’ll find ways to use the knowledge you learn, such as applying knowledge and repeating and iterating to improve.
The awareness to check periodically whether or not you’re actually learning the right thing.

The Differentiation Problem

Differentiation is great on paper and terrible in practice. When I hear about it, it’s essentially people wanting the benefits of one-on-one education, but in a classroom group setting.

There’s just “one teensy-weensy but ever-so-crucial little tiny detail,” as Hades from Hercules (1997) might put it: CLASSROOMS AREN’T EQUIPPED/DESIGNED FOR IT.

That, and having the teacher/instructor deal with all differentiation for students places your educational system onto a single point of failure. What happens when the teachers/instructors are no longer there? Do the other employees cover it? Extremely unlikely.

A conventional classroom has 1 adult, around 25-30 kids, and a surprisingly large skill spread among students. Imagine a group of students where there’s 3 different IEPs, 4 ESL students, 1 student trying to start a fire, and 4 504 plans. You’ve all of a sudden went from 1 way to designing your education to 12+ ways instead. A solution designed for an individual rarely perform wells as a solution for an entire group, which means we’re dealing with systemic issues here.

If you’re trying to hold students to one consistent standard, but are differentiating content in multiple ways, meeting standards is extremely hard, if not nigh impossible. Instead of tracking and ensuring one method adheres to quality education, you now have multiple methods to do that for. It scales terribly, can fall apart at the slightest touch, and maintaining it is painful. All of that makes standardization a go-to solution because it works with limited resources. Additionally, standardization and differentiation are antonyms and will face tradeoffs; you cannot invest into one aspect without sacrificing the other.

Where differentiation works exceedingly well is in tutoring or one-on-one instruction. There’s one teacher to one student, so a teacher only needs to create one distinct (i.e. “differentiated”) method of teaching optimized for that one student’s learning. The likelihood of that happening in a physical classroom is near zero, because there is almost always more than one student per teacher.

The 2-sigma problem, as shown by Benjamin Bloom, also shows statistical significance between students receiving differentiated instruction in a one-on-one setting vs conventional instruction (1984). There’s also a philosophy by Bloom indicating mastery of prerequisite knowledge is important before moving on to new knowledge.

Though technological advancements now provide online tutors, cognitive tutors, and learning systems/platforms, the reality of one-on-one instruction for ideal differentiation is still out of reach. It’s financially infeasible, or too costly, for societies to handle reliably and maintain at scale. Because of this infeasibility, it’s why modern differentiation may appear closer to methods of group instruction aiming to be as close to effective as one-on-one instruction.

As a potential solution, Universal Design Learning (UDL) may replace differentiation, but has benefits and drawbacks. I’m going to summarize it here, but if you want more information you can look for it online (e.g. CAST on Universal Design for Learning (2024)). You’re also technically standardizing education as it aims for a single curriculum with adaptability and flexibility, but also destandardizes the learner by taking their personal considerations into the design.

The biggest benefits are you get a framework where everyone gets the same accommodations under one curriculum and it’s accessible to as many students as possible. It’s also compatible with other teaching methods and frameworks, such as direct instruction and the Agile framework I talked about previously. To list some examples of UDL:

Subtitles/closed captions for videos
Pencils and paper for everyone
Guided notes as an IEP requirement now available for everyone
Speakers to make it easier for hard-of-hearing people

The biggest downside, though, is you risk lowering the average rigor, intensity, engagement rates, and level of learning given to every student with a poor implementation. Simply put, you cannot throw UDL into a system and expect it to perform magic.

I’m positive about what UDL can do, but am careful not to sing praises about it. Universal Design Learning should work well, because it already has parts “good” teachers do anyways. It also applies proven principles from different fields, like architecture and general design, into education. In practice, though, it suffers the same resource/time problem like differentiation and not all education can be completely accessible to every student. If sufficient supports cannot be provided with the resources available, it will still not work as intended.

UDL technically doesn’t cover IEP/504/etc. or other legally required accommodations, even if an UDL-aligned curriculum is designed to cover those accommodations anyway. It’s a pedagogical philosophy for everyone’s education and not a legal mandate for an individual’s education. Because that is the case, an accommodation you may think is reasonable may no longer become reasonable depending on what the environment provides.

There’s other aspects I’m against, such as letting students decide how they’re evaluated vs the administrator/educator deciding that for them. There’s also still a point you cannot reasonably accommodate even the students several levels too low for a given subject matter, class, and grade with UDL.

A “Secret” for Students

It’s like people finding out why Ajax (the cleaning product) is specifically called Ajax. It is stronger than grease, because Ajax (the warrior) was stronger than all of Greece. I usually cannot help but quietly smirk when the realization hits and they discover the genius of that marketing slogan and etymology.

As for the actual secret: review the material before it’s covered in class.

Is it always possible to do this? Not really; time and resource constraints still exist.

Does it help? Yes.

Pre-reading the material is where you enter the shallow part of the pool, test out the waters first to temper expectations, and get an idea of what you’re doing. Then, during the class, you’re transitioning from shallow waters to deeper waters instead of the instructor pushing you straight into the deep end of the pool. Reviewing again, if you choose, is like practicing and getting used to swimming in the deep end of the pool.

It also saves you, the student, from scrambling around in class as much. It actually saves time (ironically) by giving you an idea where to start, which means more time to do the work and a better time handling increased workloads over time. It also helps for discussions and pop quizzes, where reading the material ahead of time makes you more prepared and likely to perform better compared to those without preparation.

If you consistently cannot prepare in advance, another method is taking notes you’ll never reread. It sounds dumb at first, but consider: It forces you to pay at least some attention to what’s being taught and, if you forget something, you now have a written record to reference in the future.

These methods might sound boring because they are work, but it is work you put in now to make the future easier.

There’s also another name for this: studying.

Managing Boredom

Not all boredom is bad and not all learning needs to be fun. If students don’t learn how to manage boredom, they cannot learn to manage themselves independently to achieve bigger and better things in the future.

It’s like going to a new rollercoaster ride at a park and realizing you need to wait 2 hours in line before you can get on the 3-5 minute ride of a lifetime.

How do you manage that boredom in the meantime?

In operations research, we have two terms relevant here: balking (not joining the queue) and reneging (leaving the queue after joining).

The point is you may have to get through the boring part (the long wait in line) before the reward (the new park ride). There’s also a second lesson about a certain reward in the present vs a greater reward in an unreliable future.

This is seeking instant gratification vs delayed gratification, or the difference between a reward today vs bigger reward tomorrow. Put another way: the fight against non-stop stimuli.

To apply this back to teaching:

It’s balancing act of students doing things and students listening about things.
It’s a test of how well students can manage their own boredom.

Types of Practice

Suppose you have ever coached or practiced sports before. You may have experienced spaced practice, interleaved practice, and varied practice but not know there were terms for it (Brown, Roediger, McDaniel, 2014).

Spaced practice (alternatively, “distributed practice”) is the most straightforward. Rather than learning and cramming everything at once, you do the same material over multiple, spaced, periods. There is a strong emphasis on long enough breaks between the time you first learn material, followed by reviewing the material. Review time for materials is typically before someone naturally forgets. Spaced practice combats the forgetting curve to help with active recall and better memory retention of the topic(s) learned (Ebbinghaus, 1885).

Massed practice is what we do not want, compared to spaced practice. Rather than giving time and learning over multiple sessions, massed practice is when you try to learn everything in a single session (or multiple, unspaced sessions) and hope the information sticks. That may work for Tony Stark when it comes to thermonuclear astrophysics, but for 99.9% of other students, that statistically does not work (Whedon, 2012).

If it does seem to work, it’s an illusion of effective learning and you may forget it all in days.

Interleaved practice is when you alternate what is being practiced or learned. For example, we spaced out tennis practice at specific times each day. Interleaved practice is doing multiple types of tennis techniques throughout the practice sessions, Interleaving mixes skills in the same session instead of isolating skills across sessions.

Varied practice is another form of learning. To expand on the tennis example in interleaved practice, we’re already doing spaced days and interleaving different types of tennis techniques throughout the day. Variation adds context, where you practice a technique across multiple applications, like a drop shot from baseline and net. You take the topic and the methods employed under that topic and vary based on how they’re applied.

Back to the Basics

Alternatively: “Anchored Instruction.”

Used in a general sense, but relates to topics The Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt cover as well (1990).

For some readers, this may be a concept which doesn’t internalize fully until you have to design your own curriculum and lesson plans.

You’ll want to think with a broad perspective here. The general process is these steps:

Create an “umbrella” concepts can go under.
Establish context and find ways to tie concepts together.
Call back to these relationships in older concepts to help explain new concepts.
Continue circling back to foundational concepts repeatedly throughout the academic period.

To put it another way, mastery is paved through layering basics. To put it so it sounds more appetizing, you’re adding on more and more layers to a delicious cake.

The anchor involved doesn’t have to be serious either. When I talked about the Earth in Science, I often used cake as an anchor because cake layers are, well, layered, but also observable, edible, and people like food. I managed to relate cake back to all of these Earth concepts and more:

Layers of the Earth
Plate Tectonics
Faults, Folding, Erosion
Rock Cycles
Soil Horizons
Geological Time Scale

A good anchor is a fantastic way to explain concepts which may be difficult to approach, but it helps establish a foundation and an “anchor” point to return to as new material is covered and when you need to scale up concepts.

Helplessness and Failure

There’s also dealing with the theories of learned helplessness, learned incompetence, and negative reinforcement. Learned helplessness happens when repeated failures convince someone their efforts do not matter. Learned incompetence is avoiding responsibility for actions. Negative reinforcement occurs when avoidant behaviors are rewarded.

These may show at any age in humans and also shows up in animals. In the context of students, it typically appears when they avoid challenges and difficulties. Their responses may include not attempting tasks, quitting after one failed attempt, or waiting for another person to solve it for them (Nickerson, 2022). Another way I’d describe learned helplessness is a lack of autonomy, where it feels like nothing you try will ever make a difference based on past experiences, even when opportunities exist in the present to improve things.

In teaching, these concepts are surprisingly prevalent and show in unexpected ways. Here are some examples:

Student doesn’t have a pencil? They may wait for you to provide one rather than search for one.
Students have to retake a test? They may not care enough, despite repeated classwide reminders, or even a 1-on-1 reminder. Even if it is essential, they may still avoid it or choose not to do it.
Students need to practice a new skill? They may refuse to do so because they don’t know how and won’t attempt solutions to fix it.
Student doesn’t want to do an assignment? They may act like they don’t know so they can get you to complete it for them.

Countering learned helplessness, learned incompetence, and negative reinforcement is simple: make students experience and overcome difficulty on their own, even if it is only a small win. What’s hard is the execution. Provide no more support than necessary, like a small nudge in the right direction. What matters is the effort and problem-solving coming from the student themselves.

Resilience is built by facing and working through failures. Students have to learn to do more things on their own and get outside of their comfort zone, lest it follow them and negatively affect them for the rest of their lives.

A good learning environment isn’t always a comfortable learning environment.

The goal isn’t punishment. It is rebuilding lost autonomy and resilience by presenting manageable challenges; the small wins over time to gain confidence to achieve larger victories.

You may also see this with working adults, too. They may do just enough work not to get fired, because extra effort goes either unrewarded or given more work, reinforcing minimal engagement.

When Students Ask for Help

Here’s a mantra to save your sanity: specific answers require specific questions.

From personal experience, when a student is requesting help they’re often trying to get you, the teacher/instructor, to give an answer so they don’t have to think. They may be willing to listen to the explanation, but that’s just steps towards the goal of getting an answer still. Chances are they know

If you do give an answer without careful consideration, you sabotage the learning process and enforce it’s OK later on for them to keep doing it.

Let me give examples of non-questions I’ve experienced:

A student showing me something on their computer and saying “Well, read it.”
“I don’t know how to do this.”
“What do I write here?” (when there’s clearly written instructions for what to write)
“I don’t get it.”
A student gesturing towards their paper, computer, etc.
(After raising their hand to get my attention) “I forgot.”

As for examples how I responded to the above:

“Did you read the directions?”
“Read the directions out loud.”
Making students ask their question out loud so the entire class hears.
“Come up with a question I can answer.”
“Ask your neighbor first” (except for tests/quizzes)
“What is the first step?” (mainly for ESL)
“Try to do it first.”
If I moved to a raised hand and they don’t have their question ready, I move on to the next person.

You want to save time. Non-questions waste time and students who ask these types of questions won’t learn effectively.

The only exceptions here are if you’re addressing medical concerns or assisting people with specific accommodations. If neither of those apply, then save time where you can and expect specific questions from students.

If you want a solution, you could create something like productive struggle time where they are not allowed to ask for help. Do keep that timeframe limited though or else you may do more harm than good.

One example of “productive failure” comes from Kapur (2016).

The Test Wasn’t Like The (Homework/Review Sheet/Examples/Etc.)!”

Sometimes this is a valid complaint, but I find those are the exceptions. It can happen as a result of misalignment and bad teachers testing on material located somewhere on Mars when you need to be back on Earth. It’s possible to be a legitimate issue, but not probable.

Most of the time though, and for… pretty much every subject, you will rarely, if ever, apply learning from situation X in practice to situation X in testing to show understand. It’s like the various types of practice I discussed earlier. Yes, the class taught you how to serve the ball in tennis and why serving is done that way, but now you got to show it in a live game where many other things can also happen.

I once had a student ask me about why one of my tests was difficult in the first place. The answer I gave was the test is intended to:

Test your understanding of the topic(s)
Test your ability to apply that understanding to new or more difficult problems.
Be difficult enough to challenge, but still get at least most questions right.
Show you really understand the concept(s) and not just regurgitate an answer to a question.

The younger the student is, or more accommodation limited they are, the more you should consider hand-holding along the way as they may not have critical thinking fully developed at their age group.

As for older students though? Throw them straight into the proverbial fire.

If you ask teachers “have [students] seen it worded that way before?” you’re missing the point. They don’t understand the material if they cannot apply what they learned to properly answer the problem(s).

If it’s administration or a boss telling teachers to make tests/quizzes exactly like the homework, then the teachers hands are (mostly) tied to keep their jobs.

What Happens if Students Use my Example as an Answer?

Speaking forwardly, that’s a lack of creativity and imagination unless you’re specifically asking them to follow along step-by-step and reach the same answer. Rephrasing or rewording existing example(s) also counts here.

It may not be the student’s fault entirely either. Their past environment may not be conducive to learning or training creativity. In an era of Google and search engines, information is readily available to search and mitigates need to generate your own answers. They may also have creativity crushed by a system focused on extreme standardization across their entire learning journey.

If you’re encountering this scenario, there’s a few examples (oh, the irony) on how you could address it:

Early expectations: “Here’s what I need you to do. Here’s my example. Your example must be different.”
Starting point only: “This is the problem. Start writing out a solution.”
Directly requesting original answers: “I want your answer to this question.”
Writing it explicitly into work requiring original responses as documentation to affect grades if they break the instruction.
Adding time limits.

Performance vs Learning

When a student focuses on performance, their goal is to satisfy metrics–often quantitative, like a grade–and do no additional work beyond that. When a student focuses on learning, they’ll invest less time in an explicit grade and more in understanding how and why something works.

Performance students chase grades while learning students pursue understanding. Ironically, the latter often earn higher grades too.

I’ll show a list I’ve shown to my students, condensed down to limit redundancy.

Struggle and failure is normal and a part of learning
Passive exposure to information isn’t enough, hence practice and recall is done
Massed practice creates illusions of learning and limits retention
Motivation matters and goals are better when chosen rather than given
Learning requires explanation/theory and practice. Both are necessary.

What determines learning ability?

Though I disapprove of learning styles, there are still differences in student abilities. To reference Make It Stick by Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel, here are some examples:

Intelligence
Dynamic Testing
Structure Building
Rule vs Example Learning

In short, present materials in ways to optimize learning, not just how students prefer learning.

“Meet Them Where They’re At”

Alternatively: Teach Students Where They Are At.

For additional context, I wrote this particular section on December 2025.

You cannot meet students where they’re at if they have “no skin in the game” (i.e. incurred risk to them).

Though “meet them where they’re at” sounds like good advice, and generally is what you should do, it depends far too heavily on external factors outside your control to be actually good advice. The environment, resources available, the students, other personnel, and far more variables arise in practice. In a real-world scenario, this good advice quickly turns into the worst advice possible. A student’s academic readiness is heavily dependent on the environment and how that environment upholds excellent standards.

Say for example I am managing a workload of 150 students across all classes. Of those 150 students, only about 12 can read, interpret, and reason at the level I need them at to properly understand the information in my curriculum. The irony is many of these students, from the set of 150, are still getting good grades when they normally shouldn’t be doing well because I lowered the rigor to “meet them where they’re at.”

It’s less an issue where students are not smart. They go from point A to point B, but the thinking behind why they go from point A to point B is gone. You or I could make one slight alteration and cause a panic attack in some students who don’t know the “why” and cannot adapt. They take what they see or hear and typically go straight to work, but the process skips going into the brain and performing the reasoning and critical thinking to not mess things up.

I’ve even seen cases where they only rewrote the instructions as their answers, used the example(s) when explicitly told not to, and turn in assignments like they’re “done” but are done completely incorrectly. That’s only a few examples too!

I’m genuinely unsure if the students are actually smart, but acting this way because they know they cannot fail. I do know many students aren’t doing it maliciously on moral grounds, at least, because they’re doing what the system rewards. Since this is the case, there needs to be consequences for failures, such as holding them back a grade or forcing a retake of the class.

And no, a proper “retake” of the class that normally lasts a semester or year is not a remedial session you can finish in a few days.

What about when student performance is below expectations and/or grade level?

I see four ways to proceed here:

Remediation
Curriculum Redesign
Survival Tactics
Student Removal

Remediation is costly in time for a teacher, and other relevant staff. Supports, as part of remediation, also risk enabling dependency or feeding into learned helplessness.

Curriculum redesign is costly in time and resources and unlikely to change midway during your school period. You may also push a problem downstream unless the entire educational pipeline is also aligned.

Survival tactics is pushing students through without addressing deficiencies. It also risks students lacking foundational knowledge and unable to operate when supports disappear.

Removing a student from a class requires a lot of documentation proving the student cannot succeeed and/or function in the class, despite best efforts, and can be cumbersome to execute/process. It deals with politics, legality, and ethics, plus you also may not be allowed to remove a student outside of extreme circumstances.

Out of all of these ways, remediation (and supports) is typically done as it goes the path of least resistance while also meeting legal requirements. I’ll focus on that and assume, in good faith, your goal is getting students up to speed despite any blockers. Keep in mind that it’s possible remediation may not be feasible for the class, or some students, which means teaching what topics you need/want to teach may be impossible.

For remediation, I see two main options:

Reteach and/or integrate the basics
Provide supports (tables, charts, calculators, etc.)

Reteaching basics requires modifying lesson plans. Time spent can range from a dedicated review class session to review snippets without each class session. It also depends on subject matter and its intensity. Some implementation examples may include:

Finishing 5 minutes early to speed review basics
Exit tickets over basic concepts
Hands on activities and general review

From personal experience, I could reasonably cover 1 or 2 grades of learning deficit. Beyond that would typically require tutors, special education, and external support systems.

Reasonable example: Re-teaching parts of Calculus 1 to students in Calculus 3.
Unreasonable example: Teaching Calculus 3 to functionally illiterate students.

To give an analogy, you don’t want someone flying a plane that has never taken pilot training.

It’s not impossible to fix large deficits, but doing it on top of everything else a teacher in a typical classroom needs to do is extremely difficult, if not impossible.

If deficits are truly impossible/unreasonable to fix, then you need to document what the deficits are, what has been done to try and overcome them, and communicate why they’re infeasible to help protect yourself and your role as a teacher.

The second option, providing supports, is similar to training wheels on a bike. It complements learning, but doesn’t replace learning. Examples may include reference charts, formula sheets, and guided notes you provide students or students create on their own time to use for other assignments, tests, and projects.

Some blockers may mitigate, or completely stop, remediation and may be outside your control:

Students motivation and engagement
System issues like pushing through grades despite evidence showing deficiencies
Administrative pressure to meet pacing/benchmarks
External systems not reinforcing learning outside of class
Accommodations and legal requirements prohibiting some remediation techniques

As a caution and reminder, there’s still two issues with remediation and supports:

If students cannot acquire the skill(s) to function in the class, and it cannot be fixed, you’ll have to accept it’s a potential failure and start drafting documents to protect yourself.
Supports help students pass classes, but may not help them be independent.

Your goal here is properly educating students, and you should strive for it, but sometimes it won’t always go the way you want for various reasons.

“You Should Know How To Do It”

Alternatively: “What if students can’t follow the prompt?”

Teachers want you to figure things out and have students develop their own resources for solving problems. If you don’t try and fail, how are you going to know where you’re failing or pinpoint exactly where the problem(s) exist?

There are times the phrase in the header is unreasonable. Other times, the instructions are explicitly written out and/or shown for students to follow and they cannot follow them, or they’re asking for help when they haven’t even tried to find a solution and really just want the teacher to solve it for them.

E.g. Teacher says you need to reference a page in the book to get started. Student, with the book out, asks how they get started, despite the teacher explicitly stately how to start.

Generally, an attitude of telling the student they should know what to do implies an expectation the teacher isn’t going to repeat themselves any more than necessary or offer help unless it’s truly needed and deserved.

Additionally, teachers are far more likely to help students who pay attention, reference source material to solve problems, and take notes compared to students not putting in effort towards learning. That’s not being unfair; that’s just helping those who want to learn. Those students might even get extra credit or rewards for putting in effort or going in above and beyond.

For accommodations, you still teach (and reward) at their level. The principle can adapt.

The sword cuts both ways. You could mitigate the issue by coaching through how to ask for help, but the student is ultimately responsible for asking for help afterwards anyway. Teachers aren’t going to read minds and magically know when help is needed.

If mind-reading technology becomes available, we’d probably get regulated on what we do with it anyway through things like FERPA, FAPE, etc.

If a student were to ask me “how do I solve this problem?” (especially right after being given a problem) I’m more likely to tell them to figure it out. If that same student were to ask me “Can you see if I applied this formula correctly here?” I’m more likely to offer genuine assistance as I can verify an attempt was made.

For science specifically, I’ll see students who ask for help on a problem. I look at the worksheet, see that the problem is still blank, and hand it right back to them. Some reasons why I do that are simple:

There’s no attempt made yet.
There’s no basic steps showcasing you learned what you needed to learn

It’s different if they’re missing resources, like a ruler or calculator, to solve a problem where they’re normally needed. In that case, you can help.

Remember: you’re not filling blanks. You’re fixing work.

Don’t reward students who don’t try. They should know how to do it (or at least make a try at it).

Life and Death Learning

Alternatively: LDL (for a euphemism)

Normally, this type of learning isn’t suitable for minors and civilian populace. You may see it more in military or prison settings, where motivation and discipline is expected and enforced. Frankly speaking, most people cannot handle it and it has some ethical concerns when applied to its extreme. Much of this seems straightforward, but there’s a reason this isn’t the norm and you normally should NOT design learning this way by default.

The concept is simple: put a student into high stress situations where the cost of failure is extremely high and detrimental to said student. When students encounter that high-stress situation, which is where they learned the material, they’ll be less likely to mess it up and remain calm throughout it when it comes up outside of learning.

This part aligns with what I mentioned in a previous chapter: “The curriculum you design should mirror what students will do outside the classroom as closely as possible whenever feasible.”

Because it’s a high-stress environment, learning is also condensed down to essentials and requires ways to address the increased cognitive load and rapidly learn new information. This is where mnemonics like the Method of Loci (Further reading on a VR application (Moll & Sykes, 2022)) combine various methods like visual imagination and spatial memory for learning.

There’s also few, if any, potential distractions, such as a cell phone in your pocket, so you can maximize concentration. The impact of a single interruption can mean losing approximately 25 minutes before you’re back on task and complete context switching (Mark et al, 2005). If this were an environment where distractions happen every few minutes, or even every few seconds, a distraction-free environment is a significant learning advantage.

To put it all into an example: An instructor showcases a concept once, maybe twice if it’s complex enough, you learn it, then do it immediately. Doesn’t matter if you’re fully ready or not; you’re going to do it now. Your brain panic signals and thinks “oh shit, that’s important” and it makes a conscious effort to actually learn it and map it to something relevant to your survival.

Ironically, you prove learning it matters by failing it and experiencing the consequences, no matter how humiliating or detrimental it may be. Struggling and failing is expected, but it’s necessary. Now that you know it’s necessary, you’re not going to let distractions pry you away from critical information.

You can dilute it down to what I’ll lovingly call a “trial by fire,” but that’s after establishing multiple safeguards and providing at least a little bit of preparation so even children can utilize a part of this learning style.

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