For Each and Everyone: Catering for Individual Differences through Learning Studies

8. Conclusion: For Each and Everyone

8 Conclusion: For Each and Everyone LO Mun Ling and Ference MARTON In this book, we wanted to share the ideas underlying an attempt to cater for individual differences and ideas about the ways in which this attempt was realized. The phrase “catering for individual differences” refers to the observation that, when all students are taught in the same way, they learn different things and they master to different extents that which they are expected to learn. When they have to deal with the next aspect/area, they must rely on what they have learnt previously. So, the likelihood of ending up with differences between the students becomes increasingly large for each new topic. This is one of the mechanisms through which some students become “good students” and other students become “weak students.” From the teacher’s point of view the situation looks like this: “I am facing a class of students in which the prerequisites for learning vary considerably. And I can teach only one way at a time. But if I teach in one way, different students will learn differently, some will succeed and some will fail. If some fail, I fail.” A research project called “Catering for Individual Differences” should have something to offer to this teacher. In fact, the following is what we have to offer. Learning is always the learning of something. When you are good at learning, you are good at learning something. You are good at learning how to express yourself when writing in Chinese or speaking English, how to make sense of fluctuations in the price of goods, how to compute the area of a piece of land, to understand why your car is using more fuel when you drive faster, and why the spaceship is not using any fuel at all on its way to Venus after it has left the gravitational field of the Earth, etc. The learning of any specific capability (knowledge or skill) is highly affected by the specific way in which that particular capability is taught. So, learning in school is very much the learning of all the specific things that are taught there. Being good at learning is being good at learning all those specific things, and being good at teaching is being good at teaching 146 Lo and Marton all those specific things. Accordingly, if you want to improve your teaching, you have to pay attention to every specific thing that you teach. You have to find out what difficulties the students may have with each particular item that you teach and find a way by which it can be taught in a powerful way. But if this is the case, why is it that teachers are very rarely talked about by how they teach particular topics? Teachers are talked about almost without exception in general terms such as “good,” “nice,” “funny,” “strict,” “tough,” “weak,” etc., i.e., in the terms in which we talk about people in general. As Lortie (1975) points out, in the industrialized world, basically everyone has been in the physical proximity of different teachers, teaching different things, for ten to twelve years. So why is it that their particular ways of teaching specific things is hardly ever noticed, and even less talked about? The reason is, we believe, that there are very few people who have seen two or more teachers teach the same thing. And, according to the very theory made use of in the studies described in this book, in order to notice differences in teaching something, that something must remain invariant while the ways of teaching it varies. The Learning Study is an arrangement for doing this. Some of the characteristic features of the Learning Study are as follows. • Teachers focus on the object of learning; • learn from learners in trying to find out the nature of their potential difficulties with the object of learning in question; • work with other teachers and learn from them; • try to find ways in which they can contribute to creating the necessary conditions for the expected learning to occur, by drawing on a relevant theory of learning; • find out the outcome of the attempt and thereby receive feedback, i.e., information about the effects of their acts. This approach takes learning (and not teaching) as its point of departure, it gives space to the learners for making choices, making judgements, and making use of their own ideas. At the same time, it does not hand over all the responsibility to the...