Commonly held notions about teaching and learning influence and reflect the practice of many classroom teachers. In his article “Ten faulty notions about teaching and learning that hinder the effectiveness of special education,” Heward (2003) discusses ten notions that he believes limit the effectiveness of special education. One of these notions is that patience is required to be a good teacher of children with disabilities and that one should not expect too much from students with disabilities.
Teacher expectation matters
The importance of teacher expectations in facilitating student learning has long been recognized. All teachers have expectations for their students, as they should. Expectations facilitate the setting of achievable yet challenging targets for students. The general claim is that if teachers believe their students can meet targets and provide appropriate learning opportunities and support, their students are likely to achieve their goals and improve their academic achievement.
Teacher expectation research began with the seminal work of Rosenthal and Jacobson (1968). Rosenthal (1963) conducted several laboratory experiments where he randomly assigned rats to research assistants who then had to train the rats to go through a maze. He told some assistants that their rats were “maze bright” so they could expect them to learn quickly, while he provided the opposite scenario for other assistants and their rats. What he found was that when assistants believed that their rats were smart, the rats did learn to go through the maze more quickly than those where assistants had been told their rats were less intelligent.
Rosenthal’s proposal led researchers to examine teachers’ behaviors with high and low-expectation students.
A disservice to students
According to Heward, faulty notions do a great disservice to students with special needs and to the educators who teach them. Although patience is a positive and valued trait, in the classroom, the idea that teachers must be patient with special education students often translates into slowed-down instruction, lowered expectations for performance, fewer opportunities to respond, and fewer in-class and homework assignments.
A related piece of wisdom goes like this, says Heward: Students with disabilities can learn, but they learn more slowly; therefore, they should be given extra time, and instruction should be conducted at a slower pace. Although this reasoning possesses a degree of logic and common sense, research has found that slowing the pace of instruction makes things worse, not better, for students with learning problems.
The importance of fast pacing
Carnine (1976) conducted an experiment in which instruction was presented to four first-grade remedial reading students at two paces: slow (intertrial interval of 5 seconds) and fast (intertrial interval of 1 second or less). Fast-paced instruction resulted in more learning trials presented by the teacher, more responses per lesson by the students, better accuracy of student responses, and better on-task behavior. Systematic replications of this study have yielded a similar pattern of results.
Grossen (1998a) shared the following experience in which she helped a student-teacher see the importance of fast pacing:
A student teacher was having trouble with a class of 7th graders. The kids could not write the fraction for the picture and their behavior was horrible for about 30 of the 35 of them. The supervising teacher from the university had apparently told the student teacher to slow down, since it was difficult for the kids. I was not aware this message had been communicated to him. I walked in, saw the situation, and took a turn teaching. I increased the pace dramatically, drawing pictures on the board and asking the kids the formatted questions: “How many parts in each unit? So what’s the bottom number? How many parts are shaded? So what’s the top number?” I repeated the first item over and over until the whole 35 of them were on task and responding, then we went through a whole bunch of those problems until they were getting them right the first time. Same four questions over and over. In a few minutes they had fractions figured out and were doing the independent work correctly. In the discussion with the teacher afterward, I told him he needed to pick up the pace. He indicated that his university supervisor had told him to slow down and expressed the reasonable frustration at receiving conflicting advice. I just said, “Well, in which situation do you think the kids were doing better, when the pace was slow or when it was fast?” The answer was clear. I just said he needs to look at the kids for the answers.
Just as teaching too slowly impedes learning, teaching with excessive sensitivity to and patience for students with disabilities may lead to lower expectations, fewer assignments, and students’ participation only when the students “feel like it.”
Teaching more in less time
Educational research is unequivocal in supporting the positive relationship between the time children spend actively responding to academic tasks and their subsequent achievement. When other key variables are held constant (e.g., quality of curriculum materials, students’ prerequisite skills, motivation), a lesson in which students emit many active responses will produce more learning than a lesson of equal duration in which students make few responses.
Frequent opportunities to respond, high expectations, and fast-paced instruction are especially important for students with learning and behavioral problems, because
for children who are behind to catch up, they simply must be taught more in less time. If the teacher doesn’t attempt to teach more in less time . . . the gap in general knowledge between a normal and handicapped student becomes even greater.
Instead of patient teachers, students with disabilities need teachers who are impatient — impatient with instructional methods and materials that do not help their students acquire and subsequently use the knowledge and skills required for successful functioning in school, home, community, and workplace.
Instead of waiting patiently for a student to learn, attributing lack of progress to some inherent attribute or faulty process within the child, a teacher should use direct and frequent measures of the student’s performance as the primary guide for modifying instructional methods and materials to improve effectiveness.
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References:
Carnine, D. (1976). Effects of two teacher presentation rates on off-task behavior, answering correctly, and participation. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 9, 199-206.
Grossen, B. (1998a, December, 17). An example. Posted on Association for Direct Instruction internet listserve: [email protected].
Heward, W. L., (2003). Ten faulty notions about teaching and learning that hinder the effectiveness of special education. Journal of Special Education, 36(4): 186-205.
Kame’enui, E. J., & Simmons, D. C. (1990). Designing instructional strategies: The prevention of academic learning problems. Columbus, OH: Merrill.
Rosenthal, R. (1963). The effect of experimenter bias on the performance of the albino rat. Behavioral Science, 8, 183-189.
Rosenthal, R., & Jacobson, L. (1968). Pygmalion in the classroom: Teacher expectation and pupils’ intellectual development. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
