Instructional Tolerance and Universal Design

In a Virginia classroom we discussed, with elementary teachers, student seating choice during whole group meetings. "Does it make any difference," I asked, "if some students are sitting on the floor, some on chairs, some are lying down, others standing up, maybe even if one or two are walking around?"

My suggestion was that not only might students be comfortable - and in my mind students cannot be cognitively uncomfortable (and thus ready to learn) without being physically and psychologically comfortable - but that we might be teaching actual social skills as well. It's OK to walk around, as long as you do it quietly and without bothering others. It's OK to lie down as long as you don't fall asleep. And it is OK to be lying down and decide that you need to stand up as long as you can do it without disrupting everything.

But I could tell that the teachers were struggling with part of this. So I said, "I understand, you are teachers, you've been taught to alert on movement, because movement suggests disruption. But what if you learned to alert on discomfort instead? On the child squirming, for example?"

You can't have Universal Design without understanding Instructional Tolerance. You can't. It isn't possible.

So what is Instructional Tolerance and what does it look like?

Since the 19th Century, Montessori has modeled a different concept of attention,
one not based on the Reformation-style "gaze"

At the start, Instructional Tolerance is the opposite of "classroom management" as taught in education schools and the Teach for America "You-Can-Be-A-Teacher-in-25-Days" program ("For the first hour, most corps members work directly with four to five students to build skills in math and literacy, to gain experience in facilitating group work. For the second hour, corps members lead a full class lesson, which builds skills in delivering lessons and managing a classroom."). With Universal Design and Instructional Tolerance you will neither "deliver" nor "manage," but rather engage, adapt, problem-solve and sometimes, "re-direct."

You will not assume - and falsely assume in every case I have ever seen - that you actually know what every student is doing, or thinking, or learning, but rather, you will lead an environment in which students are truly "doing, thinking, and learning," but are doing that in ways which work for each of them.

Some kids may be reading, others writing. Some on the floor, some on chairs, some sitting on or under tables, some walking around. Some may be using books or drawing on paper. Others might be using computers or drawing on the floor. Kids might be on 10 different web sites, or six different text-to-speech systems, or many different kinds of computers, tablets, handhelds.

Attention need not be group attention

Some might be working on math, others on science stuff, or literature, or combinations of those. They might be working alone, or in ones, twos, threes, fives, whatever. And students might change what they are doing according to their schedule, not yours.

"Both the popular press and Montessori’s own writings identify human perception as the target of these pedagogic interventions. These texts problematize perception as being simultaneously voluntary and involuntary. A calculus of compulsion and free will is central to Montessori’s pedagogy (this is not unique to Montessori, of course). An example of this dual movement is captured in the San Francisco Chronicle’s 1915 claim that ‘‘the secret of the Montessori theory is to bring out the individuality of the child and force it to exercise its own initiative.’’ ...

"To be sure, there is much evidence that students paying attention in school is a long-standing, persistent concern of educators. For several centuries now, references to the attention of the child have appeared in educational literature. An eighteenth-century American manual for tutors and governesses, for example, spoke of the need to keep order among children, noting that ‘‘feuds and contentions are continually arising among them, which always take off their attention from learning.’’ In this instance the child’s attention is understood as an aid to instruction and as subservient to it. By the late nineteenth century attention had become a central concern across a range of domains. In educational theory, for instance, attention was no longer considered merely an add-on to instruction; instead, there was an increasing sense that attention could be the crux of schooling, the solution to the entire problem of education, as it was for Montessori."

But attention has different definitions.

"To come to terms with the uses of attention in schooling, we need more elaborate and specific studies of how power circulates in different locales (a Foucauldian project, in fact). Montessori’s 1915 demonstration classroom is an ideal site for exploring the making of subjects of attention. In the interests of a specific study, we now turn to the attention Montessori sought and why this was so attractive," Noah Sobe (p. 287) says. What Montessori saw, in Sobe's work, was absorption. Students absorbed in a work to which they were deeply connected. They were not absorbed in what the teacher was doing. And because they were absorbed in something they were individually connected to, they could not be distracted from their work even in a glass classroom surrounded by bleachers filled with spectators in the middle of a World's Fair in San Francisco.

"He pays more attention when he's interested."

Absorption and Instructional Tolerance are the answer to that "duh" statement above which I hear far too often in IEP meetings. "He pays more attention when he's interested." Of course. Everyone does. And, perhaps short of spending between $15 million and $500 million on 60 or 120 minutes of entertainment, you're not going to hold the interest of any diverse group with a single presentation. People have been trying it for years. People fall asleep in theatres with the best actors and musicians on stage... your audience may gaze at you - even SLANT you KIPP-style - but they will rarely be absorbed.

So despite the shortcomings of some of Montessori's theories and the antiquated conceptions in which some are based, the concept that attention is the result of connecting a student to an object of interest remains a powerful idea.

In this realm attention is not gaze at a performance - in which case any more interesting performance - say the child next to you scratching or the university student next to you drinking coffee - will pull your attention away. It is instead the attention built of interest, powerful, connected interest.

And powerful connected interest requires different things for different students. Different subject entry points. Different presentation forms. Different technologies. Different places to sit or not sit.

Which requires Universal Design in spaces, schedules, and technologies, and which requires Instructional Tolerance.

The tolerant learning space looks different and is different. Large group instruction is minimal or non-existent. Behavioural controls are few, though real. Disturbing other students directly isn't acceptable, but walking out of the door is. Talking is OK, but so are headphones. Movement is fine, but so is stillness. This is a "real world" environment - not a simulation of a sermon in a church on Sunday.

This "tolerance" for learning without your explicit knowledge or direction isn't easy. Is that student really doing anything? Are those boys looking at porn? Will they be able to get themselves ready for the test? You will - surely at first - ask yourself a thousand of these questions a day. But day-by-day you and your students will learn how to learn together as a community, and you will all learn how to better create your individual learning environments, and you may find yourself walking around less, supervising less, and having much more time for mentoring, for supporting, and for helping students find their way.

And if we do it well from the start, Instructional Tolerance will build the kind of self-directed, self-confident, internally motivated learners we need, eventually allowing you to echo Philadelphia's great 1970 school principal... "I asked [the head teacher] if he would identify the kinds of things that were going on about us. His response - quick and unqualified - was to the effect that he had no idea what the activities consisted of, that it was furthermore not his business to know, and that the participants had defined the content, value, and details of their pursuits and were probably doing whatever it was they felt it important to do." - Greenberg and Roush. Philadelphia

- Ira Socol

Enabling Voice

Last week Melinda Pongrey at LD Live! asked me about my communication skills. "Could you always tell people what you needed?" I told her, "No." Like most students who fall outside the "norms" created by school, I spent a lot of time mute, especially when it came to asking for things which might help me.

Then, over the weekend I watched a film that a friend lent me, Taare Zameen Par. And I cried because, well, in part because of the familiarity.

The child in the film hides and draws. I used to do that. I had this chalkboard in my tiny bedroom and I would disappear into worlds that I drew for myself there. Safe worlds. World where I could be whatever I wanted to be.

Those worlds, those drawings on the chalkboard, like the art of the child in this film from India, were my voice. Even if that voice only reached as far as myself.

But then, as adult after adult tells you that your way of expressing yourself does not matter, and that, in the ways that matter you are incapable of expressing yourself, eventually you might even give up that voice you have. Every answer you give is deemed wrong, or even laughed at. Every thought you have is outside of what people expect - and they tell you that. Everything you write comes back covered in "corrections." When you do things that seem right to you - from the music you hum or drum with your fingers to the pictures you draw in the margins of papers, to the daydreams you dwell in which let your imagination run - the humiliation and denigration just get worse.

So you find yourself sitting in silence. In the back corners of classrooms. In "resource rooms." In school corridors and offices. In car parks and city parks. Hidden in your own room. Wherever. It does not matter. You have learned that you are worthless, and your communication is worthless. Maybe you'll still yell from time to time, or fight, because that's all that's left and you're human after all, but silence will have descended.


Taarein Zamein Par Mummy - For more of the funniest videos, click here

This is why the most important thing you can do for students is to enable their voices, and to value their voices. Whatever their voices are, however they want to speak.

There is no reason that writing is prized more highly than art in schools, or even than speech. No reason that the making of music is not seen as valid a use of school time as writing. No reason to tell a student that SMS texting isn't writing, or twittering, or blogging, or IMing. The only thing that matters is to get them communicating, and to get them understanding how valued, how important, that communication is.

If you can get them communicating, in whatever form, you can get them interested in reaching out to the communications of others. If you can get them expressing themselves they will find in the expressions of others - if nothing else at first - techniques which they can imitate and eventually expand upon. And if they do that, they will begin to want to tap into the knowledge sources which surround them. Which is what you, as schools, and teachers, want them to learn to do. But if you have proven to them that communication is not good for them, they will not be open to communication.



A huge part of the solution is instructional tolerance - the willingness of teachers to accept real differences in learning and communication styles within a single classroom - the willingness of teachers to give up control over what students are doing every minute (an essential concept behind the effective use of personal Information and Communication Technologies - which cannot be used or personalized if too tightly controlled). That's not just a teacher thing, of course, although it takes a great teacher to really do this effectively. School administrators must encourage this and support it. If they don't, few teachers will be brave enough to truly try it.

And another huge part of the solution are those personal Information and Communication Technologies which can not only enable the voice, but project it, and can make that voice seem valid and strong. A mobile phone camera and some free computer software1 can turn a student into a film-maker whose work can be shared across the room and across the globe. Free online and downloadable animation and drawing software is everywhere, ranging from paint.net to Google SketchUp. Audacity can make every computer a recording studio for music, or simply the telling of stories - which can be edited and shared. Jott.com can turn a simple mobile into a speech recognition tool.

All can be edited and shared through the social networking tools which surround us. Blogs and wikis, Flickr and YouTube, or how about a site where the longest story - in Twitter-like fashion - is 140 characters? Because it is not just creation that makes communication valuable, it is discovering that you have something to say that others might pay attention to.

I found fabulous teachers in my life who helped me get to that point. They were (and are) the teachers who prize the idea at least as much as the method, the interesting solution at least as much as the expected answer, the originality at least as much as the "correct," the different at least as much as the "norm." Yes, they were always surrounded by other teachers with gags at the ready. Honestly, those who prefer to silence are still all around. But while research sure does prove out the destructive power of bad teachers, it also proves the stunning power of a great mentor to change a life.

Giving students voice is the most important thing we can do in our classrooms. We need to turn off the mute button which silences them. And that is not easy. Students who struggle with school and language learn all-too-quickly the high costs of trying to speak. The older your muted student, the more powerfully they have learned those costs, and the harder it it will be to convince them that their voice is worth hearing. And thus, the need to start to enable those voices is so very urgent.

Watch Taare Zameen Par if you can find it. [spoiler alert!] I will warn you that it may suggest that solutions come quickly - a Bollywood fantasy - but I've never seen a film capture the silencing with more intensity.

- Ira Socol

1 - also http://www.dvdvideosoft.com/products/dvd/Free-Video-Dub.htm and http://tv.isg.si/site/?q=node/873 for more options.

The Drool Room by Ira David Socol, a novel in stories that has - as at least one focus - life within "Special Education in America" - is now available from the River Foyle Press through lulu.com

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