Last Saturday I went to Baltimore to attend an education conference and hear a talk by Shelley Moore, a Canadian educator, researcher and storyteller.

Shelley asked us to define for ourselves each of these terms:

• Exclusion
• Segregation
• Inclusion
• Integration

​Next, she showed us this slide:​

What do you think? Which one of A, B, C or D represents inclusion? Which one shows integration? How about exclusion and segregation?

(You think about it for a minute while I eat a quick snack. :) Then scroll down a little for the Big Reveal.)

What’s the difference between “exclusion” and “segregation”? According to Shelley, exclusion is when the people inside the circle decide that individuals can’t be part of their community. Segregation happens when the people inside the circle decide that a particular group (or groups) don’t belong.

Shelley distinguishes between “integration” and “inclusion” in this way: integration happens when someone decides that it’s a good idea for those outside the circle to be brought in—but it’s often not by their own choice. She says it’s like a mandatory all-staff meeting: you know you have to attend, but when you get to the meeting you’ll likely sit next to your closest co-workers and you may not be all that interested in the updates from other teams or departments (particularly if you’re thinking, “This meeting could have been an email!”)

FYI, this tendency to prefer the company of your own group is perfectly natural, and at times necessary and comforting: Shelley calls it “congregation” when we are birds of a feather flocking together. (As a side question, Shelley asks: do our schools offer spaces and opportunities for congregation?)

Inclusion is different from integration because instead of thinking “I have to,” we think “I want to.”  That’s why the community in Shelley’s top circle looks different from the one on the lower right.


Except… after she’d shared this slide dozens if not hundreds of times, one of Shelley’s graduate students told her, “Shelley, I don’t think that this diagram [the top circle] is inclusion either.” And once her student pointed out a few things, Shelley realized the student was absolutely right.

Can you figure out why? There’s more than one change Shelley made; I’ll share them in Part Two next week.

Over the winter break, I’ve been thinking a lot about our APS students who are ready for advanced work. These students have been on my mind because of a recent report-out from the Gifted Services Advisory Committee and the recommendation currently under consideration by the School Board to expand intensified course offerings in middle school.

During my campaign and in my first year as a board member, I’ve talked a lot about every student getting the right level of support and challenge. This includes students who are testing and performing above grade level: they deserve their year's worth of academic growth, too, and to argue otherwise would mean accepting the idea that public education can only serve certain kinds of kids. I don’t believe any of us are well-served by a scarcity mindset.

So, how do we educate students who are ready for advanced work? (Note that I use the term “capable of advanced work” instead of “gifted” intentionally; these are separate but often related groups.) In broad strokes, the approaches have included separate magnet schools; acceleration by skipping grades or particular subjects; separate classes within a school; ability grouping within a general ed classroom; and personalized instruction. It’s a question with a complicated history and no perfect solution (yet).

I was one of these students and experienced all of the approaches mentioned above. I’m the parent of a student who craves more challenge and has on more than one occasion pleaded to be homeschooled or attend private school. And I’m a former teacher.

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In 1992, I was a first year high school teacher and in my school system, like most across the country, tracking was accepted practice.

​“Tracking” was the pre-Harry Potter version of the Sorting Hat. Teachers and guidance counselors determined whether a student should be sorted into a vocational track, a college track, or honors-level coursework.

In my first year I taught two sections of “Tech Prep 10” and three sections of “College Prep 9” English. The Tech Prep English curriculum was very different and emphasized the kinds of real-world reading and writing tasks that students going straight into the workforce would be most likely to perform: interpreting lease agreements and employment contracts; filling out applications for jobs and bank accounts; writing resumes and cover letters.

Leaders in our school system launched Tech Prep with good intentions: the idea was to make the curriculum more relevant to students’ lives after high school. The problem, of course, was that the adults in charge got to determine each student’s life trajectory before they’d turned 14, and that often these decisions were colored by implicit (or sometimes explicit) bias.

In the 1980s and ‘90s, groups like the National Governors Association, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the Children’s Defense Fund rallied to end tracking, correctly arguing that it perpetuated racial and economic inequity by setting up segregated school experiences within single school buildings.

Mixed-ability classrooms then became the norm. Teachers were tasked with meeting a wider range of student interests, abilities and needs, as had been the case decades before in the days of one-room, mixed-age schoolhouses. In modern mixed-ability classrooms, “differentiated instruction” (which had always been a part of teaching, even in the days of tracking) became even more important.
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In her book The Differentiated Classroom: Responding to the Needs of All Learners, Carol Ann Tomlinson writes that teachers who excel at differentiated instruction

​There’s a whole body of literature describing the strategies that teachers can use to do this well; three overriding considerations are training, class size and time.

I mention training because most often, teachers themselves weren’t taught this way. In their undergraduate schools of education, professors may have talked about differentiated instruction, but they weren’t modeling it in a large lecture hall. And once they’ve started teaching, educators’ ongoing professional learning is all too often a one-size-fits-all affair.

Class size is a factor because it’s harder to be a “student of your students” when your average high school class size is 29 (California) versus 15-16 (Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire).

And last but not least, teachers need the time to design differentiated learning experiences and continually assess student progress. But in reality, teachers’ time to plan and collaborate with colleagues on this most essential task is often insufficient, because there are too many other competing demands.


Perhaps due to the challenges cited above, or the top-down pressures created by federally-mandated school accountability and accreditation measures, ability grouping is again on the rise, though in different forms than 20th century tracking. These new forms of ability grouping are more flexible and (ideally) give students and families more say--but they still draw criticism. The debate about how to meet the full range of student needs continues.

Short of a serious overhaul of our Industrial-era public education system (which I’ve written about before, here and here), we need to continually question our assumptions and fine-tune our practices. Former school principal and author Peter DeWitt says it well:

At Harvard, Rose founded the Laboratory for the Science of Individuality. In 2016, he combined his personal story and his research in The End of Average--a book that rocked my world. (And no, that’s not hyperbole.) It’s changed the way I think about education.

​Rose opens the book with a problem that puzzled the U.S. Air Force in the 1950s: multiple, mysterious accidents that could not be explained by pilot error or mechanical malfunction in the aircraft.

They eventually discovered the cause: the cockpits had been designed using the average range of 10 body measurements from a population of approximately 4,000 pilots (e.g. height, thigh circumference, arm length, etc.). But zero pilots were “average” across all ten measurements. If a cockpit was designed for an average pilot, the cockpit fit no pilot. So the Air Force banned the average and forced jet manufacturers to design “to the edges,” meaning a cockpit that would be adjustable for even the tallest, shortest, thickest and thinnest.

What does this mean for education?

Think of a classroom or school designed for “the average.” It would likely feature

• One style and size of student desks
• Lots of whole-group instruction
• One way for students to demonstrate what they know—e.g., a multiple-choice end-of-unit test that every student must take
• Seat time: a standard number of hours all students must log to get a class credit.
• One-dimensional, high-level reporting against an average: “I am a B student in math because I am above average.”
• You’re gifted. Or not.
• Rigid tracking systems where students are sorted based on performance relative to an average (that is, you are “honors track” or “remedial track” in most or all of your classes)
• Standard operating procedures: all students are expected to eat at an assigned table in the cafeteria, walk silently in a straight line, and take notes in a certain way.

​This was Todd Rose’s K-12 school experience (and maybe yours, too). It wasn’t until college, when he discovered an honors program built around inquiry and the Socratic Method, that he felt inspired and challenged. Rose says, “I gradually realized that if I could just figure out how to improve the fit between my environment and myself, I might be able to turn my life around.”

In The End of Average, Rose explores the ways that none of us is really “average.” Instead, he argues, each of us has “jaggedness”— a unique set of strengths and weaknesses that all too often get obscured when we use overly simplistic, one-dimensional measurements.

Here's an example. Which man is bigger?

​Here's another example: Which 9th grade English student is smarter?

​Rose says, “If we want to know your intelligence, we give you an IQ test that is supposed to tap a range of abilities, but then we merge that into a single score. Imagine two young students have the same IQ score of 110 — the exact same number. One has great spatial abilities but poor working memory, and the other has the exact opposite jaggedness. If we just want to rank them then we could say the students are more or less the same in intelligence because they have the same aggregate scores. But if we wanted to really understand who they are as individuals enough to nurture their potential, we can’t ignore the jaggedness.”

"Right now because we believe in the myth of average, we believe that opportunity means providing equal access to standardized educational experiences,” Rose says in a Harvard interview. “However, since we know that nobody is actually average, it is obvious that equal access to standardized experiences is not nearly enough… it requires equal fit between individuals and their educational environments.”

What would a school or classroom committed to equal fit include?

• Flexible seating
• Dynamic grouping of students based on the level of support they need to master a particular skill or topic during that day/week/month
• Multiple ways for students to demonstrate what they know
• Multiple styles of instruction: project-based learning; workplace apprenticeships; virtual learning; etc.
• Self-assessment and reflection: helping students understand their own strengths and weaknesses
• Multiple categories of giftedness
• More nuanced assessment and reporting. Instead of “I am a B student in math because I am above average,” a student could say, “I worked on these six math standards this quarter and here’s information about how well I understand each one.”
• Flexible pacing: students can take the time they need to master a particular concept or skill. As soon as they’re ready for something more challenging, they move on.
• Advancement based on competency instead of seat time.

School doesn’t have to feel like a 1950s Air Force fighter jet cockpit. Indeed, it can’t. For Rose, this is a social justice issue, it’s an economic imperative, and it’s deeply personal. “I know what it feels like, at least in my context, when you don't fit into the current system. Like the kid who is always feeling … worthless. And I also know what it means to find your fit—to actually find your potential and your calling in life. It leaves me with this sense that from the so-called bottom to the top of our academic system, there's an enormous amount of talent and potential and contributions waiting to tapped.”

A few months before she died unexpectedly at age 61, Texas educator Rita Pierson gave a TED Talk and recalled a colleague telling her, "They don't pay me to like the kids." Her response: "Kids don't learn from people they don't like." 

We’ve known for quite some time that positive teacher-student relationships boost students’ academic achievement. We’ve always assumed that this is because students feel safe to take risks with someone they trust and are motivated to do their best work.

Research published earlier this month, however, explores a different explanation for the higher test scores and GPAs in classrooms where relationships are strongest: Are these students learning more because they are being taught more effectively? That is: do positive teacher-student relationships actually change the way that teachers teach?

It turns out the answer is “Yes.” This is some of the first research that really examines the effect of positive teacher-student relationships on teachers themselves.

The study recently published in the journal Learning and Instruction focused on evaluation data gathered over two school years for Missouri educators teaching grades 4-10. The researchers conclude:

Positive teacher-student relationships lead primary and secondary teachers to move effectively implement three complex teaching practices examined in this study: cognitive engagement in the content, problem solving and critical thinking, and instructional monitoring… teachers are more likely to check in, monitor, scaffold, provide more constructive feedback to students, have greater confidence in their students’ abilities and use better scaffolding strategies for critical thinking.

The researchers were also able to test “the direction of effect,” meaning they were able to show that the positive teacher-student relationships predict and precede higher-quality instruction. This was true regardless of the teacher’s years of experience, the percentage of economically disadvantaged students at the school, and the school-level proficiency rate on state tests.

Why do I bring this up right now? Because we’re heading into a new school year, and we would do well to spend some time in the first weeks attending to relationships. I don’t mean the traditional “fill out this questionnaire, Back To School Night” kinds of interactions: I mean prioritizing and investing the time it takes for teachers to deeply know their students, and vice versa. This investment will pay dividends all year long. Last August, I wrote about what this could look like. At the time I was thinking about its effect on students, but this recent research now has me considering its effect on teachers, too.

When I was a teacher a million years ago, conventional wisdom held that teachers should be especially stern the first few weeks of school. Lay down the law. Demonstrate that you are in control. This was especially true if you were a 23-year-old teaching high school students just seven or eight years younger than you.
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There’s no question that teachers need classroom management skills. But they also need relationship skills, and the time to apply them, which I believe create the conditions for a well-functioning classroom.

Good relationships improve student learning. And it just may be that teachers have as much to gain as their students in the bargain.