Ryan Tindal
Director - Skilled Carer
Distance travelled matters most, not the starting point
"You can't tell where people will land from where they begin. With the right opportunity and motivation to learn, anyone can build the skills to achieve greater things. Potential is not a matter of where you start but of how far you travel. We need to focus less on starting points and more on distance travelled. For every Mozart who makes a big splash early, there are multiple Bach's who ascend slowly and bloom late. They're not born with invisible superpowers; most of their gifts are homegrown or homemade. People who make major strides are rarely freaks of nature. They're usually freaks of nurture."
Adam Grant (Professional Workplace Psychologist and writer) - Hidden Potential 2023
Consider a student at a special development school, a school designed to focus on the talents that aren't measured by standard metrics such as IQ, our ability to rote learn or standardised testing. All these students have known, is to be measured against others with higher IQs, better learning aptitude and reduced barriers for learning like concentration, motivation, understanding or many other home and personal influences. Removal of these barriers by teachers and others who inspire them was not possible in other settings, where they often fade to the background. But here, in this new setting, the student thrives and finds confidence in comparing themself with others with unique struggles. They adapt a new outlook on learning, a patience and knowledge to teach to their strengths and staff who understand that happiness and social connection are crucial for development. The tree in the shade of the bigger tree cannot grow, its flowers cannot bloom and its colours are not as vibrant unless the smaller tree can be gifted or steal some sunlight through the gaps in the foliage.
These students find successes and opportunities in smaller class sizes, with educators and support staff who have greater opportunity to help unlock the potential in those starting from a different position on the starting grid. The school system judges us objectively through tests, ATARs and rote learning. It should judge us subjectively, as we know we all have different learning preferences, while context and opportunity matter.
Why is my ability to memorise information, repeat it with little understanding, before forgetting it completely a notable and valuable data point to measure? Particularly when determining someone's future. Shouldn't we aim to digest the information and think critically about it? Creating critical thinkers is something that I know first-hand that schools are working towards, but the system seems to be a conflicting paradox between progressive ideas and existing ideologies. I can see relevance that this old system of testing can somewhat demonstrate a work ethic of the individual, but that might be better utilised to determine whether someone has a photographic memory.
Some of our most famous entrepreneurs are said to have/had learning disabilities: Albert Einstein had dyslexia, Bill Gates has ADHD, Thomas Edison had number dyslexia and Louis Pasteur had dyslexia and dysgraphia. These people have a daily influence on our lives through their inventions and obviously thrived in times where research into learning disabilities were non-existent. These innovators are outliers and excelled throughout various periods in history, despite a lack of understanding from society and the education system. We are more scientific now, we are more open minded and yet some ideas appear not so. Our education system is failing many, students are opting out of learning and covid has left scars and enabled disengagement on a scale that was not before evident.
Malcolm Gladwell's book 'Outliers' details the impact of luck and further opportunity, for Canadian hockey players. The premise states some interesting points. Those who are older and therefore more likely to be more mature physically become privileged to the opportunity for advanced programs, whether it be school based; advanced maths and literacy classes, or athletic ventures; being more physically mature than others in a similar cohort because they are 10months (for example) older in the under 8's. In November (an 8-year-old), a child of the same cohort, born in January has lived 106 months whereas a child born in November has lived 96 months. For the January born child, that results in a 10% advantage over the November born child of time to learn, test, grow and physically develop. If we lined up on the starting blocks of a 100m race and I started at the 10m line, I may not beat everyone, but I certainly like my chances over anyone else who is the same age as me. These lucky children were gifted the opportunity to make these special advanced programs and further their unfair advantages allowing them to snowball the compounding growth opportunities that give them a tremendous head start, based on nothing more than luck and timing. Context matters, opportunity matters and in reality, life isn't fair.
Raj Chetty is one of the world's most influential economists. Some of his research suggests that excellence depends less on our natural talents than we might expect. Chetty was able to use a study that comprised of 11,000 students in the US, assigned to different classrooms in kindergartens through to third grade. The study was initially designed to determine whether class sizes were impactful of learning and outcomes but what he found was that by age 25, students who happened to have more experienced kindergarten teachers were earning significantly more money than their peers.
Raj Chetty, John Friedman, Nathaniel Hilger - 'How Does Your Kindergarten Classroom Affect Your Earnings? Evidence From Project Star' The Quarterly Journal of Economics 126, no.4 (2011).
While in year 12, in 2004, I studied: physical education, english, chemistry, specialist maths and maths methods. I was a switched-on kid, but I was a kid who lacked guidance. Coming from a single parent home where my mother hadn't graduated high school, and my stepfather was a person I didn't trust. I trusted the school system and I really didn't have cause or reason not to. I relied on teachers and career counsellors to guide me. I struggled to connect with my chemistry teacher and specialist maths had concepts that felt over my head. I was a good math student, but this stuff was like learning a foreign language. I ended up dropping my chemistry class which left me with just four subjects, and with the way my specialist results were tracking, it was going to be an issue for my end of year VCE results. I couldn't see that. Others no doubt could. I relied upon the adult in the room (staff in the entire school) to care enough to guide me. Maybe they did try, maybe I didn't work hard enough, maybe attending a low socioeconomic public school makes these things inevitable, or maybe it was a journey I needed to walk myself and it's benefitted me for who I am today. It's most likely parts of all these contributions. Clearly, these memories have stuck with me as impactful as I've taken time to reflect upon them. Working in the education system for 12 years allowed me to see how hard it is for staff to connect with students, that staff member was sometimes me, too. It is a combination of skill and luck that allows us to connect with others, differing quantities of each. Perhaps this poor experience at school is what gave me the extra empathy and compassion for the kids that I work with and enabled me the tools I need to build rapport and a relationship with some of our most vulnerable, because I know what it is like to be overlooked and feel unimportant. Perhaps my path to knowledge is different to experts in the field. Perhaps for them and for educated minds who are trying to teach others and impart wisdom, we don't share the same strengths and weaknesses. Perhaps my teachers had been novices too long ago to relate to my ignorance. Our hills and valleys aren't the same and when students look around for mentors to give them the map, they can seem unfamiliar. The starting points and the journey is completely unfamiliar to the expert in order to give an accurate reference.
Teachers, parents and mentors leave visible imprints on children. There are motivated, open minded and exceptional mentors everywhere, sometimes they're in mainstream settings, sometimes they're in special needs settings. We are what we mostly do, and we are a product of our environment. Professional development (PD) in a mainstream setting is different to professional development in a special needs setting. The exposure to challenging students and the ability way the school is set up leaves you with no option but to rise to challenges in a special need's setting. I can only speak to my experience in both settings, within the public system, to provide context to those outside of the sanctity of the educational bureaucracy that we have to contend. There are deficiencies everywhere, in all careers and professions. People who are really good at what they do may ascend to a point where they are on a new journey of self-exploration, leaving the impact they can make on others less viable.
I felt a passion and energy to become a teacher, because I felt I could do it better than some others who I was exposed to throughout my time in school as a student.
Within a special needs setting, I received opportunity to learn about Oppositional Defiance Disorder, behaviour management, various learning disabilities, autism, ADHD and intellectual disability on the daily. I was privileged to be able to have my mind opened through some great mentoring, through first-hand experience within the classroom of seeing what didn't work when I tried to implement my curriculum within the classroom and dealing with the everyday challenges that presented (there were many). I was forced to take ownership over my classroom and the success the students had or didn't have. Upon reflection, this doesn't seem to be as much the case in a mainstream setting. There was only 1 period a day (5 periods a week) where I may have a particular student and if they didn't want to be there, I couldn't really affect it much, it would require serious time-consuming intervention as well as commitment and alignment from parents, coordinators and other staff. By the time that was arranged the moment for feedback had become less useful and repair opportunities deteriorated to create ugly associations with myself and school. This is the system, and in my mind it's mostly unavoidable, within the resources and efforts to create meaningful improvements.
Special needs settings provided greater opportunity to connect with occupational therapists, clinical psychologists and speech pathologists, to which I found invaluable in the world that sculpted me as a teacher and as a person where I began teaching. PD for learning disability is certainly available in mainstream schools, however, these opportunities are directed at the minority of the student cohort, not the majority. Whether the adoption of ideas, knowledge and first-hand experience was limited from a lack of exposure, intent, opportunity or otherwise is drawing too far a bow for me to pontificate on any further.
Teaching, especially early in a career, is 80% behaviour management and 20% curriculum. To someone with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Being open minded and allowing yourself the chance to rethink your own ideas gives you more tools than just a hammer. Successful education is primarily about teaching others to think through scaffolding. Facilitating ideas or manufacturing ideas and then removing that scaffolding, allowing the individual to practice, try, fail and succeed through their own desire and motivation.
It's an unfair system that we play in, the distance travelled means more than the starting point we were given, gifted or privileged to.
I've witnessed inclusion in a special needs setting and witnessed inclusion in a mainstream setting, so I'll explore with you. Picture this...
I'm a student with learning difficulties (intellectual disability and ADHD for example) and I attend my mainstream year 7 science class. It's period 4, just before lunch, we have had 3 classes prior being literacy, humanities and PE. All in different rooms, all in different parts of the school and with varying expectations and boundaries from the different teachers in charge of every class.
I can't engage because the content is confusing, difficult and above my means of comprehension. Not only that but I have a bad history and an association with feeling insecure within this type of classroom setting. I have memories and trauma of having been poked fun at and now I'm much too shy and don't have the confidence to even consider putting my hand up to answer a question for fear of failure and ridicule. For some of us born into greater privilege, we have a stack of poker chips that we can barely see over. Spending a couple and taking a perceived small risk to answer a question that you are really feeling uncertain about, is easy. "Oh well, I was wrong, I still have my huge chip stack in front of me." For others, like me in this scenario, my stack may be so small that I lean over and guard these chips as though my life depends on it. Being involved in group discussion or sometimes even picking up the pen to try to answer the worksheet or questions allocated are an attack on my identity. Knowing that I WILL fail, having experienced this situation many times over, creates a familiarity with failure. Harvesting these few remaining poker chips becomes my priority.
So, I sit at the back or to the side with a teacher's aide (support staff) supporting me, away from the other 24 students, drawing even more attention to the fact that I am different and falsely showing others that I am not capable of doing things on my own. Perhaps, on this occasion, the teacher has been kind and thoughtful enough to offer a slightly different task, one that I am more capable of finding success within. Being told that I can't socialise in the room and that I need to sit separately, so as not to distract others, is a particularly painful experience while other kids play sneakily under the radar of the teacher in a more tactful way where they are creating relationships, friendships and memories.
Now, contrast with this scenario...
I am a member of a classroom setting of between 10 and 15 students of year 7. There has been a handover process before school started this year, so my teacher knows the idiosyncrasies and personal needs of most of the members of my class. Because my class is set up like a primary school, in that, the classroom teacher spends the majority of everyday with me and my classmates teaching: numeracy, humanities, literacy, sustainability, social and emotional learning (much information on this) and guides us through our day and more importantly our emotions and diverse struggles. We are held accountable by a teacher that knows our learning needs, personal needs, personal context and situation. Because my teacher knows me so well, it allows them insight into what might be going on in my mind. I trust my teacher because they are familiar and they have taken time to get to know about me and my interests, I feel that they genuinely care about me. This rapport allows my teacher to put out spot fires before they grow and sense whether my classmates or I are more heightened than usual, or summarise that others haven't had a good night sleep because they were up all-night gaming (not necessarily their fault) or maybe they have missed their medication this morning. This constant contact allows my teacher to create meaningful relationships with us in the classroom, understand our personal situation and therefore validate our emotional responses to various contexts. It allows them to learn my triggers and find out what works to calm me down or prevent me from having a meltdown. I still may have a meltdown, but I come around sooner than I have in the past, and I'm getting better at regulating my emotions because our teacher has the time and skills to teach us about our feelings regularly and how they affect our bodies and our mental health.
Hopefully I have provided some context to 2 very different experiences of education.
That 80% of behaviour management we were discussing, is critical in knowing the individual and being able to connect with them through the rapport that has been built and the knowledge and understanding you as an educator and/or mentor have from the combinations of book learning, PD and hands on experience. The curriculum has various levels and extension opportunities that are delivered to the students. As the classroom size is smaller, it's less likely individuals will slip through the cracks or are able to fade into the background, either by accident or strategy derived by the student. The environment is more predictable from the perspective of the student because they know their classmates and then they know the consistent expectations from a teacher who will hold them to account if there is misbehaviour in specialist classes like PE or cooking. There is less likely to be time delay in following up an issue or escapism into the unknown. The coordinator also spends less time following up 'he said, she said' miscommunications between staff and students because there is only one classroom teacher.
My only hope has ever been that I am open minded. I believe in the opportunity for education enough to be able to understand that this is only my point of view. There are many others that are completely relevant and need to be taken into account for decisions to be made when thinking about the reform of the education system or the decision making in general. I am completely biased to my experiences, my individual context and my beliefs that have been inherently formed throughout no choice of my own during my years as a child, student, young adult and as a professional. Points of view from leadership within schools, parents and caregivers, as well as the student themselves are all relevant and require investigation.
So, as it currently stands within schools, which situation do you believe sounds more inclusive?
Since evidence from the 1900's where literacy rates were firm predictors of economic GDP throughout the world it has been established that individual's literacy ability can determine income or at least point to a plausible destination of income. Determining an individual's literacy skill capabilities, in modern times, has much more nuance and reasons why and how we learn; from having glass ceilings, having good teachers, feeling safe at school, socio-economic factors of the school, region or family, parents who read at home with their kids, etc, I could go on.
What can't be understated, and is terribly difficult to quantify, is an individual's happiness and desire to attend school. All of the above factors are a moot point if I, as a student, don't like school or don't want to go to school. Happiness absolutely has to be one of the most influential factors toward outcomes. One's desire to learn is correlated with one's outcomes of learning defined within their own potential.
Happiness has to be one of the greatest influences for student success, however you define it, that I've noticed between the students at mainstream schools and special needs schools. Connecting with others of similar interest, opportunity for engagement with teachers, more than anything, is something that stands out. Attending weekly assemblies (before covid protocols), and the annual Houses Drama Performance were experiences that cannot be explained, they had to be lived to be understood. Exciting and funny, a student's birthday wishes of having Mr Blank get up on stage and dance Gangnam Style, created a connectedness I've only come across in such settings within the school system. Glazed over assembly speeches replaced by kids dancing in the isles, and for the next month you would walk around the school like a rockstar, giving high fives and dabs for your performance where you bobbed for apples in a 'Minute to Win It' assembly item game. A set up from the PE teacher who put me up against students where my apples were so big that they wouldn't fit in my mouth while the student's tiny apples allowed them to thrash me in front of 400 people all but leaving my dignity as wet as my face. We loved facilitating moments of joy and seeing the smiles upon children's faces as a result, we were creating memories to last a lifetime for all those involved.
Quantifying happiness, engagement and school absenteeism requires so much more rhetoric. The data can be used many different ways to determine the outcome bias the ready-made point is looking for. Is it correlation or causation? My mind has been made up from year 1 as to my personal opinions towards special schools. Yes, there are problems in specialist schools. Yes, there are problems in mainstream schools. Yes, there are problems with the way the government and RBA control and influence the housing market. Does that mean we should shut down one's opportunity to buy a home if they want one? A very far-fetched parallel, I don't disagree, but an analogy to contemplate. Parents, teachers, kids... They are the ones that should be in charge of this decision whether or not to close special schools, and they are. They are voting with their feet. The number of special schools in Australia increased from 414 in 2010 to 520 in 2022. Funding has been given to every one of the special schools in Victoria under the Labor government since 2014. By 2026, the demand for specialist education teachers will grow by 13.5%, which translates into 4,100 additional jobs according to Open Universities data.
The NDIS is about choice, why? Because families and individual's want the choice to determine how they are supported. They get the opportunity to self-manage their funds and they should have the opportunity to not only choose but to take the journey to explore both settings and determine for themselves what suits their family's needs through the inevitable failures and successes that growing up brings. Through both the confronting emotions that education brings, and the exploration and perspective that a parent's journey brings. Enjoy the journey.
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