Differentiation and the Brain - David A. Sousa

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students who have a teacher with a growth mindset will receive consistent signals as well as direct guidance and purposeful actions that will lead them to see the connections between their effort and success at a high level. However, students of a teacher with a fixed mindset will probably find the signals and connections far less clear.

      Exercise 2.1 (page 39) offers some questions to help teachers think about their own mindsets and the implications of their responses for differentiation. As the chapter continues, it will be helpful to think about links between teacher mindset and the kind of learning environment that can maximize each learner’s growth and success in an inevitably academically diverse classroom.

      Learning environments are largely invisible yet permeate everything happening in a classroom. Perhaps because of their invisibility, we tend not to talk about learning environments very much in faculty meetings, staff development sessions, or professional conversations. These missed opportunities diminish teachers’ awareness of this critical aspect of schooling and their intentionality in developing environments that actively invite learning.

      We see examples all around of how environment shapes our responses to events. Most of us have been to a restaurant where the surroundings are appealing, staff members are welcoming, waiters are attentive to our particular tastes, and the food is an art form. Most of us have also been to a different restaurant where the food is equally good, but those who interact with us are too attentive or not attentive enough, where the surroundings are overdone or drab and greasy, where someone is arguing loudly at the next table, where the service takes far too long, or where we feel obliged to swallow dinner whole so the people waiting nearby can be seated. The same extraordinary food in the latter settings cannot make up for the environmental missteps, and we are unlikely to leave those settings with a desire to invest our resources there again.

      Similarly, the medical profession knows a great deal about the contributions of positive environments to healing. These days when one walks into a hospital lobby or waiting area, it looks more like a hotel than like the austere hospitals of a generation ago. Even hospital rooms are often painted in pastels, have comfortable chairs for guests, and allow family to stay overnight. Medical personnel now readily share information with patients and solicit their help in decision making. The results are a lessening of patient apprehension and better overall patient attitudes and outcomes.

      Classroom environments are no less critical to outcomes for students, who typically lack power and autonomy in school settings. In many ways, classroom environments are harbingers of cognitive and academic outcomes. Just as their environments affect adults, classroom environments encourage or discourage, energize or deflate, and invite or alienate students. Positive learning environments prepare students for the difficult task of learning. They open up students to the possibilities of what lies ahead. In that way, learning environments have profound implications for learners both affectively and cognitively. John Hattie (2012) calls these highly positive environments and catalysts for learning invitational environments. He notes they become invitational as teachers demonstrate respect for each student, trust each student to work collaboratively and effectively, have optimism each student has the capacity to learn what is taught, and develop intentionality that results in each step of a lesson inviting each student to learn. Learning (and the classroom in which it takes place) also becomes more invitational when a teacher works consistently to establish meaningful and deepening connections with each student. This approach also includes helping students establish trust among each other so there are clear and evident learning partnerships.

      Learning environments have profound implications for learners both affectively and cognitively.

      Many readers may recall that Abraham H. Maslow (1943) proposes human beings have a hierarchy of needs consisting of five levels. Satisfying needs at the more fundamental levels must happen before addressing needs at the higher levels. In the hierarchical progression, physiological or biological requirements such as food, shelter, and sleep are at the first level. Once addressed, the need for safety and security takes center stage at the second level. The third level is the need for belonging, affection, and love, while esteem and respect (which stem from achievement) are at the fourth level. Only when all these levels are met can a person strive to attend to the fifth, and highest, level of need—becoming self-actualized, which is what one is meant to be (Maslow, 1943).

      The implications of Maslow’s (1943) hierarchy for learning are evident, and research further supports how the brain prioritizes incoming information (see figure 2.1, page 22). If young people come to school hungry or sleepy or both, they need a teacher and the classroom environment to address those fundamental needs. When those basic survival needs are adequately addressed, students then turn their attention to the need for safety and security.

      Feeling safe certainly includes a sense that the school and classroom are protected from intruders, violence, and other forces that, regrettably, are very real in the world of contemporary students. Protection from those sorts of violations is a school-level responsibility. In the classroom, maintaining safety and security includes having structures such as class rules and routines that lend predictability to the day. It extends to the assurance that students do not make fun of, belittle, or bully one another. Many students at all grade levels come to school each day feeling vulnerable to peers, society, and even their families. If the learning environment is crafted to address issues of safety and security, the classroom becomes an oasis of order in an otherwise unreliable world. If the learning environment feels unsafe and insecure, an intangible but very real barrier stands between the student and academic growth. Every student—not just the ones we might identify as vulnerable—needs an abiding sense that the classroom has protective rules of the road universally followed. Such assurance and knowledge provide stability that allows attention to the next higher level of need.

      With adequate attention to safety and security, students seek belonging, affection, and love. Shaped by a growth mindset, the teacher’s positive regard for each student sends initial signals that the classroom has a place for everyone—that everyone is worthy of respect. A teacher attuned to students’ needs helps the students work collaboratively, celebrate one another’s successes, support one another’s needs, and create positive memories as the year progresses. In this way, the classroom becomes a community.

      Clearly, we do a disservice to teachers (and their students) when we imply their job is simply to convey content. If the learning environment confounds student needs at any level of Maslow’s (1943) hierarchy below achievement, esteem, and respect, it creates barriers to students’ academic success. This book’s model of brain-friendly differentiation counsels teachers that virtually all students enter their classrooms seeking affirmation, contribution, purpose, challenge, and power. Further, the model advises that the most effective teachers respond to those student needs with invitation, investment, opportunity, persistence, and reflection (Tomlinson, 2003, 2017). The model reflects the following beliefs.

      • Teaching and learning are rooted in a teacher’s response to a learner’s fundamental needs.

      • Students in a given classroom will have common affective needs shared by all human beings.

      • Students in a given classroom will inevitably bring varied experiences that have shaped their emotional development and will require personalized affective attention to help them grow from their current points of development.

      • Attending to students’ affective needs is both a precursor to and an integral part of effective teaching.

      In other words, learning environments that support academic success for each student proactively address both affective and cognitive needs, and teachers who develop such environments understand the interface between affective and cognitive growth. Exercise 2.2 (page 41) offers some questions to help teachers think about the relationship between student affect,

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