The Dangers of Assumptive Teaching

Posted on | February 2, 2010 | Comments Off

Karen Chenoweth, author of It’s Being Done: Academic Success in Unexpected Schools, has an interesting piece in the Britannica Blog, entitled: Baffled Educators: Free and Falling. She describes her visits to two big suburban schools in the USA, both of which pride themselves on sending their top students to highly selective colleges, and both of which have seen significant demographic changes as middle-class and working-class African-American families have moved into their catchments.

Both schools have been dependent for many years on ‘assumptive teaching’, which means that teachers in these schools:

….assume a great deal of background knowledge among their students and have not done the essential work of determining what their students really know, what more they need to learn, and then figuring out how to teach them.

However, once school, the more successful one in this specific regard, has started to do something about it, by actively trying to identify students who need extra help, while also building an understanding of the existing knowledge held by students in relation to what is being taught in the classrooms.

Teachers in the second school are less willing to compromise on their longstanding ways of working:

Some of them visibly recoiled when I said that highly successful schools with significant percentages of minority and low-income students achieve success by collaborating on careful plans of instruction mapped to state or college-preparatory standards, complete with common formative assessments and data systems so they can track how well each of their students is doing and ensure that each of them gets the help they need.

All in all, a piece such as this is a reminder of the importance and farsightedness of a development such as Scotland’s Assessment is for Learning. There are many schools, and schools systems, around the world that still have to learn this very basic lesson.

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