The Learning Plateau Myth
In 1970, my more seasoned colleagues smiled at my optimistic zeal.
“Ah, yes,” they’d say. “I was a beginning teacher once. You’ll learn that you can’t reach all kids. Some of them have already reached their plateau.”
I generally respected their opinions, but I was determined to prove them wrong.
In those days, before there was a special education law, my English classroom included quite a range of students. I had very bright kids who quickly grasped anything I threw their way and took it to another level. My challenge was to keep up with them and give them new ideas so they wouldn’t be bored. Mostly, I had conscientious students who obediently completed every task. All I had to do was point them to a narrative and hand them a list of questions about plot, setting and character motivation.
The other quarter of my students captured my heart. Several were repeating the seventh grade and just marking time until they turned 16 and could drop out. Others could barely read or write and had developed creative acting out behaviors to deflect attention from their failures. I spent countless sleepless nights contemplating ways to engage them so they would surprise themselves with success. We laughed over our dramatic enactments of scenes in Huckleberry Finn. We created human sentence lines to separate the subject and verb from modifying adjectives and adverbs or prepositional phrases. In spite of themselves, even those students learned the essential principles of sentence construction.
I remember my Principal’s reaction when he conducted my spring observation.
After watching my class eagerly crafting argumentative paragraphs, he said, “I see I made a mistake. I wanted to observe you teaching your basic class, but these are your gifted students, right?” I’ll never forget that moment. He and all their teachers believed that these students had plateaued – that they had probably gone as far as they would go, but I had indeed proved them wrong.
Today, nearly five decades later, I see that educators still believe that some students will plateau. They say, “My kids can’t learn that,” “I have to set lower expectations for these kids,” and “What about the ones who are too lazy to learn?” Most frequently, I hear teachers talk as though there are limits for students with intellectual disabilities, developmental disabilities, and autism, but the same extends to children who are minorities, immigrants, homeless, and even from “broken” homes.
But we all can cite examples of students who beat the odds, who were “overachievers,” who surpassed our expectations.
New brain research is revealing ALL students can learn using innovative instructional approaches.
We just don’t know how to apply those new findings in a classroom – YET. I’m amazed at what teachers’ creative powers can accomplish when they don’t give up. The next time we hear somebody speak as though there are limits to what a student can learn, we need to ask, “How do you know they can’t learn that?” Maybe together we can explode the myth of learning plateaus in 2017!
I want to bust the myth of learning plateaus with
Joyful Inclusion
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