Our staff recently played a game of Family Feud to see how well we know our students. I was in charge of tabulating the data from the kids to create the game and it was fascinating, but I wonder if playing Family Feud reinforces a bad habit. Here's what I mean; look at this question from our game:
106 middle school students were surveyed and asked: "Name a popular TV show." Here were the top 4 answers: Stranger Things (18), Spongebob (9), The Flash (5) and The Walking Dead (4).
After we played, I heard some comments from the staff:
But wait, look at the numbers, even if you add the top 4 totals up, you only get 36. That's 36 kids total represented in the survey answers. That means 70 kids answered this question and didn't influence the Family Feud game results because their answer was UNIQUE. In fact I used the "COUNTUNIQUE" function on Google Sheets (Thank you, Alice Keeler, for teaching me this!) and even after correcting for creative spellings, there were 54 unique answers to this question. That's right, out of 106 kids, we got 54 different answers! I'm not sure that would have been the case when I was in middle school. Were there even 54 different shows back then? (The actual data from this question is at the end of this blog post if you're curious.) This means that the real number one answer was "I have my own opinion and it doesn't match everyone else's idea."
Maybe it was just a bad question, you say? I asked 34 questions in my survey and many of them were completely unusable. There were many questions for which I couldn't even generate a Top 3 or 4, or even 8. For example:
106 middle school students were surveyed and asked: "Name a popular TV show." Here were the top 4 answers: Stranger Things (18), Spongebob (9), The Flash (5) and The Walking Dead (4).
- "Wow, did you know that Stranger Things was the number one show among our middle school students?"
- "I didn't know the Flash was that popular."
- "That is a weird group of popular shows."
But wait, look at the numbers, even if you add the top 4 totals up, you only get 36. That's 36 kids total represented in the survey answers. That means 70 kids answered this question and didn't influence the Family Feud game results because their answer was UNIQUE. In fact I used the "COUNTUNIQUE" function on Google Sheets (Thank you, Alice Keeler, for teaching me this!) and even after correcting for creative spellings, there were 54 unique answers to this question. That's right, out of 106 kids, we got 54 different answers! I'm not sure that would have been the case when I was in middle school. Were there even 54 different shows back then? (The actual data from this question is at the end of this blog post if you're curious.) This means that the real number one answer was "I have my own opinion and it doesn't match everyone else's idea."
Maybe it was just a bad question, you say? I asked 34 questions in my survey and many of them were completely unusable. There were many questions for which I couldn't even generate a Top 3 or 4, or even 8. For example:
- "What's your favorite book?" had 101 unique answers
- "Name a place you'd like to visit on Spring Break" had 88 unique answers
- "What's your favorite musical group?" had 91 unique answers.
- "Name a planet in our solar system" even had 13 unique answers! (As a former science teacher, this is cause for serious concern!)
I think what is going on is that we live in an era of choices. The world is becoming more and more personalized. With the push of a button, we tailor our experiences to our own opinions and interests, and so do our students. We are out of the habit of compromising and agreeing on what we like or what we do. Kids are used to this in many parts of their lives, but not school. When students come to school, we group them all together and give them collective characteristics... "The 8th grade class is so talkative, they won't be quiet and listen." "My 4th period is really creative.... "or even "middle school kids really like Stranger Things." We over-generalize! We make conclusions based on the majority and soldier on, hoping that an occasional moment with individual kids, especially our highest or lowest, will make up for their boredom, apathy or struggle.
So, why do we generalize? Because we have to! When you see 150 students a day, it's simply not possible to think about each one's progress on a daily basis. Even if you spent 1 minute reviewing each student's progress each day, that's an extra 2 1/2 hours each day. I mean come on, we have to sleep! So, we generalize to make our jobs manageable. Generalizing is the only way to function in the secondary classroom... or is it?
Technology has changed our personal lives and given us choices, allowed the business world to collect data and personalize their interactions with us. Is it possible to harness this power to truly personalize instruction? There are a lot of people, and businesses, trying to figure that out. New apps and startups promise it everyday. But it's more complicated than just plugging our students into a computer program. The magic of teaching and learning has always been in our interactions with each other, our collaborations, and our sense of community. Do we risk losing that in order to leverage technology to collect data and personalize for each kid?
I for one, think there is a middle ground, a way to leverage technology to collect data and personalize education according to each child's need, but also to offer choices, to capture the magic of collaboration and build community. We all know our students are individuals, each with hopes, fears, skills and passions and they each need to be challenged in a way that helps them learn and grow. We need to dig in and figure out how technology can help us, because like it or not, our students live in a different world than we did at that age, a world that is increasingly personalized.
What do you think? How do you balance individualized instruction and collaboration? How do you plan lessons that still treat every student as an individual? When do you use technology and when do you unplug your students for face-to-face learning? Please share your ideas in the comments below.
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