In this episode Femi and Matt speak to Aparna about her experience of education as a mother of two exceptional children. The conversation shines a light on some of the challenges students, their families, teachers and schools face when the children don’t fall into that broad middle 99% that we are accustomed to working with. Hopefully the conversation provides some awareness and stimulates thinking about those children who live life at the far edge of the distribution– whether that is in terms of physical or emotional needs, natural ability, cognitive approaches, or any other dimension of relevance to a successful schooling.
The trio discuss the dangers of schools placing these children in boxes simply because those categories are the familiar ones, and the challenges and frustration of trying to unpick that, the importance of making an accurate assessment of what students can actually do – which might not be revealed when the analysis is at the level of a single number summarising the score on a standardised test. They debate whether cognitive science implemented in schools does or does not cater for the exceptional, or whether this is a failure of quality first teaching and it raises the interesting question of how deep we should reasonably expect teacher’s pedagogical skill and subject knowledge to run to truly qualify as quality first teaching.
The conversation touches on the idea of cognitive underload and the need to frame learning within a wider context, how students fundamentally need to feel they have something interesting and challenging to do in lessons, opportunities to ask their bizarre questions and feel included, possible classroom strategies, the importance of having a centralised plan and it not being left to each individual teacher, and the possibility of teachers even just acting in more of a coaching role – equipping these students with material and then checking in and following up with them.