The Simultaneous Method
The history of classrooms as we know them started during the 16th century. The beginning of humanism as well as the religious wars between Protestants and Catholics made it important to start educating large groups of people. Before that, one was either poor and ignorant or rich with private tutors or preceptors. Johannes Sturm opened the Gymnasium in Strasbourg in 1538 which had 9 distinct grades with specific programs and end of year exams. A few years later Ignatius De Loyola, founder of the Jesuits order opened the College of Rome which turned out to be the first of a large number of Jesuits schools opening all over Europe and the rest of the world.
The simultaneous method was born and it still is the model used in our schools today.
The first modern pedagogue was the Czeck Comenius who claimed at the beginning of the 17th century that children should not be asked to memorize knowledge but rather taught how to think, pretty modern idea!
Then followed Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Herbart, Froebel, Montessori and all the others...promoting many of the modern ideas we believe in today:
The simultaneous method was born and it still is the model used in our schools today.
The first modern pedagogue was the Czeck Comenius who claimed at the beginning of the 17th century that children should not be asked to memorize knowledge but rather taught how to think, pretty modern idea!
Then followed Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Herbart, Froebel, Montessori and all the others...promoting many of the modern ideas we believe in today:
- Children learn through social interactions first
- They have to be interested to learn..idea of student centered education.
- All students are different and learn differently
Differentiated Pedagogy
- The first example of differentiated pedagogy was introduced by Helen Parkhurst and the Dalton Plan in the 1920's. The goal was to tailor every student's program to his or her individual needs, abilities and interests. The students would meet with a mentor at the beginning of the academic year in order to identify their weak and strong subjects and a contract was established. Students would have access to laboratories (one per subject) where there would find a teacher and other students to engage in collaborative work according to their needs. The goal of the teacher was shifted from "sage on the stage" to "coach on the side" and the priority given to student learning. This student centered approach has since been visited by many famous pedagogues from Celestin Freinet to John Dewey and others. It can be described like this: "Providing instruction in a variety of ways to meet the needs of a variety of learners".
Differentiation became increasingly popular in the 80's when a decision was made in many different countries to bring the majority of an age group to higher education, thus filling high school classrooms with extremely diverse groups of students. The truth is that today even if differentiation is taking place in elementary schools, it is clearly rarely happening at the High School level. Content heavy programs and classroom management are the two main reasons why teachers are not engaging in clasroom differentiation but it also is because teachers have a tendancy to teach the way they were taught when they were at school which usually was frontal pedagogy.
The Flip allows teachers to differentiate because the content no longer has to be delivered in class thus freeing time for interactions in the classroom. Furthermore students deciding when where and how they receive their lecture part of the course is an empowering process that allows them to be more responsible for their learning; this is clearly the first step to differentiation.
