Able or label?
Can we really afford to put ceilings on students with the price of housing these days?
I’ve heard a number of discussions take place in both my school and the wider teaching community about ‘tier 2’ and ‘tier 3’ students and the potential need to flag these ‘tier 2’ students to staff via a learning management system so that staff know in advance that these students may need additional scaffolding and support in the classroom. This sounds moral, this sounds positive, this comes from a thoughtful and well-meaning place. This is also an absolutely steaming pile of rubbish1 when it comes to those students learning.
For those of you needing a little bit of context in regards to this conversation of tier 1, 2 and 3 this is referring to a Multi-tiered System of Support. Tier 1 referring to our core instructional practice which we ideally aim to plan with such fidelity that it leads to understanding with the vast majority of students. The magic number being often referred to as 80% or higher to determine that enough of the class has shown understanding in the lesson’s knowledge that you can continue moving on. Hopefully you’ve noticed that we do not refer to any students as ‘tier 1’ students.
Next we have tier 2, this refers to the students who do not show understanding in core instruction, however are able to show it through additional scaffolds or supports such as pair sharing, cold calling other students, worked examples, questioning as well as (in extreme instances) re-teaching which should then lead to around 95 to 98% of students showing understanding successfully.
This is where the problem lies. These students are not the same every single time. On any given day our students come into class with a wide variety of external factors which impact their attention and memory on that day. Your most reliable student who hangs on your every word even on your worst day, always is willing to share their answer when called upon, and usually correct could one day have a big disagreement at lunch or maybe they just sat an accounting assessment and their balance sheet wouldn’t balance and they are fixated on that. Suddenly, they are in need of tier 2 interventions to support their understanding on that day. You would’ve never labeled your golden child a ‘tier 2 student’ and yet if you were only providing additional supports to identified ‘tier 2 students’ then learning would’ve fallen through the cracks for a student who desperately needed support on that given day.
When we label students we are risking putting a ceiling on their potential. This is not done intentionally, however our unconscious biases can then change our treatment of these students and avoid truly challenging and pushing them in their learning. This only goes to widen the achievement gap between students when we are aiming to close that gap wherever possible
This connects with a lethal mutation of Vygotsky’s zones of proximal development which exist to tell us where a student is now and where they should be pushed towards next. In theory this sounds great, meeting the student at their point of need and pushing them beyond their capabilities to close that achievement gap. However, in practice this more often looks like teachers putting their students in achievement groups where they stream2 their tasks to be either high, medium or low. Again, in practice this can work well if there is the ability to transition between the groups in a single lesson to end at the same point as those in the highest group. The reality however, is that students in the low group complete the low questions, get checked off by the teacher and the goal posts never move. They never improve. Never grow. Because the ceiling has been placed so low that they’ll forever be crawling through their education, never able to stand tall and proud of their achievement.
Then we have our students with tier 3 needs. These are extensive adjustments usually recommended by a specialist which address a functional need of a student to ensure they are able to access the learning to the same degree as their peers. These needs can vary greatly across learning, social, communication, mobility and wellbeing needs which require additional supports almost all of the time. This is where labelling gets tricky, because it can be useful to know that a student has tier 3 needs due to a visual impairment so that the teacher can plan around this and allow them to address that need smoothly in the lesson. However, this label should not change the same high expectations you should have for that student as you would have for any other student. I have had conversations with parents in the past where their child has an autism diagnosis however the student is able to self regulate and manage their needs well enough that they have wished not to disclose those diagnosis with teachers to prevent the student being treated in anyway differently from the rest of the class. We’ve discussed at length in my inclusion posts that even when a student had tier 3 needs that we should not be accommodating for them, accommodations lower the bar and again mean that the students will never reach their full potential as they are never given the opportunity. A further thought on the majority of learning functional needs at a tier 3 level, the large majority of specialist recommendations in managing learning and attention are exactly the core principles of explicit instruction such as chunking information, providing scaffolds, worked examples, checks for understanding, modeling, routines and minimizing transitions. Therefore a well structured and planned explicit lesson removes the need to label these students with additional learning needs at all because their needs are met by great teaching.
These labels do not only exist for learning like I’ve outlined above. Sometimes students get referred to as “wellbeing students”, “shy students”, “just there for vibes”, “could talk in the vacuum of space”. All of these labels just place a limit on our students by creating an unconscious bias which means we treat them differently, we do not have the same expectations and therefore do not push them to achieve the same outcomes.
When I was younger I was obsessed with the labels on my clothes, yet as I’ve gotten older I care far less about these labels and more on clothes that fit well and are comfortable. Isn’t that what we want of our students in class? These labels set to separate and alienate these students when we want them to feel like a high quality plain t-shirt. They are reliable, fit right in with the rest of the outfit, sometimes need some additional support (stain removal and ironing) which with that support they will lead to a successful outfit time and time again.
Let’s ditch the labels and make the assumption that all of our students are capable of meeting our high expectations.
I was going to swear here and say “steaming pile of crap” but I was worried that was a bit too intense for the Substack community… yet here we are in the footnote unable to keep a single thought to myself as a chronic oversharer.
