Facts Versus Skills: Asynchronous Development

 

Photo by Conscious Design on Unsplash

Grownups who work with 2e (twice exceptional) kids talk a lot about spiky profiles and asynchronous development. Sometimes that means kids learn multiplication long before reading, or learn to analyze literature before getting smooth at arithmetic. But sometimes it shows up within a subject.

Learning about a new topic often involves learning facts, concepts, skills, and the ability to notice details. When I started taking yoga classes I was okay at noticing and imitating the teacher’s arm and leg positions, but I didn’t notice whether her torso was straight or bent so initially I did some poses wrong in predictable beginner ways. Repeatedly hearing instructions, doing poses, and occasionally getting specific corrections from the teacher taught me to notice and imitate torso positions. 

I quickly learned the facts of where to place hands and feet for downward dog pose (adho mukha svanasana). Then I learned the concept that it was supposed to include a straight line from wrists to hips. But it took a long time for me to notice the detail of whether my shoulders were in the right position, and that self-assessment was necessary for me to reliably do the skill of getting into downward dog.

Most lesson plans are designed to teach facts, concepts, skills, and noticing details at the rate and in the order most people learn them. That goes okay most of the time.

But if someone learns concepts super fast, the exercises to practice facts and initial skills might be much too boring to engage them. If someone is super slow to start noticing details they don’t get all the benefits from practice that the other students get. Someone who needs immense concentration to do physical skills isn’t able to pay steady attention at the conceptual level during practice. And often students are expected to pick up noticing details on their own without explicit instruction. 

While homeschooling my teenager I’m finding it useful to separately assess and talk about how they’re doing at:

• Facts
• Concepts
• Skills
• Noticing Details

Consider the difference between “You got four problems wrong so you need to practice more” and “You understand this math concept perfectly but you need to practice noticing minus signs in order to get skilled at these sorts of problems.” The latter both respects the student’s strength and guides their practice to address their weakness.

Too often, grownups respond to a lacking skill by repeatedly explaining a concept or quizzing a student on facts. That might not be the help a student needs to improve. It’s off-puttingly condescending to students who already know the facts and concepts. So a student with a spiky profile might be the only one having a terrible time in a class and it’s not the kid’s fault and it isn’t anything the teacher is doing on purpose, but it’s still terrible for that kid.