By: Megan Prats

3/22/2014

One or the Other

The customized curriculum, in it’s bare bones form, simply contains two elements – what the student needs and wants to learn. Your job is to provide the student what she needs and allow the student to be responsible for what she wants.  Sometimes, the student’s needs and wants align ever so beautifully, thus you do not have to sacrifice one for the other when designing the customized curriculum. However, sometimes the student’s needs and wants are adversaries and thus one element must be sacrificed for the other. This article details when and how you should allow one element to trump another.

In general, the best approach to determining the quantity in which the needs and wants of the student appear in the customized curriculum is equilibrium, because like in the classical economic pricing model, equilibrium equals maximization. Thus, when the two elements live within a delicate balance, the student is achieving the most that she can from the customized curriculum. As equilibrium price for instance is subject to change based on outside forces acting on the supply and demand of the product, so is the equilibrium attained with the balance between the needs and wants of the student. Below are some instructions as to how to achieve equilibrium when the student’s needs and wants conflict:

• Sacrifice and Honesty, and

The most common situation in which the student’s needs and wants conflict is when the student is receiving what she needs and not what she wants and thus is frustrated with her learning experience.  For instance, I had an English for Spanish speakers student who complained that he wasn’t learning fast enough in the lessons. However, the lessons were being conducted in accordance with the 2learn® Method and the student was making fantastic progress in a short period of time but wanted the impossible. Thus, in this case, the student’s wants and needs were contradictory as the student really needed to develop her understanding of grammar rules and critical thinking skills to appropriately build sentences in English, and instead wanted instant gratification in learning which can only mean a memorization approach. Now, the appropriate thing to do is to ignore the student’s wants and continue to focus on the student’s needs as satisfying the student’s wants will do an injustice to her learning. How you sacrifice the student’s wants without upsetting the student further is to honestly explain to the student that what she wants is unrealistic and she needs to be patient in order to see real results. Once the student understands this, then she will likely be okay with sacrificing her wants for the time being and continue to achieve the maximum of the customized curriculum because the balance is now tipped towards the student’s needs as the student’s wants do not advance the student’s learning.

• Delay.

At other times, when the student’s wants and needs conflict, it is better to allow the student’s wants to trump the students needs. Normally, this is the case when the student wants to do something that advances her learning and is usually an easier, more fun activity, but you feel that she needs to devote her time to another aspect of her learning. Because it is always extremely important that the student continue to have her wants respected and in this case, the student satisfying her wants will not hinder her learning, you should delay the student’s needs for a future lesson or allow them to materialize later on in the lesson and allow the student to do that what she wants for the meantime. For example, the student is struggling to play 16th notes in time and you have her working with the metronome for a while. Then, you see that the student is clearly getting bored by doing her timing exercises. Thus, allow for the student to take a break to jam and then resume the 16th note exercises at a later time during the lesson.

Equilibrium is key in designing the student’s customized curriculum. The idea behind equilibrium
is that equilibrium of the two basic elements of the customized curriculum – need and want – will provide the student the maximum that she can receive from the customized curriculum. Just like equilibrium in classical economics, it is subject to change depending upon the outside forces acting upon it. Thus, at times, to achieve equilibrium you have to sacrifice one element for the other.

© Megan Prats 2014