Haygood Learning
Good learning starts here.
“It is better to light a candle than curse the darkness.”
~Eleanor Roosevelt
When our society industrialized, we lost something important–the idea that all children are different. Age became the sole factor for access to content. A child’s abilities, interests, and prior knowledge became secondary to their age.
Education has become an assembly line. And assembly lines must yield a predictable product; with little room for individuality, passion, and divergence. We ship them out in a box that they rarely escape. The goal of this website is to disrupt the assembly line.
Many educators and parents appreciate the fact that all children grow and develop at different rates. Some children have a more pronounced disparity between their cognitive, social-emotional, and/or physical abilities than others. This disparity is called asynchrony. When a student’s cognitive abilities are well below the mean for children their age, schools provide scaffolding, supports, modifications, and interventions. When a student’s cognitive abilities are well above the mean for children of the same age, most schools are left to do their best with insufficient funding, resources, and training. Many of these students are left to their own devices with a “They’re smart, they’ll be fine,” mentality.
At a certain point, students at either extreme of abilities require more severe interventions than an Industrial Age classroom is equipped to provide. If we embrace the truth of asynchrony, we have to do away with limiting children based on their age and make a shift toward mastery as the determining factor for success.
The ideas, strategies, and resources that you’ll find here support the central idea that all students deserve to learn at a speed and level that matches their abilities.
Haygood Learning
Let them learn.