Schooling vs Talent Development
Schooling and talent development are completely different things.
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Schooling = the class progresses through the curriculum in lockstep, each student doing the same tasks at the same time, and it’s expected that different students will learn skills to different levels.
Talent Development = students progress through skills at different rates, but learn skills to the same threshold of performance.
Their progress is measured not by their level of learning in courses that they have taken, but rather, by how advanced the skills are that they can execute to a sufficient threshold of performance.
This is accomplished through completely individualized instruction. Learning tasks are chosen based on the specific needs of individual students, each student must learn each skill to a sufficient level of mastery before moving on to more advanced skills.
And what I’ve written above is not new. Researchers have known this for many decades. For instance:
“Schools do not seem to have a great tolerance for students who are out of phase with other students in their learning process.” –Benjamin Bloom, 1985
“In general, school learning emphasizes group learning and the subject or skills to be learned. Talent development typically emphasizes the individual and his or her progress in a particular activity.” –Bloom & Sosniak, 1981
Basically, schooling and talent development are completely different things.
At the heart of it all, here’s the core difference:
Outside talent development, lots of people in education disagree with the premise of maximizing learning.
Whereas in talent development, an individual’s performance is to be maximized, so the methods used during practice are those that most efficiently convert effort into performance improvements.
Here’s an concrete example.
On one hand, “testing” and “repetition” have become dirty words in education.
However, practice testing and distributed practice (also known as spaced repetition) are widely understood by researchers to be two of the most effective practice techniques.
Moreover, deliberate practice – which has been shown to be one of the most prominent underlying factors responsible for individual differences in performance, even among highly talented elite performers – is centered around using repetitious training activities to refine whatever skills move the needle most on a student’s overall performance.
So what gives? Why are there debates about scientifically proven learning techniques like testing and repetition?
Because lots of people in education disagree with the premise of maximizing learning.
The debates aren’t about whether testing and repetition are effective learning techniques – the debates are about whether education should seek to maximize students’ learning.
Outside of talent development, the typical approach to education involves maximizing other things like fun and entertainment while, as a secondary concern, meeting some low bar for shallowly learning some surface-level basic skills.
I’ll admit this approach ends up working out okay when the bar is low. De-prioritizing talent development often ends up working out alright when students aren’t expected to achieve a high level of success.
For instance, if every student in gym class were expected to be able to do a backflip by the end of the year, things would have to change – but the expectations are so low that meeting them does not require talent development.
But math class is different. The bar is typically very high. Not just in honors classes, but in all classes.
Students are typically expected to achieve a relatively high level of success in math: many years of courses increasing in difficulty, culminating in at least algebra, typically pre-calculus, often calculus, and sometimes even higher than that.
As a result, in math, de-prioritizing talent development leads to major issues.
When students do the mathematical equivalent of playing kickball during class, and then are expected to do the mathematical equivalent of a backflip at the end of the year, it’s easy to see how struggle and general negative feelings can arise.
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