28 Second Lesson on Differentiation + Caring
This kid shows us Accommodation at its best
A recent tweet from Cute Black Babies shares a video in which a little boy is teaching his younger sister how to shoot a basketball. Like a lot of us when we try something new, the girl misses. She’s so sad at her failure that she begins to cry right away. Her brother’s first response is to comfort her and let her know it’s ok.
What he does next is an amazing example of how teachers can make accommodations for students who need it.
Recognizing that the problem is the height of the basket, he asks her if she’d like a “carry.” Through her tears, she’s able to get out an “uh-huh” sound, so he hands her the ball, wraps his hands around her waist and lifts her a few inches off the ground. That extra little bit is all the help she needs and she makes the basket on her first try. She smiles, wipes her tears and smiles more.
Her joy is contagious.
What might get lost in the video of what the boy did is what he did not do: he did not lower the rim. It would have been logical for him to see that the rim was too high for her and respond by going behind the basket and pushing it to lean closer to the ground and his sister’s reach. And as an educator, I’m embarrassed to say that this is an approach I’ve defaulted to many a time: help students realize success by lowering the bar.
At its foundation, accommodation is all about helping learners meet the objective. If the boy were to lean the basket down for his sister, it would be a fundamental change to a similar though different objective. His intuition guides him to support her in such a way that allows her to meet the same objective, just with her brother’s help.
There’s no way for us to know what her sense of satisfaction would have been had he lowered the basket, but we can see in this video that her brother’s “carry” in no way diminished her joy at her accomplishment.
A final note on my dramatic over-simplification of this really important idea: the older brother shows that when we focus accommodations on addressing the Learner’s needs (and not adjusting the objective), it is a highly personalized and learner-focused act. As we see in the video, this necessarily comes from a place of caring about the individual and what success looks like for them. The realities we face dictate that we won’t always be able to adjust the task over the objective, but whenever possible, providing multiple paths to the same end destination is in all learners’ best interests.
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