Quotes from Anne Meyer

the most common approach to curriculum design is to address the needs of the so-called "average student." Of course this average student is a myth, a statistical artifact not corresponding to any actual individual. But because so much of the curriculum and teaching methods employed in most schools are based on the needs of this mythical average student, they are also laden with inadvertent and unnecessary barriers to learning.

Today, the public mindset is beginning to shift away from a medical model of disability towards a recognition that context and self-awareness as a learner both play a huge role in whether any given condition is disabling or not.10

By playing happy or sad music, displaying different emotionally moving photographs, or giving different kinds of feedback to participants during a taxing task, researchers can manipulate participants' affective responses. This proves the variability of affective states in response to constantly changing surroundings and social interactions. Of course classrooms are rife with changing conditions that influence students' affective states.

The learning context exerts very strong effects on whether a particular individual characteristic becomes an impediment to learning.

Tight on goals, loose on means" is how U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has described his expectations of accountability systems, and that phrase aptly describes our aim for curriculum. When the means of learning are restrictive, the goals of learning get warped.18

We think that the demands of any given task are focused in the area of our goal, such as mathematical computation. But within the way we present a task, we often create demands that are not relevant to the goals or purposes of the lesson or task. For instance, consider the classic case of the word problem. We think the demands of the task are about math, but there are of course also reading demands that confound our understanding of students' successes or failures.