Learner disabling: Teaching examples
How might the choice of examples used in lessons lead students to misunderstand basic concepts?
If you want to make it harder for students to learn (or even want to create disabled learners!), select the examples you use in teaching so that they can mislead the learners.
Instruction very often uses examples.
A teacher may say, “For example…” and then provide an illustration of a rule or a concept she has been explaining.
A professor may say, “Remember: Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Ellison’s The Invisible Man, and Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces? Those are examples of picaresque novels.”
A primary grade teacher may point a letter “s”—an example, that varies by font, color, size—printed on a wall chart and say, “What sound?”
I’ll return to these examples (ahem!), but first let’s just take a tour through a few ways that examples can go wrong. By “go wrong” I mean how they can mess up learners’ learning.
Lessons gone wrong
Here are descriptions of instructional efforts that, despite great intentions and many good features, have a wired-in failure. That failure is specific to the selection and treatment of examples used in the activities. The first illustrates the problem in a pre-school situation. The second shows how problems can occur in early mathematics instruction. And there are other examples, too.