Which baboon are you?

Day 8 Session 2 (Friday, 17 Oct. 2014, 10:30-12pm)

“Are you a dominant baboon or an ordinary baboon?”

Session: Consolidating Learning with Differentiation and Mixed Ability Groups

By: Bill Bowler

Are you a dominant baboon or an ordinary baboon? That was the sentence Bill said to us. I was captivated by the words and I cannot help but to laugh aloud with the rest of the class. As we sat there in the class listening to Bill’s explanation, my mind digested his words. The reason why he uttered the sentence was because of how differentiation was done in a normal classroom. Majority of us as teachers take for granted of the importance of differentiation. We simply group our students according to their sitting position or maybe just let them group themselves. This kind of grouping always happens every time during class time. I am no different from the rest of the bunch.

The issue about the dominant baboon symbolises the active student who always answer the teacher’s questions. The ordinary baboons, on the other hand, refer to the rest of the group who are passively listening to the discussion without any contribution.  

The question that may arise from this issue is “how this will affect the students?” Well, sadly to be told, I silently agreed that the ordinary baboons will stay ordinary and the dominant baboon will always be dominant unless we do something about this.

Throughout the session, Bill made me realised that we should not overlook or take this matter lightly. This is because it does not promote any learning, at least not to rest of the ordinary baboons. He emphasised that differentiation should be done in a mixed ability class so that each student will learn from each other and take a different role every time during an activity is carried out. The students will benefit much more from this kind of learning as the weaker students will be motivated by the stronger students.

Here I can conclude that, there is so much more to be done for the students. It depends on us to facilitate the learning and let the students discover the lesson themselves. After all we do not want them to be just another dominant and ordinary baboons right?

BABOON FACT:

Baboons use around 30 vocalisations which range from grunts to barks to screams. Non-vocal gestures would be lip smacking, shoulder shrugging & more.

SUZANNIE STEPHEN GALAUT

KOTA KINABALU POLYTECHNIC