The next big idea

I've had it on the brain lately: Scale matters.

It's a thing I learned in ecology: the phenomenon that one observes at one scale may look completely different than the phenomenon seen at a different scale. A partial explanation is easy to conceive: imagine a field, made of of 100 squares. Each square is an evenly distributed mix of exactly two populations of equal size-- but these populations appear at different frequencies, randomly distributed through the whole. So, any single square is clearly a 50/50 mix. A four-square sample may be 1/4, 1/2, 1/4 of three different species. Across the whole, 100-square field, there's 20 species, in a wide variety of proportions...


So, what if differentiated instruction is unscalable, in the same way? I think that this is the null hypothesis-- the default assumption of the system: every student, everywhere, should have access to the same curriculum, the same rigor, and be tested on the same benchmarks... Every classroom will have it's small-scale variability, but every school will have a different, medium-scale environment, and large school systems are effectively unrecognizable from the perspective of the local school.

But, what if differentiated instruction IS scalable? What if we build an entire school around idea of differentiation? Is that Dewey's dream?

Is it mine?