By Alison Davis

Based on the talk from the Starlight Rays series

If you currently teach or love someone—even many someones—whose needs surpass what you feel you can meet, you are in good company. And in both of these cases, I am here with you. It is important to know that before you keep reading. I am writing today not because I have achieved anything, but because I am willing to be honest about what I’m trying to do as a teacher in these times, which necessarily involves working with growing numbers of neuro-divergent students.

Differentiation is one way of describing a pedagogical orientation in which a teacher takes into account the multiple needs of a given class and offers entry points at different levels that correspond to those needs. Differentiation has as many faces as there are students, but saying “to each their own” is not helpful for the teacher who is sometimes spending hours planning a single lesson, only to watch it fall flat with the students.

When it comes to differentiation, a Waldorf teacher has access to ideas, practices, and relationships that are not common in other educational settings, and the most central to this discussion is that many of our current practices for diagnosing students with learning differences (re: pathologizing them) drive out their genius, which is the exact phrase Steiner uses in the first of his lectures on curative education. Here is how he builds the picture: Suppose we have here the physical body of the human being […]. Then we have the life of the soul […]. This life of soul, which can show itself in varied expressions and manifestations, may be normal or it may be abnormal. But now the only possible grounds we can have for speaking of the normality or abnormality of the child’s life of soul, or indeed of the life of soul of any human being is that we have in mind something that is normal in the sense of being average. There is no other criterion than the one that is customary among people who abide by ordinary conventions; such people have their ideas of what is to be considered reasonable or clever, and then everything that is an expression of ‘normal’ life of soul (as they understand it) is for them an abnormality. At present there really is no other criterion.

That is why the conclusions people come to are so very confused. When they have in this way ascertained the existence of ‘abnormality,’ they begin to do–heaven knows what!–believing they are thereby helping to get rid of the abnormality, while all the time they are driving out a fragment of genius! We shall get nowhere at all by applying this kind of criterion, and the first thing the doctor and teacher have to do is reject it and get beyond the stage of making pronouncements as to what is clever or reasonable, in accordance with the habits and thoughts that prevail today. Particularly in this domain we must refrain from jumping to conclusions, and simply look at things as they are. What have we actually before us in the human being? (1)

So this first undertaking for a teacher who recognizes the vast range of needs in a given classroom is to drop any preconception of what a student should or shouldn’t be. In the place of judgements, just observe. This builds our phenomenological muscles. Instead of saying “Ralph acts out in frustration,” say “Ralph threw his book.” Instead of saying “Malika is in a good mood today,” say “Malika smiled as she was speaking to me this morning.”

There are so many things we miss out on observing because we are busy judging. Instead of saying “they have messy handwriting,” say “I can’t tell the difference between their lowercase a and lowercase u.” Notice the proportions of their limbs. Notice the way they walk, how they hold their weight, the sound of their voice, what they pack for lunch, their posture at a picnic table, at a desk, in the driver’s seat of their car, sitting cross-legged on the floor. What you notice can become a question: “Why does Natsuko press so hard that it breaks the lead of her pencil four times in one lesson?” A question becomes a vessel that the spiritual world can pour guidance into. A judgement, or worse, a conclusion, leaves no room for that.

The second undertaking is to recognize that whatever we are seeing in the students, we also contain somewhere in ourselves. This builds our empathy muscles, but only if you can be honest with yourself. For example, do you currently have a student who drives you crazy with the number of times they say 6-7, because I do. I also currently drive myself crazy at the number of times I think I would be happier if I had less cellulite. The kid who yells is me when I slam the cabinet door shut because someone put the dishes away wrong. The kid who won’t make eye contact with classmates is me when I go back into the house and decide to do my grocery shopping later so I don’t have to chitchat with the neighbor outside. Please hear me: we have to stop blaming the kids for being what we are.

The third undertaking is to examine the student environmentally and circumstantially, using the aforementioned phenomenological and empathic muscles. Students manifest differently depending on where they are and especially who they are with. You know how you can sometimes just tell that a person doesn’t like you, even if they’ve never said as much or even made so much as a mean comment? And you can still just tell? The kids can tell, especially neurodivergent kids. There might not be anything wrong with them so much as there is something wrong with the way the people around them think. They will come and expose all of the falsehoods that we often inadvertently build our classes (and even our lives) on so that we can appear good and productive and worthy. Goodness and worth cannot be achieved. Curative educators see time and time again that a child changes when the adults around them change. It’s part of what we call the Pedagogical Law, and it’s the basis of the communities of care model of the curative education centers being built in India and Australia by Dr. Lakshmi Prasanna.

These observations don’t need to take up a lot of time. The time you spend being annoyed and complaining to a colleague can be swapped for just observing and asking questions. It’s not like you need to block out an hour or more, like you do if you’re trying to plan a lesson where you are trying to guarantee everyone can reach a pre-determined outcome. The observations will lead to inspirations about what kind of experiences to offer, which are naturally differentiated in ways that traditional academic work is not. And when the experiences have had time to sink in, the academic work follows with much more ease.

But don’t be fooled: it may never be “easy” in the guaranteed-to-work kind of way. It will always demand effort from us because we are forever evolving, unfinished, and becoming. We won’t always like it, because sympathy is not love, and this work requires that we stretch our capacity to love.

Once we are in the habit of doing these kinds of observations, we will naturally look at differentiation in a new way. A meditative practice gives us the gift of new eyes. Student’s shortcomings are no longer obstacles to getting through the lesson; student’s growth and development is the lesson. A student’s inability to perform a given task at a given moment is no longer proof that we have failed; it is proof that we have more to learn. And then we do!

It is my hope that something I have shared here sparks something in you. It is also my hope that you don’t walk away thinking that you’ve spent all this time reading and still don’t know how to plan your class tomorrow. I also hope you don’t feel like you have failed if you read more Edutopia than Steiner. So to close, I would like to offer you something not from my mind, but straight from my heart. The following statements are reminders that you can be as human as you are and that the spiritual world stands ready to help. 

There is a difference between trying a teaching strategy to force your lesson through and trying a teaching strategy with openness to where it will lead. The lines exist in your heart.

There is a difference between offering an accommodation because you just want to be done with the situation and offering an accommodation because you see it as a bridge. The lines exist in your heart.

There is a difference between holding high standards because “you need to know this” and holding high standards because you know deep down there’s value in it. The lines exist in your heart.

There is a difference between testing the students on content or skills because they need to prove they’ve learned it and testing the students on content or skills because you are wondering what they understand. The lines exist in your Heart.

There is a difference between wanting the students to do well so that you look like a good teacher and wanting the students to do well so that they can incarnate as fully as possible. The lines exist in your heart.

On the outside, all of these actions may look the same. But teaching is an esoteric task. What’s in your heart matters