Is your coffee a 60 or 78? Malcolm Gladwell speaks on differentiated instruction (kinda)
July 1, 2009
BY BILL FERRIS
“The difference between coffee at 60 and coffee at 78 [on a scale of zero to 100] is the difference between coffee that makes you wince and coffee that makes you deliriously happy.” -Malcolm Gladwell
I stumbled across this TED Talk from Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers. In this talk, Gladwell tells the story of Howard Moskowitz, who revolutionized the food industry by figuring out what people actually wanted, as opposed to what they said they wanted. In doing so, Gladwell also inadvertently makes a great case for differentiated instruction.
The ideal spaghetti sauce
The food industry, much like education, spent much of its existence looking for universals, for ways of doing things that worked for everyone. People naturally assumed that whatever worked for the greatest number of people was the best way to go. They thought this despite it flying in the face of the old common-sense saying that if you try to please everyone, you’ll end up not pleasing anyone.
According to Gladwell, Moskowitz conducted extensive research on food preferences. While working with Prego trying to find the ideal spaghetti sauce, he broke down sauces by every conceivable variable until he found that, rather than finding one magic sauce recipe, people’s preferences fell into one of three categories — plain, spicy, and extra-chunky. At the time, extra-chunky sauce didn’t exist. Prego released a new extra-chunky variety, and a new tomato sensation swept the nation.
Clusters
Sure, you like spaghetti sauce as much as the next guy, but what does this have to do with teaching?
Differentiated instruction has gotten a lot of play lately as an alternative to universal teaching methods. Its easy to extrapolate that concept from the latter part of Gladwell’s talk (he gets to the differentiated instruction part at around 16:10, but I recommend watching the whole thing), where he makes the point that breaking up your audience into even a few smaller sub groups and catering to each can have significant results.
“When we pursue universals in food, we aren’t just making an error, we are actually doing ourselves a massive disservice…If I were to ask all of you to try and come up with a brand of coffee, a type of coffee, a brew that made all of you happy and then I asked you to rate that coffee, the average score in this room for coffee would be about 60 on a scale of zero to 100.
“If however you allowed me to break you into…maybe three of four coffee clusters, and I could make coffee just for…each of those individual clusters, your scores would go from 60 to 75 or 78. The difference between coffee at 60 and coffee at 78 is the difference between coffee that makes you wince and coffee that makes you deliriously happy.”
Obviously education isn’t the same as the food industry (unless you want to get into an ethereal discussion of knowledge being food for the brain, which I don’t). However, I do think Gladwell’s example does bring up truths about how human beings work. You can’t have a different lesson plan for each of your 30 students in a class, but by adapting to at least a few of the different learning styles in your class, you can take students from wincing to making them…well, deliriously happy may be a bit much, but suffice it to say you’ll do some good.
As Gladwell says, “That is the final and I think most beautiful lesson of Howard Moskowitz — that in embracing the diversity of human beings you will find a surer way to true happiness.”
TED Talks: Malcolm Gladwell on spaghetti sauce
Related stuff:
Check out these differentiated instruction resources
Find what you need at 4teachers.org
Photo credit: e’s on Flickr.
