Bad Metaphors: Achievement Gaps (Continued)
Let’s get back to gaps.
The challenge of the gap metaphor is that it inherently depicts a fissure between a desired state and a current state. And it feels very right to do so. With the New Year barely in the rearview, and 2020’s effects still lingering around my waistline, it sure as hell feels appropriate to worry about the gap between what I want and where I am. Gaps are familiar American territory. We love problems, performance, and analysis. And gaps give us the opportunity to solve, do, and measure away. But maybe this familiar approach is incomplete.
Gaps live inside a mindset of scarcity. In their brilliant 2013 book Scarcity: The New Science of Having Less & How It Defines Our Lives, Mullainathan and Shafir define scarcity simply as “the condition of shortage; having too little” (p. 4). In their conception, the condition of having too little is as much psychological as it is factual. The authors describe the ill effects of operating from a scarcity mindset. We tend to over-focus on what’s directly in front of us (what they call “tunneling”) at the expense of seeing the bigger picture. And we lose our capacity for absorbing change (what they call “slack”), becoming psychologically rigid.
Here’s the bottom line: when we teach to and from gaps, we teach from scarcity. But scarcity and good teaching don’t match well.
From a Zen view, the gap metaphor is a form of delusion. It projects wholeness onto some future state, while quietly disowning the wholeness already present. In zazen, we don’t sit in order to become enlightened; we sit because this moment, just as it is, contains the entire path. So too in teaching: the student before us is not an error in need of fixing, but a full expression of this moment’s conditions. The work is not to measure the distance, but to meet it fully.
Scarcity turns the present into a problem. Zen invites us to see the present as a field of possibility. Each morning in service, Zen students chant the Verse of the Robe, declaring “Vast is the robe of liberation/A formless field of benefaction”. Seeing life as boundless energetic potentiality is worlds apart from seeing it as a sequence of pesky problems. Rather than chasing after what’s missing, the practice becomes one of turning toward what is—with care, curiosity, and precision. This doesn’t mean ignoring real inequities. It means refusing to locate value solely in comparison. When we do, we become freer to teach from relationship rather than remediation, from presence rather than panic.
It’s true that tested academic performance varies across populations. The question, then, becomes: how do we describe and respond to those differences? What’s the story we tell ourselves about them? We are subject to the questions and language we use to address these challenges. They will frame and limit the conversation, so we ought to be very careful about how we proceed.
Maybe a better approach is to drop the gap metaphor altogether.
Instead, we might return to that tried and true bedrock practice of education: inquiry. Maybe addressing educational inequity and academic achievement is more a function of leaning into and living out a set of questions. Here are a few we might consider:
What’s our learning aspiration for all/each of our student(s)?
This question sets a goalless goal. It creates intention and animates movement in a direction without being tethered to measurement. In his Appreciative Inquiry model, Cooperrider (2008) describes these as “unconditional positive questions”—inquiries into what’s possible, not what’s wrong.What conditions will nourish that aspiration?
This comes from the systems thinker in me. While we can’t see or control all the variables that support learning, we can name and influence some. Like gardeners, we don’t control the weather—but we can water, weed, and tend the soil.What do we want more of?
In the world of nutrition, there’s a move away from fixating on what to cut ("Eat fewer cookies") and toward what to increase ("Eat vegetables at every meal"). The cookie-less view reminds us of what we’re missing; the vegetable focus draws energy from aspiration. It’s a shift from avoidance to invitation.
Perhaps these questions more authentically address the challenges of the classroom.
So let’s drop the gap metaphor. It creates too much scarcity. Instead, we might let the beautiful questions of teaching energize our work for a while.
REFLECTION
How would you answer the above questions for yourself and your students?
What questions would you add to the list?
REFERENCES:
Cooperrider, D., Whitney, D, Stavros, J. (2008). Appreciative Inquiry Handbook: for Leaders of Change, Crown Custom Publishing.Mullainathan, S., & Shafir, E. (2013). Scarcity. Times Books.
