Fairness and equity

The classic response to treating learners differently by giving them additional encouragement is that ‘It is not fair to treat children differently. You are rewarding one child for something that another child does every day with no reward.’ Well, children are not all the same, responding to difference in ways that enable achievement is central to the craft of the classroom. We are in fact not rewarding the performance of a skill in itself but the effort that has gone into learning that skill. That’s what makes it fair.