Education fails when it cannot adapt to the learner

What?

In 2015, as a Clinical Teaching Fellow, I designed and validated (PBL-SGT)-Fusion for my MMedSci: a method that ran a short pre-test at the start of each session and adapted the difficulty to the group in front of me. It worked, junior-phase students reached material normally taught two phases later, and I proposed a follow-on model, Theory, Simulation, Practise. Two years afterwards, in 2017, I was diagnosed with dyslexia. The diagnosis did not create the method; it explained it. I had spent years building around a way of learning I had not yet named in myself.

So what?

Most teaching is built for the average student in the room, and the average student does not exist. What my own diagnosis taught me from the inside is that when a learner cannot keep up, the honest question is rarely whether they are able; it is whether the teaching bent to meet them. I find that harder to forgive in a system than in a person, because a system can be redesigned.

Now what?

I keep the pre-test habit in everything I build now: find out what the room actually knows before deciding what to say, whether the room is a lecture theatre, a field team, or a language model. And I am more open about the dyslexia than I once was, because a trainee who is struggling should be able to see that it need not be the end of anything.