In yesterday's comment section, Wendy pointed to an op-ed in the New York Times by Susan Engel, a senior lecturer in psychology and the director of the teaching program at Williams College. Engel writes that as policy talk shifts from health care to education, we should consider designing "a curriculum that teaches what truly matters."
Simply put, what children need to do in elementary school is not to
cram for high school or college, but to develop ways of thinking and
behaving that will lead to valuable knowledge and skills later on.So
what should children be able to do by age 12, or the time they leave
elementary school? They should be able to read a chapter book, write a
story and a compelling essay; know how to add, subtract, divide and
multiply numbers; detect patterns in complex phenomena; use evidence to
support an opinion; be part of a group of people who are not their
family; and engage in an exchange of ideas in conversation. If all
elementary school students mastered these abilities, they would be
prepared to learn almost anything in high school and college.
She says that teachers need to be freed up a laundry list of goals for every period. They should immerse the children in a reading environment. Children should have the time to thoroughly read and discuss books, rather than marching from one subject to the next.
Children should write essays or creative stories for ONE HOUR EVERY DAY. Does your child write for one hour every day? Mine doesn't. I just forwarded this article to my son's principal and said that I agreed that this was an important goal.
Engel also writes that kids shouldn't be memorizing useless math formulas and scientific terms that aren't grounded in experiments and experience. They should have time to explore through play.
I liked Engel's opinion piece a lot. Kids should be reading all the time. Kids should be writing and exploring all time. And they're not.
Jonah does way too many worksheets. His science curriculum is about studying for tests that involve filling in the blanks with a word bank. At ten, he had to figure out the molecular weight of Zinc, but without the adequate discussion of what molecules are and why they are cool.
He does little essay writing or creative writing. Which is a crying shame, because this is what my boy does really well. He never writes on his own, because if he does have a half hour of free time, he would much rather veg out in front of a computer. When he is forced to write at school, one of those rare times, he writes long, detailed stories that twist here and there. His handwriting is sloppy. He makes a ton of spelling errors. But he is marvelously creative.
A River Runs Through It is one of my favorite movies. In the opening scene, the narrator talks about his father, a Presbyterian minister, and his method for educating his boys. In the morning, they wrote and rewrote and rewrote essays making them as lean as possible. In the afternoon, the boys were let loose to fly fish until dinner. Sometimes when I'm working with Jonah, I channel Norman's father and emphasize the importance of perfection, hard work, and playing outside in the sun.
Yes, I have an inner Presbyterian minister.
This is the way a perfect school would be run. However, few schools can operate that way except for in very affluent communities. This system relies on certain assumptions. It assumes that all children come prepared to learn. It assumes that all teachers have a love of learning and are themselves readers and writers. It assumes that state legislatures haven't imposed rules about time spent in health class or on mandatory lessons on bullying that the children promptly ignore. It assumes that all children have done their homework and show up for school on a regular basis. It assumes that parents are encouraging these same goals at home. It assumes the teachers aren't burnt out from the last round of curriculum reforms.
Too many assumptions.
Let's just talk about Engel's point about the importance of collaborative learning. Engel is imagining a scene of four kids working on a project about the digestive system of the body. The kids jointly discuss how to lay out their poster and what information should be on the poster. One kid draws the picture of the body. Another finds information on the web. Another neatly copies down the words. Another kid leads the discussion to the larger group about their work.
How does that work in practice? One kid does all the work, and the other three hang back. The expectations for the project are so low that not much learning happens. The teacher has no idea how to assign grades to the students and how to evaluate this project. The project stretches on for one month.
Implementation is a bitch.
While I don't really expect the schools to implement the teaching style that Engel describes, I do think that parents should do this at home. We have mandatory reading time at home. We limit computer time. We talk during dinner time. We make time to play outside.
Parents should also nudge schools to do the right thing. Send your school principals a link to the article with a request for more writing instruction. The writing reform is the most do-able of Engel's suggestions.
Apt. 11d 
I’m a bit surprised that math is barely mentioned here — while I agree that all the other skills are important, a good grounding in math is vital to any sort of scientific career.
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I love this post – thoughtful, personal, researched and provocative. As an educator myself, THANKS!
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I agree that an important element of “The Good Classroom” is having a “Good Class” — good kids backed up by good parents. And I recognize that you’re not always going to have that, and without it even if you have the “good teacher” and “good curriculum” parts down pat, you’re not going to have a “good classroom.”
Which is why, even though my politics wants me to support more mainstreamed and ability/background integrated classroom, I think that kids will generally learn better in classroom with other kids who are approaching school the same way that they are.
A kid whose parents (maybe for good reason!) are not supporting them at home with reading time and writing time and creative exploring time will simply flounder in a group where the other kids have that background. And it’s not fair to the teacher to teach multiple classes simultaneously, with some kids needing to move forward after mastery and other kids needing reinforcement of what they haven’t yet internalized.
I understand that there are big problem with this sort of tracking — kids whose needs fall perpendicular to the way the kids are segregated so that no class is right for him, lack of good role models for the struggling kids, general narrowing of worldview for kids when they are narrowly tracked with kids like them — but I think that these problems are outweighed by the increased ability to have the pieces in place for a good classroom.
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I was intrigued by the article, because it so closely fit what my kids have been doing in school (especially in the 3rd grade classroom). The writing assignments were a laundry list of what they’ve done this year (including the cartoon unit, writing letters, creative writing of stories, . . . ). The science description was also very in line with what they do. They’re doing a lot of reading, and have started “book club” type discussions. This week’s project is to have a Roman style “Symposium” discussing “What makes people happy?” or “How can you tell something is true?” That activity is embedded in a larger theme about Greek myths, including art activities, creative writing, and an exploration of other mythologies.
They’ve also, as alluded to in the article, done their “computational” skills, and acquired those as well, and with practice in the classroom.
Amy compared the school to “unschooling”, but it would be only if unschooling included a community of learners of similar developmental stages, and a “facilitator” (teacher). One of the nice things about the “What is truth discussion” or what is “happiness” is that it’s being done with peers, not those with a lot of background behind them (i.e. teachers, or other adults). In addition, there is a goal of reaching competencies along a range of subjects — the children are not allowed to guide the path of knowledge, as in some forms of unschooling.
They are also learning how to do collaborative work (which I also remembered as “one person does the work.”). That does not seem to be the case in my daughter’s classroom. When I asked her about it, she said the ideal environment is one where everyone has something to contribute, and she also said that she generally thinks that’s available in her classroom. And, there is an authority figure who guides the discussions to reach those competencies.
My childrens’ classrooms (private school) are tracked. I do not know how the system would work in a less tracked classroom, and I don’t know how strugglers would do in the environment. But, my daughter, at least, has not learned to be dismissive of people with differing abilities (one of my proudest moments is watching her empathy with a friend with Down’s Syndrome), but, that’s not in a classroom environment.
Oh, and I think this “developmental” idea does change as kids get older — when content rather than learning skills start to matter more. Formulas are just not meaningful for most 3rd graders (the ones for whom a formula helps learning are probably rare). But this changes as they grow older, where the formal math starts helping provide structure. And, the same might be true of detailed content.
(And, of course, individual children are different)
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What’s an example of an useless math formula?
Just asking.
Also, if the kids read and write a lot about scientific topics, is that junk learning because it’s science or is that good learning because they are reading and writing?
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“What’s an example of an useless math formula?”
A useless math formula is one where you know the string of letters and numbers that describe it but don’t really understand how to apply it. That happens all the time, and it can be painful to watch at times — when people try to stuff numbers into the variables in deeply inappropriate ways. I’ve seen it most clearly in calculating probabilities and in statistics. Take MDS (Multidimensional Scaling) analysis — if you stuff your numbers into a particular format you can make an MDS run. But, it won’t usually mean anything.
Of course, third graders aren’t being taught MDS, but the formula for the area of a square can be just as meaningless without understanding.
And, for “science writing” — listing the names of the planets in order, though cute, isn’t science (just like reciting the alphabet isn’t reading). Having the conversation we had with my son yesterday morning — elicited by the statement that the sun shines on the earth during the day (wrong, because the sun shines on the earth all the time; it just shines on our part during the day) — that’s science. We corrected the misstatement, explained about the spinning earth, fielded questions about why we didn’t get dizzy because the earth is spinning, and then demonstrated with a globe and action figures about how we move with the earth, and night and day.
My son gets to do that in the classroom, too, and brings the questions home, and takes them to school.
(This morning, I got a little review of Abraham Lincoln, how he died, what kind of president he was, etc. , from the 6-year old)
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We recently got a long list of students who are in academic distress. I recognized many names as students who have developmental writing issues (I coordinate writing assessment, so I get a pretty good overview). The question I have is this: Are these students doing poorly in their other classes because they lack writing skills, or are these students just weak overall? Am contemplating a research project (specific to my institution). if the former is true, then maybe we are doing a huge disservice to students by not having them write, write and write some more.
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What Kevin said. I don’t know any “useless” math formulas that are taught in elementary school.
Also, I sort of disagree about science. There is a vast body of elementary scientific knowledge that every educated person should have, and there isn’t possibly time to learn each element of that body of knowledge by experimentation, and kids don’t have the experience to relate to a lot of it. With respect to experiments, I know I am in the minority, but I think grade school science experiments are useless, being basically canned exercises to illustrate one of the twenty points in that week’s lesson (usually chosen not because the most important point, but because it is the one that can be done affordably). I would get rid of labs until college. With respect to experience, although it is helpful to me to realize that the polar/non-polar distinction explains why oil and water don’t mix, that isn’t going to help my daughter, who doesn’t spend a lot of time either cleaning house or making gravy.
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My daughter is in 5th grade and has been working on area and perimeter (which they did in 3rd grade, and I’m not sure why they’re doing it again). Apparently her teacher makes her write the formulas for area and perimeter on the worksheets then plug in the numbers, something my daughter thinks is useless.
Just a datapoint.
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bj – Your kids go to a private school for gifted and talented kids. So, you’ve got highly motivated kids with similar highly motivated families. The student body is homogeneous. The school isn’t pulled this way and that from political pressures from the state, school boards, and teachers unions. The difficulty is taking the type of education your kids get and implementing them in a public school system.
Did I say useless math formulas? Maybe Engel said that. Actually, I have little complaints about my kids’ math education. A little more drilling at school would have helped some kids, but the program wasn’t horrendous.
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“This week’s project is to have a Roman style “Symposium” discussing “What makes people happy?” or “How can you tell something is true?””
Ironically, I think Plato didn’t want anyone to study philosophy before age 30.
Engels understands that kids need books, but she doesn’t understand why–they need background knowledge. They need to know about reptiles, amphibians, mammals, invertebrates, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Vikings, Genesis, Exodus, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, etc. They need to know it. And the beautiful thing is, not only do they need it, it’s highly motivating and totally developmentally appropriate.
The basic problem with Engels’ approach is that as E.D. Hirsch and Daniel Willingham tell us, being a good reader is area specific and highly dependent on background knowledge. In fact, we might want to do away with the very term “good reader.” Baseball fans (even poor readers) do better on a test about a passage on baseball than “good” readers do. I enjoy Patrick O’Brien, but I’d get a heck of a lot more out of his Aubrey and Maturin books if I knew more about ships. Likewise, hand me a description of a football game or the innards of a car, and I’ll understand much less of it than a football fan or a mechanic, even though I got an 800 Verbal GRE score at one point.
I think one big problem when we talk about education is that beginner learning is so very different from advanced learning that it is difficult for an advanced learner to understand the process that a beginner goes through (which is why it’s so helpful to think about how we adults struggle with alien material). At the beginner level, learning is laborious. When I was first studying Russian, every word learned was a victory. But at some level, after years of classroom work and psychologically uncomfortable immersion, word learning stopped being work. It just happened automatically and effortlessly. I heard an unfamiliar word in context and I immediately understand what it meant, how you spell it, and I was immediately able to use the word myself.
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bj, if the formula for the area of a square is confusing a kid, they need more time spent learning math, not less.
I agree with the general thrust that kids should be spending lots of time practicing the essentials like reading and writing, but let’s remember that it is equally true of math.
With respect to science and memorization, I believe that young kids have abilities for rote memorization that they lose as they grow into the ages where they begin to learn to think critically.
It’s advantageous to make them memorize lots of facts and lists when they are young, because: 1 they are better at it when they are young, 2 they aren’t rebellious enough to refuse and 3 it gives them a rich context of facts within which critical thinking can be learned when they are older.
If they spend an hour a day writing and another hour a day reading, they still have time for an hour of doing math problems and lots of time besides for both memorization and play.
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Oh, I know that our personal experience doesn’t translate to setting public policy. But, it is the ideal model for my kids, and, I suspect for many others. I also don’t know that our experience *doesn’t* translate — I see little work showing that one model works better than another in public settings. I see a lot of people with strong opinions (including me). My strong opinions are fine when I’m sending my own kids to a school I pay for. But, I see little evidence that the strong assertions on other systems by others would translate, either. My school is selective (for both parents and children), but it’s also expensive (far more expensive than the highest level per capita state spending, as far as I can tell). The experiment of offering it to children who haven’t been selected hasn’t really been tried, and for all we know, it might work.
Though I think canned, toss stuff around, mix stuff together, take stuff apart labs don’t teach science, I also think that reading about it teaches science.. No labs ’til college would horrify me.
Certain kinds of labs work, and others don’t. Classical mechanics can be done in school, and it can be done by different students depending on the math that they have (f=ma is multiplication, and can be measured reasonably accurately by grade school students). Of course, as with math, I think the fundamental problem is that both math and science are being taught by people who don’t really get it.
It’s interesting Laura — that you’re comfortable with the math execution at your school but not the language arts. Do you think that’s the general belief at the school, or that you have different standards for the two (since you are a writer yourself)?
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“Of course, as with math, I think the fundamental problem is that both math and science are being taught by people who don’t really get it.”
Yes. Here’s a related story that you’ve probably seen “Female teachers’ math anxiety affects girl students.”
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-teachers-math-anxiety,0,4114031.story
Even just reading Engels’ short piece, you can easily tell which academic subjects she thinks of as broccoli.
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Our public school has a program which has been very similar to these recommendations. The math is much stronger, thank heavens.
The group work aspect does not work in heterogeneous classrooms, when the ability level span runs from sped (with aide) to extreme gifted. It’s not a good use of anyone’s time. The groups generally assign the least cognitively demanding part of the task to the most challenged group member. “Here, you color in the letters.” The fastest member of the group gets frustrated at doing everyone’s work–and frustrated at the lack of work ethic in the kids in the middle. Everyone except the kid doing the work gets a better grade than they would get on individual work. The gifted kid gets a poorer grade than his would would deserve.
And then, around 5th grade, the girls start to form cliques, and the middle school bullying starts. In that environment, group work gives the bullies an opportunity to continue to bully. Teacher sanctioned! You know, the kids who are calling you a “slut” or a “wimp” are not going to suddenly like you better because you can spell “Egyptian,” no matter what teacher ed school would like to see happen.
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Ken Robinson feels that math and sciences are too much emphasized in schools.
When it comes to memorization of facts, that’s one thing I don’t worry about with my kids. They have awesome memories (E’s comes with his Asperger’s). However, he’s having a lot of trouble with writing. Engel’s model probably sounds good to me because it would improve the areas I think my son needs to improve. (And actually, my daughter loves writing and seems to do tons of it, some of it unprompted.)
The issue is what is good for all kids, not just mine, though.
However, I was talking with a student yesterday who was disappointed in her grade in my writing class. She said she has always been very good at memorization but not so much at writing.
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Oh, I’m totally on board with memorizing math facts — I think fluency in those facts is needed in order to be able to do the rest of the math. It’s like sight reading words, or learning basic spelling. Without it, you spend too much time stumbling on that stuff and not on the important stuff. I don’t know what Engels’ position on that is, but I’m guessing she thinks its less important for the school day, since collaboration-communication doesn’t particularly help with it (I’m a fan of computerized practice for math facts). And, yes, all the 3rd graders in my daughters class have “passed” their multiplication tables up to 12X12.
Memorizing state capitols, on the other hand, or the order of the planets, or the parts of a flower, or taxonomy (and I pick the last one especially because it is almost totally useless for modern biology), not particularly worthwhile (though of course, I have no problem with someone choosing to memorize that stuff if they want and it helps them learn stuff). Historical dates? Well, I think sequences are important, but exact dates, not really.
People seem to think that spending a lot of time reading means that you won’t have content knowledge. But that makes no sense to me. Same goes with the math. If you’re doing math, you’re learning the math facts, too. The problem, as I see it, is that kids will pretend that they’re reading or doing math, while basically being set in corners without supervision, allowing them to leave without learning anything. I know this is a problem; I also know that we need to have methods of telling whether something was achieved during those periods. But, those worries doesn’t change the fact that there can be an enormous amount of learning when the methods are implemented correctly.
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I was talking to the middle school science teacher from my daughter’s school a couple months ago, and she said that middle school science curriculum is a problem. To begin with, it is hard question–where do you start when you are tackling the underpinnings of the whole universe? The materials available aren’t that great, either. My informant particularly complained about the fact that while there are lots of “experiments” in books aimed at middle school kids, they do not work with formulas, which means that it’s more “science appreciation” than science (that’s my phrasing, not hers). I was very happy to hear that the middle school science teacher is working closely with the high school science teacher to put together a unified curriculum (the school is pretty young and is still adding grades).
I have a nephew who is in 4th grade in Germany and his parents are very happy with his education there. They don’t do “science” in 4th grade in Bavaria, but study scientific fields separately. (I’m going to have to quiz my sister on the details.) As I recall, when I taught in Russia, there also wasn’t such a thing as “science” in school. In the early grades, they’d do nature study, and then in the later grades, they’d be doing biology, chemistry, and physics, and they’d take each every year.
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“People seem to think that spending a lot of time reading means that you won’t have content knowledge.”
It’s really hard for me to remember my elementary education. I read VORACIOUSLY as a child, though. And I learned an awful lot of content from Bobbsey Twins books–true fact. Just like kids are learning content from Magic Tree House books and Percy Jackson books, too.
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It doesn’t help, of course, to have teachers who don’t especially find reading worthwhile and motivating themselves. A little evangelism is useful.
Worksheets happen a lot because it’s very easy to track them to objectives 2.0.a 2.0.c on a long list of standards and check those off the list.
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“Ken Robinson feels that math and sciences are too much emphasized in schools.”
Go for it, bj!
“People seem to think that spending a lot of time reading means that you won’t have content knowledge.”
No, I think you can get a lot from reading if you already have background knowledge that allows you to understand what you’re reading. The rich get richer. The question is, how to acquire that initial lump of capital that will allow you to learn quickly?
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But where did I get the background knowledge to understand the new content in the Bobbsey Twins? I was about 5 or 6. Can’t remember when I started reading them.
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“The question is, how to acquire that initial lump of capital that will allow you to learn quickly? ”
You learn to read.
Oh, I think a lot of what Ken Robinson says makes sense. And, I actually think that reading is more important than math in the elementary school. And then, I think that math, and especially science, are taught poorly in elementary school. No science would be better than what passes for science (i.e. memorizing lists of things) or making slime (to pick too extremes of how it can be taught badly).
But, the 4-5 science teacher in my kids school is beyond awesome. People compare her to Ms. Frizzl, but I think that’s unfair our Dr. “F” is much much better. I wrote her fan mail after seeing a sample class.
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“Learning to read” isn’t adequate, since there’s a lot more to comprehension than just being able to decode. There’s a well-known phenomenon called the fourth grade slump, which is often attributed to the difficult transition between “learning to read” and “reading to learn”.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/68442
http://www.colorincolorado.org/article/13284
I especially like the second second URL, which
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Jeanne Chall, The Reading Crisis: Why Poor Children Fall Behind is worth reading. As I recall, she found that even the best readers in her study group had deficits in comprehension.
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What I remember from the Bobbsey Twins is the absurdity of boy/girl twins being identical. That struck me as wrong even before I got to high school biology.
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I don’t imagine having to fill out a fucking worksheet every time you read a book is particularly motivating.
Amy, as a technical writer I must remark that the electrical specification the author of the second link used as an example isn’t merely unclear because of background knowledge–it’s unclear because it’s a bunch of phrases weakly strung together with prepositions. If it had been written with strong logical construction, the vocabulary gap wouldn’t have been anything like as much of a problem.
I wonder if the amount of time kids spend reading levelled texts (and not practicing with material that is interesting to them, but contains words above grade level) makes a difference in the ability to acquire background.
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The Chall book looks interesting — like it might provide useful data on the question, relevant to public education.
Any similar cites on the utility of group work in mixed-ability settings?
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“Levelled texts”? I’m guessing that means texts that are designed to be a particular reading level. But what does that mean for children’s literature in general? When someone writes a book like Harry Potter, does someone read through it looking for “leveling”?
Was that done for older children’s literature?
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I’ll come back to the conversation later, but I’m working my into K-12 education right now, though I’m not (yet?) teaching. I’m teaching teachers. And I just attended Educon, which is all about some of the things mentioned in the article. Tomorrow, I’m taking my students to the Science Leadership Academy, a charter high school in the city where they will see kids working together on projects, taking responsibility for their learning, and teachers who understand how to make some of those things happen. It’s not the only school out there like that but it’s one I know well that’s close by.
What I’m seeing with my current students is that many of them want to teach the way they were taught–and unfortunately, those methods are not good for everyone. As someone said at Educon, you have to remember that as a teacher, you were good at school, and school (in its current NCLB mode) doesn’t work for everyone.
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Levelled texts have been either vetted to contain nothing considered above a certain level, or have had that content removed. So it would be hard to assign something like Harry Potter in third grade in many places even if the story is very appealing, because it contains imponderable stuff like Latin phrases.
http://www2.scholastic.com/browse/article.jsp?id=10216
I guess the principle that you don’t want to go too far over a kid’s head so they don’t tune out has some validity, but it seems to me watching my kid that interest in story or subject matter is toweringly likely to carry her over reading difficulties: she is much more likely to be able to read a book about the Mars Rover than a Junie B. Jones, for example, even if the words are longer and the concepts are harder.
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Way up near the top of the comments, Amy P mentions how laborious learning is for beginners, but that’s for adult learners. For most kids, learning–real learning, not filling out worksheets–comes relatively naturally. Yes, they need to be guided to books at the right level and that might be of interest; they need background information; they need connections made for them, but once the circumstances are in place for learning, kids will learn without it being too laborious. There’s research to back me up. š
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“Any similar cites on the utility of group work in mixed-ability settings?”
Karen Rogers’ “Re-Forming Gifted Education” (2002) has an entire chapter devoted to issues in grouping, with lots of cites.
Rogers says “high potential students are neither harmed norm helped in academic areas by any form of cooperative grouping” (Reis, et. al, 1994). That’s a big study from the National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented. Peer tutoring dyads with a strong student and a weak student help the weak student and don’t hurt the strong student, although Rogers suggests avoiding mixed dyads for exercises where the stronger student will be tempted to just feed his partner answers.
So, no biggie?
“It should be noted again that Slavin’s studies of mixed-ability cooperative grouping seldom have focused on gifted students. The few studies that reported the the effects of this kind of grouping on gifted students initially reported that they did better academically in cooperative groups. However, more recent analysis of the quality of this research suggests that there was no improvement in achievement at best, and at worst, there was substantial alienation or isolation of the gifted student from other group members.”
Rogers doesn’t give a citation for that ominous statement, but she suggests that as with dyads, “Mixed-ability groups should include gifted students in the mix only when the tasks themselves are higher order and complex investigations, problem-solving based learning tasks, or open-ended tasks.”
On a somewhat different subject, I’d like to put in a good word for the much-despised worksheet and workbook. Some children may find it easier to stay on task if they are working on a piece of paper right in front of them, rather than trying to make sense of what a teacher or a group of fellow students is saying.
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“Amy P mentions how laborious learning is for beginners, but that’s for adult learners. For most kids, learning–real learning, not filling out worksheets–comes relatively naturally.”
It’s not that easy for kids, either. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard the Rosetta Stone ads (“Learn a foreign language as easily as you learned your first language!”) but it never fails to tick me off. My younger child barely said a word until he was two, and he was obviously struggling seriously with the process. Lots of frustration! As an adult language learner, you bet I’d do better than 5 words in two years (or however much it was). Even the average child barely says a word for a whole year.
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To answer the original question, the third graders at our school have writing workshop for an hour every day. The kids are grouped according to ability, and the highest groups are working on the proper structure of a paragraph and essay.
FWIW (not much?), the reading/writing curriculum my kids use is a gazillion times better than anything I had in the 1970s. By third grade, I was being left to the boxes of books for advanced readers and given worksheets to prove I had understood them. My kids and I all scored/score in the 99th percentile on standardized reading tests, but believe me, they know more than I did at their age.
I volunteer in the leveled-book room at our school, and yes, there are matrices for “leveling” just about every kind of fiction being written for kids today. About half of all the first-grade books were easy readers and picture books that you probably read to your kids at home (if you’re a parent). “Peter and the Starcatchers” is on our book-room shelves. (I think it’s level W.)
I have no real curriculum complaints at our school. The teachers, aides, and other staff make it look fairly straight-forward to implement science, math, and reading/writing instruction that challenges different groups of kids in the same classroom. I’d say about 95% of my kids’ days are spent in groups of no more than 5.
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Bj, I don’t know of any book I’d recommend on mixed ability group work. I know that some will praise it highly, claiming “everyone benefits.” The able students are supposed to gain empathy and patience. (To which I would ask, “why do you expect the gifted kids to be rotten people?”) We didn’t see the benefits. “…there was substantial alienation or isolation of the gifted student from other group members” was our experience.
Group work can be useful. It needs to be carefully structured, however, and the groups must be carefully assembled. High kid-middle kid-middle kid-low kid is not a good model.
If our school had used group work occasionally, and with good judgement, I might not have had any complaints. In the end, making my kid work as an unpaid tutor with the students the teachers couldn’t handle, or with the “mean girls,” made that school a miserable experience. Changing to a school with a more traditional style has changed everything. What a thrill to hear, “I love school.”
Another drawback of extensive group work is the difficulty in keeping instruction on track. Our school has many students who spend a great deal of time in club sports. Students frequently missed school to attend meets, or competitions out of state. Add in illnesses, and routine doctor’s visits, and most groups weren’t able to complete tasks within a given timeline, because their group was never all in class on the same day.
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I quite liked the idea of kids having to be able to “detect patterns in complex phenomena”, but being a math person, I thought of that as a mathematical thing. My kids, in Australia (year 1 and year 5) have both been learning probability to the extent of thinking about the chances of two heads if you toss two coins (something I learned in high school).
Math is really important to me – much more than times tables, it is a way of thinking about the world, and now that I’ve gone back and read the original article, I think it is seriously underdone in that utopia. In today’s society, far more than even 50 years ago, numeracy (which means far more than times tables, it means understanding how to use numbers in ordinary life) is incredibly important.
The concepts in computer programming are also something we would like our kids to know by the end of primary school (and are teaching them at home)
Anyway, my kids would do well in that classroom, because at home we are a very numerate and geeky household, which also loves books. Your average kid – would have a serious deficit in mathematical thinking at high school.
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“The concepts in computer programming are also something we would like our kids to know by the end of primary school (and are teaching them at home)”
What are you thinking of using? My husband would like to do the same thing. He mentioned some sort of EZ programming method, (Snake Wrangling?) but I’m not sure big girl is going to be excited about it.
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We play with a program called Scratch, which the kids can use to program games. I blogged about it here – http://penguinunearthed.wordpress.com/2008/07/26/scratch/
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Interesting–what are people so scared of?
My husband and I are doing a (theoretically) monthly board game club for grades 1-6 at the kids’ private school. He did a lot of math and science contests as a kid and into college and really enjoyed the experience, and I’ve been wondering what would be a good direction to go if we wanted to organize an afterschool math or science club over the next few years (our older child is in 2nd grade now). What age children do best with Scratch?
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