Week Six

        Does Ability Grouping Work? Isn't this a question we have been asking ourselves for all the years we have been involved in education? 

        My intuition and my observations have always leaned toward the side of ability grouping only benefiting gifted and talented learners. 

        From a personal observation, I know my own daughter benefits greatly from advanced and accelerated curriculum and problem-based learning opportunities that are provided in an advanced content model of gifted education. In the classroom, I have had "high performing" classes who I was able to push harder and to cover content with much faster. I was able to enhance the learning experiences for the higher half and hone in on the needs of the slightly lower performers. Then I have had classes where only one quarter of the students would be considered average performers. Every procedure, every concept, every single moment required so much support that I found myself feeling like I was treading water just to keep up with all the individual needs. Those years hurt! Those years required more hours after school, before school, all the time, in the books and in collaboration, searching for answers.

        I am a huge proponent of building upon the collective knowledge and conversation. Instead of being only as strong as a weakest link, I see high achieving students as life rafts who pull everyone to the surface with them. I love to see high achieving students empowered to teach what skills they have mastered and the sponge-like capacity of lower achieving students who are learning from a whole group or small group conversation. Some of the best moments are when the lower achieving student grasps a concept they have been struggling to reach and then turns to explain it to someone else they know has been struggling. 

        This leads me to what I feel is an overlooked problem with a practice in my district. Our gifted-identified and some high-achieving students receive an advanced curriculum model while our students qualifying as at risk or who receive special education services are grouped together with some high-achieving students and average achievers. I feel that the collaborative and conversational benefits are diminished and overload the teachers with accommodation requirements. I feel that we place a ceiling on the non-gifted/high achiever classes and place the risk of burnout squarely upon those teachers. Even with Early Intervention teachers in place in elementary grade levels, they do not provide services throughout the day, and the thirty minutes of small group support hardly seems to be beneficial in most cases. By the time these students reach middle school, there is little, if any, of this support. 

        In the readings, the section dedicated to tutoring got me thinking of the benefits of merging these class groupings on a regular basis in order to capitalize on peer tutoring. Would this be a solution? Would the social implications be positive or feed bullying in the middle school environment? How would this look if implemented during academic opportunity times each day? As professional learning community facilitator for my content area on my grade level for the next year, I may just have the avenue to try this on for size.

Comments

  1. Dan LomaxJune 28, 2021 at 10:08 AM

    Another great week here with your blog post. I appreciate the number of times you linked the reading to your classroom practice. Well Done!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week Five

      There is a time and place for individual practice and direct whole group instruction. It is also important to understand that, as supported by constructivist approaches, cooperative, student-centered learning activities can be inspiring and can improve problem-solving abilities. Student-centered learning requires teachers to plan for many scenarios and guide the learning with clear objectives. Much modeling of behaviors and procedures aids students in being successful and fully, productively engaged which prevents the often dreaded behaviors of group work gone awry.      I have found that cooperative learning activities such as jigsaw and think-pair-share help my students deepen their understandings of concepts beyond basic rote knowledge. My students, over several years, spent most of their time in groups of desks having collaborative conversations except rare occasions that they were required to demonstrate independent proficiency. This ye...
Read more

Week Three

      In starting year eleven of teaching, one thing I am sure of is that I still have work to do by way of implementing cognitive theories of learning to best meet the needs of every student in my classroom each and every year. If I thought it was challenging to meet the needs of around twenty first graders, I had no idea how tremendous the task would be with sixty-five to one hundred middle schoolers. The last year has shown me that it takes fortitude and resourcefulness to meet the needs of even a large portion of that number of students. Perfection is unattainable and unrealistic, but students, parents, administration, and teammates depend on my continual pursuit to improvement.      Understanding how thinking and learning occur within the brain as well as the differences in ways individuals process information, move items to long term memory, and resist interference are vitally important to choices in metacognition explicitly taught within th...
Read more

Week Four

    One of my favorite activities with Pre-k students was our apple week. We sorted apples, tasted apples, diagrammed apple parts, read apple books, graphed favorite apples, and cooked with apples. The experience immersed all the students' senses and built an excitement that I am sure many of them feel each time they smell homemade applesauce. For me, the smell of apples and cinnamon take me back to one brave little boy who was likely to have a spectrum disorder. He told me all week that he did not like apples and that, on Friday, he would not try the applesauce. I told him that was fine but always encouraged him to take part in anything he would willingly do. Friday came, and he came over when I was handing out applesauce cups. I asked if he had decided to try it. He said yes but that he wanted me to give him a bite. I got a spoon of applesauce and held it for him to move his mouth to. To both my and his surprise, he actually put the whole bite in his mouth and tried to ...
Read more