Comment by cutemonster
Comment by cutemonster 2 days ago
That's a good point.
Maybe you can have all quiet and focused students together in the same classroom?
They might be reading different books, different speed, and have different questions to the teachers. But when they focus and don't interrupt each other, that can be fine?
Noisy students who sabotage for everyone shouldn't be there though.
Grouping students on some combination of learning speed and ability to focus / not disturbing the others. Rather than only learning speed. Might depend on the size of the school (how many students)
For what it's worth, that's how the Montessori school I went to worked. I have my critiques of the full Montessori approach (too long for a comment), but the thing that always made sense was mixed age and mixed speed classrooms.
The main ideas that I think should be adopted are:
1. A "lesson" doesn't need to take 45 minutes. Often, the next thing a kid will learn isn't some huge jump. It's applying what they already know to an expanded problem.
2. Some kids just don't need as much time with a concept. As long as you're consistently evaluating understanding, it doesn't really matter if everyone gets the same amount of teacher interaction.
3. Grade level should not be a speed limit; it also shouldn't be a minimum speed (at least as currently defined). I don't think it's necesarily a problem for a student to be doing "grade 5" math and "grade 2" reading as a 3rd grader. Growth isn't linear; having a multi-year view of what constitutes "on track" can allow students to stay with their peers while also learning at an appropriate pace for their skill level.
Some of this won't be feasible to implement at the public school level. I'm a realist in the sense that student to teacher ratios limit what's possible. But I think when every education solution has the same "everyone in a class goes the same speed" constraint, you end up with the same sets of problems.