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Old 10-12-2016, 07:48 PM
 
Location: Sun City West, Arizona
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Originally Posted by LLN View Post
Maybe it depends on the grade level.

That dog dont hunt in the 8th grade. Just not cool.
I spent 31 years teaching/administering middle school (which included 8th grade), and I don't agree.
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Old 10-12-2016, 08:36 PM
 
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My experience was with a very small class in the early grades. I started with around 12 kids who were just like Vinnie Barbarino. There was no one there for them to model. Some of them were repeating the grade. All of these kids came from challenging backgrounds. They had no incentive to learn, no interest. They were developmentally very immature. During the year, I got several average students because the "average" classes were full. So I got the spillover of about an additional 5 kids. When we had a class discussion, the new kids would answer appropriately, giving models for the more limited students. The limited students would start to piggyback on the new kids' answers. The modeling came so much better from other kids their own age, than me, the teacher. The new kids were able to model reading fluency. They also learned appropriate social skills from these kids, which they did not have because of their challenging backgrounds. As the class started to gel, they were finally quiet enough to listen to a story because now it was making sense to them and they learned t "how" to enjoy a story. The new kids could draw in an age appropriate manner. The other kids would draw a few lines and say "finished." They started to copy the new kids and began to add details to their people, grass, a blue sky, the stuff that most kids would draw at that age.

I get what someone was saying about how some bad apples can spoil it for the high achieving kids. I get that. I am a parent of a very high achieving child and I would not have wanted that in my child's class to have children so disruptive that it slowed down the progress of the class. But I also understand what it is like at the other end of the spectrum. Scaffolding and modeling is teaching 101. Children need to see the next bend around the corner, the next level because little kids cannot think abstractly enough to comprehend what the next level is like. I learned a lot as a teacher from that class and that experience.
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Old 10-16-2016, 02:51 PM
 
Location: Whoville....
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Quote:
Originally Posted by North Beach Person View Post
What you're describing is called tracking and has fallen out of favor over the last couple or three decades.

Arguably, tracking groups of students with others having similar ability or achievement levels resulted in better outcomes.

What happened when tracks disappeared and you had only three, Honors, SPED and everybody else, the everybody else classes were all over the map in ability levels.

I had classes (high school) where the reading levels ranged from 2nd grade to above grade level, a spread of up to 10 years. Trying to find a happy medium where the low kids wouldn't be totally lost and the more on schedule kids wouldn't be bored out of their minds was.......challenging.

One of the reasons tracking fell out of favor was because some school systems had a tendency to place certain ethnic groups or kids from particular areas in the lower tracks automatically.

There was also the push for equity, which in education means mixing all ability levels together, in my opinion, has harmed some kids and set many others up for failure. Kids know when they can't keep up.

I just gave a chemistry test. The class average was 72 in my lowest class and 87 in my best class. I so want to just run with that class. But there are 4 kids in there who simply would not be able to keep up. It's the higher class simply because it's top loaded. (Just the way our schedules work out because of how band and AP classes that drain other hours of the top are scheduled). Even though the average of all four of my chemistry classes is well over 80% I'm still being hammered over that 72% in that one class. I couldn't be the class. It MUST be the TEACHER.


In my school our upper kids are inadvertently tracked in the sense that they attend classes that are top loaded with their peers because most of them are in classes like band and taking the same AP classes the same years. Unfortunately, I can't do anything with that other than allow deeper side discussions because there's always a hand full of kids who simply could not keep up with them if I raised the bar.
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Old 12-22-2016, 11:05 AM
 
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Only those who can reason and honour the left hemisphere of the brain,the masculine yang aspect of knowledge can succeed or prosper in school anyone who is creative,wise,poetic,or anything else is left by the wayside it's very sad.
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Old 12-22-2016, 11:13 AM
 
Location: NE Mississippi
25,438 posts, read 17,134,480 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Katiethegreat View Post
Only those who can reason and honour the left hemisphere of the brain,the masculine yang aspect of knowledge can succeed or prosper in school anyone who is creative,wise,poetic,or anything else is left by the wayside it's very sad.
I think the title of the thread, "Segregating students by academic ability", is a little sad. All schools can do is segregate by performance, which is a different idea altogether. Segregating by performance can do significant harm to some students. Some will not recover.
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Old 12-24-2016, 11:37 AM
 
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Listener2307 View Post
I think the title of the thread, "Segregating students by academic ability", is a little sad. All schools can do is segregate by performance, which is a different idea altogether. Segregating by performance can do significant harm to some students. Some will not recover.
Please elaborate?

The word "segregate" has negative connotations and shouldn't really be used in discussions like these.
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Old 12-24-2016, 01:13 PM
 
11,412 posts, read 7,769,043 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Listener2307 View Post
I think the title of the thread, "Segregating students by academic ability", is a little sad. All schools can do is segregate by performance, which is a different idea altogether. Segregating by performance can do significant harm to some students. Some will not recover.
I disagree. Not segregating students by performance does more harm than good. The bottom quintile doesn't get the additional support they need and the upper quintile is left bored and turned off by school. How does teaching only to the middle serve all students?
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Old 12-24-2016, 01:19 PM
 
Location: On the Chesapeake
45,116 posts, read 60,226,663 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by UNC4Me View Post
I disagree. Not segregating students by performance does more harm than good. The bottom quintile doesn't get the additional support they need and the upper quintile is left bored and turned off by school. How does teaching only to the middle serve all students?
And it's teaching to the middle. Almost all the effort is aimed at that bottom quintile, the rest are more or less on their own.
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Old 12-24-2016, 04:15 PM
 
11,412 posts, read 7,769,043 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by North Beach Person View Post
And it's teaching to the middle. Almost all the effort is aimed at that bottom quintile, the rest are more or less on their own.
Sad, but mostly true. I don't know why tracking (aka segregating by performance) has such a bad rap. IMO, we should be focused on serving each child in the most efficacious way. If that means classes that move slower for some and faster for others then so be it. If the end result is a better education for each child, I'd call it a win.
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Old 12-24-2016, 07:45 PM
 
3,281 posts, read 6,262,549 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by UNC4Me View Post
Sad, but mostly true. I don't know why tracking (aka segregating by performance) has such a bad rap. IMO, we should be focused on serving each child in the most efficacious way. If that means classes that move slower for some and faster for others then so be it. If the end result is a better education for each child, I'd call it a win.
Because there were some practices associated with tracking that, in the past, were admittedly completely unfair to those locked into the lower tracks. So the pendulum swung far in the other direction and there was a push for inclusive classrooms, bolstered by research that infamously said that high achievers performed "no worse" in these settings than in homogeneous settings. Inclusion is not a terrible idea on its face, particularly with some courses in some grade levels, but as an across-the-board policy it's completely unfair to high achievers.

The district in which I work has accelerated courses starting in 6th grade for math and language arts, but I'm worried that at some point those will be eliminated in favor of a program that purports to be able to effectively serve a wide range of student ability levels all in the same classroom.
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