My deaf education professor is very excited about grouping students by their topical knowledge. In order to do this, you would need to really know your students well. You would need to ask them questions at the beginning of a unit to establish what kind of notions they already held about the topic that you are teaching. Then you could group students into three groups, the group that knows very little about a particular topic, the group that has a decent amount of knowledge, and the group that knows a lot about the topic. As a teacher you would teach the same topics to all three groups, but each group would learn about the topic in a little bit more depth.
This would also mean that when you were testing the students, each group would be expected to know a different amount about the topic. You can't expect the lower group to know as much by the end of your unit as the highest achieving group, so there would need to be different levels of assessment involved.
There are a few things that I really like about this approach. First of all, it allows teachers to meet all students where they are at. Second, the students will move from group to group based on their topical knowledge. Therefore students will not always stay in the lower achieving group or the highest achieving group all the time. Instead they will bounce around from group to group and learn to work with many different children in your class.
However, there are also a few things that make me hesitant about this approach. It sounds terrific in theory, but I don't know if it would be easy to implement this all the time in the classroom. It would be very time consuming to come up with three different versions of the same lesson for each lesson that you teach. Also, this type of teaching relies heavily on teamwork, and if I was teaching a class of students who didn't work very well together, this approach could be very challenging. Overall though, I do think that the benefits to this type of teaching outweigh the negatives. Therefore, I would definitely utilize this method some, if not most of the time in my own future classroom.
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This is an interesting approach to teaching/learning. It would involve more preparation when it came to assessments, but would challenge higher achieving students (in that subject) while offering support to those who need it.
ReplyDeleteI really like this idea. And I as well think it might be a more time consuming thing to prepare for, but if you are willing to have your students do the best that might be what it takes.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your input! I think that it is important do do whatever it takes to make our students successful. Sometimes that means putting in more time and effort as a teacher, but I think that it is worth it in the long run, especially when you get to see those students who are struggling succeed!
ReplyDeleteI do like this approach for the fact that the students are not always divided into low/high groups. The kids in these kind of groups are usually grouped there for the entire year. It doesn't matter if they are really knowledgable about a particular topic. I like that in this approach the students move around for each individual topic. They are not just "stuck" in the low or high groups.
ReplyDeleteThat one of the biggest positives of this approach. Students will move around from group to group, and I think that's important because no matter how discretely you do it, all the students know whose in what's perceived as the "dumb" group, and the smart group.
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