Students will progress from one level to the next when they achieve proficiency — not when they get a year older — in a Colorado school district called Adams 50. From the Denver Post:
Students will be tested this spring to determine their proficiency in reading, writing and math, and will be grouped next year with peers who are learning at the same level.
Students may move to the next level at any time, not just the end of the year or the end of a semester.
Several schools are piloting the idea. Kim Carver, a first-grade math teacher, says the new approach is working.
Six-year-old Dominic Herrera showed (a capacity matrix) on the subject of counting pennies. On the chart were four categories: “I need help,” “I think I can,” “I know I can” and, finally, “I can teach it.”
Dominic had reached the “I know I can” level and was onto the next category, telling time in five-minute intervals. He was at the “I think I can” level.
“It’s neat that they have ownership, and they know what proficiency means,” Carver said. “It’s not arbitrary anymore.”
Eventually, the district plans to use 10 levels for students from kindergarten through high school.
The plan requires specific learning goals and close tracking of students’ progress, which I suspect will be very helpful. But kids who progress slowly will need something extra, such as mandatory summer school, to complete school by 18 or 19.
Grade levels are a subtle form of child abuse, writes Paul B on Kitchen Table Math.
Imagine if someone made you wear the wrong size underwear every day for 13 years; not very comfortable and not likely to turn you into a clothes horse.
Grouping students by standards mastery is working in Chugach, Alaska, he adds.
I didn’t propose that students return to a work of literature multiple times, emphasizing a different skill each time. That may have been Tracy’s idea, but I don’t want to misrepresent her.
I said that “a teacher can convey in various ways that the poem does not end with the class reading of it.” A teacher can help students see that there’s more to a poem, story, or play than may appear at first reading. And yes, memorization is very important.
My main point was that literature cannot be reduced to skills, though skills come into play. There is good reason for whole-class instruction and discussion: that is how one hears the work and start to consider it at different levels.
From kindergarten on, I was an advanced reader for my age. As far as skills go, I could have learned on my own, with teacher conferences, some good books, and not much else. But I have not forgotten how my teachers and professors read literature aloud, and how they helped us see meanings and levels we hadn’t seen before (sometimes just through their manner of reading). I don’t know what my life would have been like without that.
Lightly Seasoned: I’m glad to see you are still arguing that less is more.
Can you please let me know where I was arguing that less is more?
I did say that there was a fundamental tradeoff in English literature, and in history, between depth and breadth, and I didn’t know what position on that trade-off was right, and I didn’t even know what units you could use to work out what the right position was.
And, yes, I do passionately believe that theme is important; this is how literature engages us in the contemplation of the human condition across time and place.
I find more sources for contemplating the human condition across time and place than just in the theme of the novel. My attention gets caught as much by the little bits, eg Elinor Dashwood, when her mother is wondering how she would spend a hypothetical large fortune, jokes that her mother just needs to start on her renovation plans for the house and the problem will take care of yourself. Home renovation is not the theme of Sense and Sensibility, but the joke rings true today. Plus of course, professional critics often find multiple themes to a piece of work, indeed that’s a measure of a great piece of work, that it will bear multiple readings. While I am on the Jane Austen line, her novels can be read as comic romances, as explorations of the moral choice of spouse, as proto-feminist works, and in the case of Emma, as a mystery novel. Just because someone missed the theme doesn’t mean they missed every theme.
And of course, if you study a novel in class, the teacher can just tell the class “the theme” if the class doesn’t have the historical knowledge to reconstruct the allusions. Just as in history class, the teacher can tell the class about the Treaty of Versailles before getting down to the history of WWII. It’s not necessary to learn literature starting with the Greek myths and legends and Biblical stories, and history starting with the bones of Lucy, which I think makes it different to mathematics where arithmetic appears fundamental.
Diana: I didn’t propose that students return to a work of literature multiple times, emphasizing a different skill each time. That may have been Tracy’s idea, but I don’t want to misrepresent her.
Sorry, it was me misunderstanding what you were talking about. When you talked about knowing that there was more to a poem, story or play than may appear at the first reading, I translated that in my head to the various different ways I can look at a poem, story, or play. My apologies for misinterpreting you. What do you mean when you talk about different levels?
Tracy,
One of my poetry professors had an inimitable way of teaching poetry. He would seize upon certain lines or phrases and then tell long stories about them and what they could mean. Somehow, no matter how far he went off, he would find his way back to the poem in question. I would leave class with little memory of what he said. But I would see the poem in a profoundly different way, and parts of his lecture would come back over time.
Once we were reading the villanelle “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop. I remember that he suggested that the villanelle form itself might (traditionally and inherently) have to do with loss. Bishop, being aware of this, was not only writing about loss but responding to others’ treatment of loss through the villanelle. Thus she was responding to Dylan Thomas, Edwin Arlington Robinson, and others, breaking the rules of the form slightly to show something about it.
But that was only part of what came through in that class. I remember how he read the last stanza, pronouncing “Write it!” with a kind of ferocity. He pointed to her restraint and the heartbreak that comes through it. But more than anything, he read it in a memorable way.
—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
I have come back to that poem many, many times. I wish that I could remember everything that my professor said about it. But I am sure that it is in part thanks to him that I have returned to it; whatever I learned or didn’t learn from that class, I knew there would be more to find when I returned.
Now, are these “levels” or “angles”? That’s another question. I would say a “level” includes a previous understanding and more. An “angle” could bring out an aspect of a work without necessarily touching upon other “angles.” Thanks for asking the question, Tracy; I like to define my terms, but sometimes I forget to do so!
Thanks Diana for explaining.