Reply to Good News for Stuart Hobson !!!

Forum Index » DC Public and Public Charter Schools

Reply to "Good News for Stuart Hobson !!!"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Differentiation is just good, sound teaching in order to reach all students and learning styles in the same classroom   IB MYP encourages that in its teacher training which is great.  But if the teachers aren't good at it, it won't happen.

[b]It is not a part of International Baccalaureate to require honors classes or divide students by ability levels. [/b]

[/quote]

But it doesn't preclude it. Deal is IB and tracks. I'm PP who lumped SEM and IB together to claim that they foster differentiation. The reason I did is that both have a student-centered and project/theme/case-based take on learning. That model naturally offers better opportunities to challenge classrooms characterized by different ability levels and "different smarts". And because classrooms and school-wide projects are set up to work in teams a lot of the time, there are opportunities to let advanced students move on to higher challenges. If you know what to look and ask for, notwithstanding the currently still too often struggling student body, there is a lot of that going on at Eliot-Hine, in fact more than I saw on my visit to Deal.
I find it encouraging to see Stuart-Hobson take on the challenge of catering to different ability levels and different "smarts", which - I understand - SEM solves in a somewhat different way, namely by offering multiple tiers of advanced student-centered learning opportunities, lower tiers catering to all (hence the ire expressed by another PP) and upper tiers catering to as few as 10%. Tracking is a somewhat more explicit part of SEM I think. IB is stronger at differentiation by inherent design, or so my understanding.

Both of these models are quite different from a more lecture-based teaching format, which places a stronger emphasis on cramming and root-memorization (classrooms set up with chairs/tables all facing the front, where presumably the teacher stands most of the time, are but one indicator). The schools I went to operated mostly like that but I retained so much more from the few classes in which the teachers deviated from this model. That said, I think it's largely a matter of fit. I have two kids who are very different, one for whom exploration is a natural first step to learning, the other who'd much rather listen to a lecture first and then go do it.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics