Reply to Maryland could axe advanced math classes in elementary school

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It’s more than just the pre k to 2nd bit.

“ In third to fifth grades, schools would only be permitted to regroup students for math class on a periodic basis. These children should “never be permanently grouped by ability,””

This sounds like you could not have a class that does more advanced math in 3rd - 5th either. All you could do was groupings “periodically”. That is going to be massively frustrating to the math kids bored out of their minds at the slow pace of normal instruction for 6 years. [/quote]

My old district did this. They pretested kids before every unit and split them into groups based on the results. Some kids wee always in the top group, but some kids were better at certain topics and floated into the top group for those. And some topics were new to a grade and there was no top group.

The top group got enrichment rather than acceleration.  They went deeper, not faster. It might have been harder to manage logistically, but it made more sense pedagogically. [/quote]

This is a good way to do things. Lots of kids are not uniformly advanced, or have highs and lows over time, so on ramps are good. Also, socially, it normalizes growth (you can improve / it's nbd to miss the mark one time) instead of having to permanently maintain on track. My kid is in advanced classes and talks about the worry of bring demoted to the regular track even though we try to put zero pressure at home. [/quote]

No, it’s a terrible way to do things. math is quantifiable by definition. kids are not this fragile. They can understand that their math class has a syllabus of topics to cover that they need to pass in order to advance. Putting them into a million different small groups just exacerbates the problem and distracts from instruction. [/quote]

That's dumb. Small groups let the more advanced kids learn new material instead of material they already know. [/quote]
In theory, yes.  In practice, small groups let the teachers give extensive tutoring to the struggling kids while ignoring the top groups.  [/quote]

PP whose district did the flexible groupings.

This could be the case if they made smaller groups within the class, but that’s not how they did it. All the 3rd grade classes had math at the same time, so if Ms A was your normal teacher and Ms B was teaching the advanced math group for this topic, you just went to Ms B’s room for math and Ms B taught a full classroom of advanced math. The math specialist also went to each grade for their math block, which stopped any one group from getting too big.

They pretested at the beginning of each unit anyway, so there weren’t extra tests.

And because the top group went deeper, not faster, it was really easy to specify what content went to each grade level.  The advanced kids did things like projects and AoPS-style challenge problems on the topic, rather than moving onto new/different topics.

I thought it was weird at the time, but after moving here and having a kid bored in compact math, it was clear that it worked really well. [/quote]

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