Very good question.
Load for teaching M levels of kids is considerably higher than teaching 1 level kids. Here, M > 1.
If the materials are independent, a teacher needs M time of effort, in terms either preparation time or book reading or reference checking or teaching time management, etc.
To model this mathematically, we can have a class of N students and they are separated into M groups. In a math class of L minutes, a teacher must break L minutes into at least M pieces in order to address the need of his/her students. Is it easy? I have to say, oh my god.
In fact, it is not at all straightforward to allocate class hours for teaching even for a small number of groups. Please let me elaborate. Let me assume L = 50, M = 3, and N = 20.
Case 1:
If the number of kids in the 3 groups are roughly equal, a teacher can roughly divide 50 minutes equally.
Case 2:
If group 1 and group 2 have 5 students each, the group 3 has 10 students, how to manage 50 minutes?
Case 3:
Let group 1 and group 2 have 5 students each, the group 3 has 10 students. Moreover, group 1 is "ahead" students, group 3 is "behind" students, how to manage 50 minutes? The materials are of different complexity.
Case 4:
Let group 1 and group 2 have 5 students each, the group 3 has 10 students. Moreover, group 1 is "ahead" students, group 2 is "behind" students, how to manage 50 minutes? The materials are of different complexity.
Finally, I have to say that it is addressed in Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations" that "Division of labour has caused a greater increase in production than any other factor". It seems to me that Curriculum 2.0 is trying to do the opposite.
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
This is saying allowing kids to go to "ahead" or "behind" grade classes will not increase the work load of teachers and other resources if load/resource depends on number of students.
Does the load/resource depend on just the number of kids or does it also depend heavily on the number of different types of lesson plans they need to do? I.e. if a class has 5 different groups of children with roughly similar levels of understanding of the material wouldn't the teacher have to come up with 5 different sets of lesson plans to successfully challenge these different groups?