Wednesday was a Day of Meetings for me, starting at 8am, which means I didn't have time to type up a bunch of blog posts and schedule them as usual. Having just clawed my way out of Meetingville, though, let me take a few minutes to throw up another Academia post, before the topic gets too stale.
Steinn has been thinking about the differences between the European and US educational systems (first post, second post), and he brought up an idea that I hadn't encountered before: "Looping". The idea, as described by Steinn::
When I were a lad, in elementary school you had teacher - call it a "homeroom teacher" if you like, and that teacher stayed with you for several grades, before rotating back down to pick up a new class. Further, you generally stayed with "your class" between grades, with little re-mixing of students.
This had several effects: the good thing is that the general syllabus was quite coherent, not repetitive except to reinforce previous learning, since it was dominated by the same teacher from year-to-year. It also fostered a strong class identity - I felt part of my class, not just part of my school, and classes developed quite distinct identities. I guesstimate that we had 85-90% retention of students within the class from year-to-year.
I hadn't heard of that before, but it's an interesting idea. I can immediately see both pros and cons, and the basic arguments for and against the idea are presented in Steinn's comments. It occurs to me, though, that you could possibly argue that some of the educational beenfits of small colleges are, in fact, related to this phenomenon.
Take my department, for example: We require all majors to take at least ten courses in the major in order to graduate (plus a handful of courses in math and other sciences). We also have ten full-time teaching faculty. This means that, while it is mathematically possible for a student to go through four years of a physics major without repeating any instructors, it's very common to have the same student two or three times in the course of their career (upper-level courses are not distributed evenly among the faculty).
That means that a given faculty member really gets to know at least some of the students very well, and know their strengths and weaknesses. As a faculty member, this means that it's possible to tailor the presentation of the material in an upper-level class to better suit the abilities and preferences of the students in that class. On the student side, they have some idea what to expect in classes later in their career, and don't have to battle with both new material and new approaches to the presentation of that material.
It also means that we end up having a really tight-knit department. In the "exit interviews" that we do with students, they universally praised the sense of community within the department, and two of our recent graduates sent us very nice notes praising the almost family-like atmosphere.
My experiences as an undergraduate at a small college were pretty similar. The level of bonding may not have been quite as high, but the basic idea was the same: I got to know a couple of professors very well, and it made the major much more comfortable for me.
So, I can definitely see the advantages of the "looping" idea. Of course, I can also see the disadvantages-- I took multiple classes from three different faculty members, and two of them were very good. The third, on the other hand... Had the balance been the other way around, the idea of "looping" might not be as attractive.
Returning to pre-college education, though, I wonder if this isn't an idea that sort of breaks down in the middle period of a student's education. At the college level, students are largely "tracked" into majors, and it's reasonable for the same person to teach them mulitple different subjects. At the elementary level, the things they need to learn are basic enough that they don't require a great deal of subject-specific expertise.
At the high school level, though, things start to get in-depth enough that it's a little difficult to imagine making a looped system work. The thought of needing to be able to teach biology one year, chemsitry the next, and physics the year after that is a little daunting. I could probably do it-- the level isn't all that high-- but I think I'd burn out on that pretty quickly.
Any readers with experience of this sort of system? Anybody with really strong opinions they'd like to share?
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In high school the same person teaches you biology in the 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th grade, another person teaches physics in the 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th grade, etc... Thus everyone is within their area of expertise throughout, i.e., nobody is asking a person with an MS or PhD in physics to teach chemistry.
My older son just started kindergarten and it took a few weeks for him to get comfortable with school. I can imagine this would help shy kids adjust to the new teacher and new class more quickly in subsequent years. This would complement an idea I had recently, which is to band together students of similar abilities, so the bright kids wouldn't get bored, and the kids who needed more repetition would get it.
On the other hand you would miss out on the different perspectives/abilities of different teachers. Also, it would stink if you got a bad teacher or one who was not suited to your style of learning.
In my high school, everyone had to take "freshman science", which was one trimester each of Physics, Biology, and Earth Science. Each trimester was taught by a different teacher whom you would see again when you took the year-long course. (Earth Science was taught by the Chemistry teacher for some reason.)
It seemed to work well in that teachers didn't stray too far from their core areas, but students were still familiar with the teacher from previous experience.
Coturnix, it's been a while since I was in high school, but at my rural New York school there was one year each of Earth Science (9th grade), Biology (10th), Chemistry (11th) and Physics (12th grade), and that was for the college-bound students. I believe the non-college track students just got Earth Science and Biology.
One disadvantage with looping is if one is stuck with a teacher that everybody hates with a vengeance from the very start.
My department was small (~10 professors) and students had several of them twice but I didn't feel like we, the students, were a cohesive group until our last year when we'd had several classes with field trips. The trips provided bonding experiences. As a graduate student, I felt we were a little more bonded.I'm not a "joiner" so my impressions are probably very different from someone who is more outgoing.
My little sister looped kindergarten and 1st grade. She and my parents loved it. There are a lot of advantages at that age to looping. But she also lucked out and got a teacher she liked.
Yup, the difference between Europe and USA - each of the sciences is taught for several consecutive years, not just one year each.
In junior high, we had a "class" called "homeroom" that met for maybe 15 or 20 minutes each day, and you kept the same homeroom teacher clear through junior high. It was mostly a place for official paperwork and/or announcements.
Apparently everyone had a homeroom teacher in high school, but you only saw him/her once or twice a semester. There were no regular meetings.
And I agree about the small college feel. I was at a large college, but with a small department, so that by the end I knew most of the professors. Sadly, the small size also made it impossible to avoid one professor who was particularly bad at teaching. Nice guy, meant well, but completely inept as an instructor.
I'm an 8th grade teacher and I know of some schools that loop the early years. K-2 or 3 and then start over. It's the same issues as you brought up. If the teacher and class are compatible, it's wonderful. If not, it's a whole lot of pain.
My son did looping in first and second grade, and loved it also. There is a flip side to the issue of if the teacher is bad, you're stuck, and that is if the teacher is good, then there are groups of kids every other year that _don't_ get that teacher, or at least don't have a shot.
I have never posted to a blog before. However we are having a discussion on this very topic at the middle school where I teach. We currently loop, but as we move to a new building we are wondering if we will keep it.
I actually experienced something like this for two years at the end of the 1970s. Whether it was by accident or by design, I don't know, but when I was in the fifth and sixth grade at a "gifted/talented" center-based program in Northern Virginia, I was placed in a combined fourth/fifth-grade class that became a combined fifth/sixth-grade class the next year, with the same teacher and most of the same students. We had maybe half of our class time in that classroom, mostly English- and arts-related stuff.
Though it was just for two years, there was, I think, a powerful sense of group identification that came out of it, though there were also intra-group frictions that didn't get reset at the end of the year.