Christopher Bauer’s Weblog

Greetings,

As I was reading the Brophy selection for this week, I was struck by the quotation at the beginning.  Overall I agree with every aspect of the quote, but I wonder about what exactly it implies for the future.

Initially, the quote divides the students into two groups, tortoises and hares, and states that it would be unfair and unwise to force them to compete against each other.  Although I would argue that there are three groups (upper, middle, and lower), I would still agree that it would be unwise to force them to compete against each other.  The quote ends with the goal of education is to get students to perform at maximum.  I would also agree with this part of the statement.  But the main question is how this can be done.

I would concur that a single teacher could create a classroom that would be able to accommodate the needs of the tortoise as well as challenge the hare, but I would also believe that it would be easier, and more efficient, to put the hares together and challenge them, and then group the tortoises together and challenge them.

If this is truly the most efficient way of educating students, how can we separate the tortoises from the hares?  Even though I am not an expert, or even well trained, in this subject matter, I can still attempt to reason out how to do this.  The first step is to announce the separation of the three groups, and to educate the students on the differences in each, and what kind of future each track (because this is really what we are talking about) will hold for them.  The second step would be to have the student indicate which track they would want to be in, and have teachers and parents concur with the decision.  The third would to have the separate the groups and begin educating them.  Since transfers from a lower to a higher track may be difficult to arrange due to the difference in material covered, more, sub tracks would have to be implemented.  I would also argue that transfers from higher to lower tracks would be made difficult to arrange, so that students cannot decide that the high track is too much work and therefore they want to be in the low track.  I would think that it should be by the recommendation of several teachers.

To me, this does not seem to be an unreasonable way to approach tracking.

Readings:

Brophy, J. (2004). Rebuilding discouraged students’ confidence and willingness to learn. In Motivating students to learn (2nd ed., pp. 119-150). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 8th, 2006 at 1:12 am and is filed under Class Readings and You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.