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6. Allow students significantly more self- and group-led teaching; especially with the rise in video lectures (a la Khan Academy, etc). 7. Have bright student
by eof 15y ago
6. Allow students significantly more self- and group-led teaching; especially with the rise in video lectures (a la Khan Academy, etc).
7. Have bright students from higher grades teach bright students from lower grades.
8. Embrace, rather than try to diminish, the natural bell curve of student performance and abilities--let students fall behind, and teach them the most critical skills before everything else. Who cares if you can recite the Gettysburg Address if you can't do basic reading an arithmetic. Let students get ahead; and don't burden them with arbitrary amounts of homework simply because they can do it faster; shove hard-to-learn things down their eager minds.
- sukuriant 15y ago7. Or not-so-bright students from lower grades. Heck, all students from lower grades.
- count 15y agoRegarding #7: Why? I would have absolutely hated that in school. How does having a kid who's good at Algebra teaching a younger kid who's not so good at Algebra help the kid who's good at all? If he's already good at it, teaching it shouldn't help him that much, and now he's wasted time he could be using to learn more things himself (see your own #6).
- gfodor 15y agoThe best way to be sure you understand something is to teach it.
- Anechoic 15y ago> I would have absolutely hated that in school. Agreed. I was the smart kid on the high school football team, so I was tasked by the coach to tutor some of my lesser-performing teammates and it was an absolutely miserable experience.
- eof 15y agoRight; but what if you were tasked with spending time with 'the smart kid' from 3 years below you? That is an entirely different experience. I would not want smart kids wasting their time with dull kids; but smart older kids imparting their wisdom on smart younger kids (where it won't be wasted)
- zinkem 15y agoBecause learning to communicate the thing is just as important as learning the thing itself.
- eof 15y agoFirst of all, its bright students teaching other bright students--if that wasn't clear. Second, you are only looking at half the equation. That 7th grader spending time with a smart 6th grader is also spending time with a smart 8th grader. The benefit comes from the (fact? hypothesis?) that bright children within a couple of years from each other will get a hell of a lot more bang for their buck than the time they spend with their (statistically) relatively average teachers that have lost touch with that part of their development cycle.