Let’s hear it for Jody Childers, Kathleen Taylor, Sue Perino,
Vince Oberst, and Barbara Siep, the Glen View third-grade teachers
who have achieved amazing results this year.
Let’s hear it for Jody Childers, Kathleen Taylor, Sue Perino, Vince Oberst, and Barbara Siep, the Glen View third-grade teachers who have achieved amazing results this year.
Last year, 8 percent of Glen View third graders scored proficient or advanced in English. This year, 27 percent did.
Last year, 6 percent of Glen View third graders scored proficient or advanced in math. This year, 66 percent did.
This year, 57 percent of the students moved up one or more proficiency levels in English, and 88 percent did so in math. (Proficiency levels are identified as far below grade level, below grade level, approaching grade level, and grade level.)
This is wonderful news, and the next questions, naturally, are: How are the teachers accomplishing this near-miracle? Can other teachers replicate their results?
Theories abound. I agree with some of them, as when Superintendent Edwin Diaz credits a “relentless focus on improvement'” and Principal Marilyn Ayala says, “They are always looking to improve. They are never satisfied.”
Other theories are less enchanting to me: collaboration, for example. To be sure, discussing work with one’s co-workers and working together as a team to get a job done can be highly efficacious. (Homeschoolers call the discussing “Park Day'” and the working together a “co-op.”) If educators want to call discussing and working together “collaboration'” I guess that is okay.
But collaboration is the latest fad in education, and I am wary of fads. It would be awfully easy to put the collaboration cart in front of the education horse, as in the imaginary case where a teacher leaves his students in the charge of an aide so he can go collaborate. It could happen, if collaboration is viewed as the magic ingredient.
Other ingredients mentioned in the Jan. 19 Dispatch story include constant communication, consistency, tweaking, tailoring, attention to data, and trust.
The article also described but did not name another technique, one which I believe may well be the magic ingredient. This technique has a name, but it fell out of favor during the laid-back, self-esteem ’60s. It is the technique that dare not speak its name. Instead, we tiptoe around its truncated form, and pretend not to notice the elephant in the living room. It, like many of the techniques named in the article, begins with a T. What is it?
Give up?
Tracking.
The tracking technique was developed during the first half of the last century, when schools became large enough to have multiple classes at each grade level, and when immigration to this country was at its peak. Rather than teaching children who were reading fluently in the same classes as those who were working on their A, B, C’s, the schools separated them into different classrooms based on their skills.
The positive side to tracking was that the more advanced students could continue to learn at their own level, instead of being bored. And the less advanced students could receive instruction at their level, acquiring the basic skills necessary to learning, instead of floundering and failing for their entire school careers.
The negative side was that the tracks tended to become semi-permanent: a sentence of doom rather than an educational technique. The more advanced students became conceited; the less advanced students were ashamed.
The Glen View third graders are benefiting from the positive effects of tracking by being shuffled into proficiency groups for 90 minutes a day. They are avoiding the negative social aspects by spending only a fraction of the day in them, and by being allowed to move up when they are ready to tackle the next harder level.
In conclusion, when we examine our islands of excellence in GUSD, let us be very candid about what works. Tweaking and tailoring certainly deserve consideration. Trust between teachers is a necessity if students are to be shuffled from room to room.
And if we do not want to call it tracking, fine; let us call it partial day proficiency-level grouping: flex groups for short. But acknowledge its existence. It may be the magic ingredient.
