I have been talking to metro Atlanta teens at every opportunity and hearing the same reports about their high schools. Classes are crowded. Teachers can’t teach because of unruly students.
For their part, teachers tell me that administrators are pushing them to teach to higher standards and assign more meaningful and complex work, including more writing in every class. They are supposed to go deep, despite classes that are larger than last year in many metro schools as a result of budget cuts, which will likely continue.
My older son had 22 to 23 kids in most of his high school classes five years ago. His 14-year-old siblings have an additional 10 students in most classes. One metro teen told me this weekend that he had 35 students in his math class, five of whom had no desks for the first weeks of school.
Another said, “If the teacher would stop focusing on the kids who were being disruptive and give us our work, high school would be so much better.”
Here is how one teacher roughly broke down his 33-student class for me: “Sixteen kids on target, seven behind but attentive, five well ahead of their peers. And five who don’t try at all and don’t care at all.”
Those last five students demand 25 percent of his time.
And they need that time, the teacher says. He’s not giving up on them, but his efforts on their behalf steal time away from other kids, including the top students.
The problem, says Gerald Eads, an assistant education professor at Georgia Gwinnett College, is that schools are still relying on a factory model in which kids are shoved through an assembly line and judged by the same — typically low — standard.
“The five kids who didn’t want to be there should be somewhere else, as perhaps should be the five stars, as well as the seven who are trying hard but may not have the capacity of some of the others. Because we’re punishing all of them far more by forcing a teacher to try to do best for all of them,” he said.
We keep hearing about innovations in online learning. Why can’t high schools pull out the five kids who are well ahead and some of those who are on target and let them progress on their own track?
Why don’t we embrace the Oxford University tutorial model, where bright students read and research on their own and then meet with their teachers one-on-one or in small groups for an intense session where they must defend, analyze and critique?
The flipped classroom model — where students watch teacher-created videos online at home and come to class for discussion, hands-on activities, debate and problem-solving — may be a solution to crowded classes and time lost to disruptive students. Give kids who want to learn the option to do so in productive settings, and free up teachers to bring up the students who are behind or at risk for dropping out.
A highly touted model of a flipped classroom approach is the highly successful Khan Academy, in which children learn math through online tutorials. More common in college, flipped classrooms are spreading to high schools on the power of anecdotal evidence rather than hard research. But results from schools using flipped models, including a Michigan school that flipped all its classes three years ago, are encouraging.
Teachers tell me they could better deal with problem students if they had fewer kids in their classes.
Some parents offer reassurances that AP classes will offer relief from the large “general population” classes. But rather than an escape hatch for a few students, why don’t we create more options for all kids?
Why can’t we think creatively and solve this?
