All Hands on Deck!!!
Now that we are settled into the 21st century, researchers have begun to investigate what they believe contribute to creating a successful learning environment. Monitoring class size has always been a major concern, yet budget cuts, along with the downsizing of the teaching profession, are causing class sizes to rise at an alarming rate. Many states are dedicating tremendous time and effort to fixing this problem, even though research supporting the reduction of class size is hard to find. Tennessee’s Project STAR is viewed as one of the most credible studies done to date due to its large scale: (11,600 kindergartners, 1,300 teachers, 76 schools and 42 school districts.) After a four-year study, they concluded that smaller class sizes at the primary level almost always outperformed the students in larger classes. The same students were examined ten years later in the Lasting Benefits Study and they found that those students in smaller classes had assumed a greater initiative for learning and were extending more effort in the classroom. As interesting as this data is, these studies, like most similar to them, did not send shockwaves through the educational community. While class size seems to be the trendy topic of discussion, engaging students is the real problem at hand. Reducing class size is just one way of increasing the direct instruction and interaction that occurs between the teacher and each individual student, but it cannot be the only method. Creative methods such as co-teaching and increasing the active role of student leaders in the classroom are two ways to tackle this problem.
The increase in individual attention that students receive is the biggest benefit of reducing class size. In smaller classroom settings, teachers have a better opportunity to get to know each student’s strengths and weaknesses in more detail, allowing teachers to differentiate instruction more effectively. Personal connections are also a result of these smaller classrooms and play a large role in determining academic success. Studies performed in the inner cities, such as the SAGE study, have shown tremendous amounts of evidence to support that smaller class sizes are particularly beneficial to students who come from low socioeconomic backgrounds. If engaging students is the overall goal, then every teacher’s first responsibility is to make sure they are “reaching” as many students as possible, no matter how many students are in his/her class.
If money were no object, simply hiring new teachers and building new schools would go a long way towards reducing our class sizes. In the past decade, California has attempted to decrease its class sizes by hiring new teachers. Along with the extremely high cost, California also ran into a problem with the quality of teachers that were being hired. Almost twenty percent of their new hires had emergency credentials, which brought much scrutiny to their plan. Some states have tried adding teacher assistants to the classroom, but they have yet to garner any positive results. Research is still being conducted, but after noticing that in 2008 nineteen states relaxed their laws on limiting class sizes, it is time to start investigating some other options.
Breaking down individual classes into manageable groups often requires too much effort to be done by one teacher alone. Having two highly qualified teachers in one classroom may still be somewhat of a financial burden, but the size of these classes could be larger to help make up for the difference. Studies show that students who struggle the most with schoolwork tend to gain the most benefit from working in smaller group settings. In a classroom with two teachers, one of the teachers could work with these struggling students in small learning communities while the other teacher moves on with the rest of the class. Keeping all of the students in the same room would make it easy for students to float back and forth between the two groups and for each teacher to be able to interact with every student.
Another way of dividing up an individual classroom is to start including our higher-level learners in the teaching process. It’s no secret that the best learning takes place when explaining something to someone else, but implementing that process into the classroom is easier said than done. Classes can be split into teams with the student leaders serving as “teachers” for each group. Each student on the team would be held responsible for making sure every team member was successful in class. Although peer pressure is usually looked upon as a bad thing, not wanting to let down your fellow classmates can serve as a huge motivation factor. Having the students being accountable for each other goes beyond the school’s walls and will hopefully stretch out into the community.
America’s class sizes don’t look to be getting smaller any time soon, so teachers must take it upon themselves to break up their own classes into smaller learning communities. Whether teachers are relying on another highly qualified teacher or student leaders in their own classroom, they need to realize that they don’t have to fight this battle alone. By embracing larger classes by placing two teachers in a classroom, student interaction will be forced to increase and the classroom itself will begin to become more dynamic as time goes on. Since funding will always be a major obstacle, the incorporation of student leaders into the teaching process may make the most sense. The lessons these leaders learn by internalizing the material and teaching it to others will prove valuable as they move to the next level. Researchers can crunch statistics until they are blue in the face trying to find the perfect class size, but they’re not sure if that number even exists. It’s time they start realizing that it’s not the number of desks that are filled in each classroom that counts, but the person who is standing in front of those desks that ultimately matters the most.
Now that we are settled into the 21st century, researchers have begun to investigate what they believe contribute to creating a successful learning environment. Monitoring class size has always been a major concern, yet budget cuts, along with the downsizing of the teaching profession, are causing class sizes to rise at an alarming rate. Many states are dedicating tremendous time and effort to fixing this problem, even though research supporting the reduction of class size is hard to find. Tennessee’s Project STAR is viewed as one of the most credible studies done to date due to its large scale: (11,600 kindergartners, 1,300 teachers, 76 schools and 42 school districts.) After a four-year study, they concluded that smaller class sizes at the primary level almost always outperformed the students in larger classes. The same students were examined ten years later in the Lasting Benefits Study and they found that those students in smaller classes had assumed a greater initiative for learning and were extending more effort in the classroom. As interesting as this data is, these studies, like most similar to them, did not send shockwaves through the educational community. While class size seems to be the trendy topic of discussion, engaging students is the real problem at hand. Reducing class size is just one way of increasing the direct instruction and interaction that occurs between the teacher and each individual student, but it cannot be the only method. Creative methods such as co-teaching and increasing the active role of student leaders in the classroom are two ways to tackle this problem.
The increase in individual attention that students receive is the biggest benefit of reducing class size. In smaller classroom settings, teachers have a better opportunity to get to know each student’s strengths and weaknesses in more detail, allowing teachers to differentiate instruction more effectively. Personal connections are also a result of these smaller classrooms and play a large role in determining academic success. Studies performed in the inner cities, such as the SAGE study, have shown tremendous amounts of evidence to support that smaller class sizes are particularly beneficial to students who come from low socioeconomic backgrounds. If engaging students is the overall goal, then every teacher’s first responsibility is to make sure they are “reaching” as many students as possible, no matter how many students are in his/her class.
If money were no object, simply hiring new teachers and building new schools would go a long way towards reducing our class sizes. In the past decade, California has attempted to decrease its class sizes by hiring new teachers. Along with the extremely high cost, California also ran into a problem with the quality of teachers that were being hired. Almost twenty percent of their new hires had emergency credentials, which brought much scrutiny to their plan. Some states have tried adding teacher assistants to the classroom, but they have yet to garner any positive results. Research is still being conducted, but after noticing that in 2008 nineteen states relaxed their laws on limiting class sizes, it is time to start investigating some other options.
Breaking down individual classes into manageable groups often requires too much effort to be done by one teacher alone. Having two highly qualified teachers in one classroom may still be somewhat of a financial burden, but the size of these classes could be larger to help make up for the difference. Studies show that students who struggle the most with schoolwork tend to gain the most benefit from working in smaller group settings. In a classroom with two teachers, one of the teachers could work with these struggling students in small learning communities while the other teacher moves on with the rest of the class. Keeping all of the students in the same room would make it easy for students to float back and forth between the two groups and for each teacher to be able to interact with every student.
Another way of dividing up an individual classroom is to start including our higher-level learners in the teaching process. It’s no secret that the best learning takes place when explaining something to someone else, but implementing that process into the classroom is easier said than done. Classes can be split into teams with the student leaders serving as “teachers” for each group. Each student on the team would be held responsible for making sure every team member was successful in class. Although peer pressure is usually looked upon as a bad thing, not wanting to let down your fellow classmates can serve as a huge motivation factor. Having the students being accountable for each other goes beyond the school’s walls and will hopefully stretch out into the community.
America’s class sizes don’t look to be getting smaller any time soon, so teachers must take it upon themselves to break up their own classes into smaller learning communities. Whether teachers are relying on another highly qualified teacher or student leaders in their own classroom, they need to realize that they don’t have to fight this battle alone. By embracing larger classes by placing two teachers in a classroom, student interaction will be forced to increase and the classroom itself will begin to become more dynamic as time goes on. Since funding will always be a major obstacle, the incorporation of student leaders into the teaching process may make the most sense. The lessons these leaders learn by internalizing the material and teaching it to others will prove valuable as they move to the next level. Researchers can crunch statistics until they are blue in the face trying to find the perfect class size, but they’re not sure if that number even exists. It’s time they start realizing that it’s not the number of desks that are filled in each classroom that counts, but the person who is standing in front of those desks that ultimately matters the most.
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