On 01/02/14 20:14, Faye Coker wrote:
On Sat, 1 Feb 2014 07:39:50 PM Michael Scott wrote:
The difference between a class size of 20 and 40 probably depends on the ability of the teacher to maintain discipline in a class, until it comes to one on one tutoring. That will depend on the students...not on the class size.
My friends that teach in schools (public and private) all agree that roughly 90% of their time is spent on setting up activities, classroom management, getting students to line up, shuttling between rooms, conflict resolution. The remaining 10% they refer to as "the amount of time we actually get to teach". One of these teacher friends told me there was a study published showing that teachers spend about 90% of the day on the above areas, ie classroom management etc. I'm hoping to get a copy of this study. I don't think class size made much of a difference. The teachers do not get the chance to work with each child individually, before the bell rings and they have to move on, so learning opportunities are wasted.
There is another way to deal with the student-teacher ratio and classroom management issues and get more opportunity to work individually with kids to some extent at the same time. That is something I have personal experience of (btw: I have worked as a secondary School teacher for a few years about 10 yrs ago). The school (State) I worked at was trialling team teaching: ie 2 classes combined with the 2 teachers in the classroom at the same time. It did require specially setup rooms capable of holding 2 classes. What it meant was that 1 teacher could focus on delivering the curriculum material to the class as a whole, while the other would focus on the classroom management stuff and also could provide 1-1 interaction to some extent. It meant that the curriculum delivery was less interrupted by other classroom activities, And the teachers would swap over the roles. I think you could probably increase the student-teacher ratio at the same time. 2 teachers in the same room with twice the number of students are more effective that 2 teachers in 2 separate classrooms with 1/2 the number of students each! It does require that teachers are actually willing to do that. In my particular case I was very keen to do that. But the teacher I was paired with was not so keen. Some teachers for what ever reason do not like it. I don't know what happened to the trial as I left the school (and teaching all together). My guess is that given the issue of teachers' willingness to participate and the room size issue, I doubt that any further progress was made. Cheers Daniel.
Many children need one-on-one teaching to accommodate different learning needs and a lot of it. The kids with learning disabilities or the bright kids are the ones who often miss out.
faye
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