Great article, thanks for sharing. I'm glad the blog author is discontinuing those practices, and appreciate that she shared the reasoning and sources which had informed her view. Hopefully more classrooms may be made free of these and other ineffective and counterproductive practices.
Adding a link to the thread
Introduction from Arizona, in which a 6th grade teacher seeks resources and planning.
Regarding peer tutoring... In the current educational climate in US public schools, both school ratings/rankings and teacher evaluation/compensation are increasingly based on achieving
equal outcomes for all. Therefore US public schools may be less concerned with helping gifted pupils achieve their potential and more concerned with closing achievement gaps and excellence gaps. Unfortunately, sometimes this is accomplished by capping the growth of the students at the top. Other threads discuss
buzzwords for educational experiences and
different grading strategies which may be utilized to accomplish this.
Some may state that gifted kids benefit from a requirement that they use their school day tutoring other students rather than learning new material, concepts, and ideas themselves. However many parents of gifted children believe that children who may have already mastered the grade-level standards in a given subject ought to spend their school day learning something new and challenging, rather than being required to tutor others (effectively being treated as free labor, or slaves, doing the work which teachers are paid to do).
