Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Class sizes--elementary school

Our elementary school has about 20-22 students per class with a teacher and a teacher aide (not certified). If a certain grade has more students then they will split the students out into an additional class, so some years we may have 2 classes of 20-22 1st graders and the next year we may have 3 classes of 18-20 1st graders. The only issue this might cause is the extra teacher will move up with the students as they go to the next grades, so some students may have that same teacher several different years. This could be a good thing or it could be a bad thing depending on how each student meshes with that teacher.

Class sizes in WA are high. There was about 25 kids in my DDs K class and 29 kids in 1st grade class. In public gifted program which starts at 2nd grade, class size is around 20.

I feel K and 1st grade class sizes are the most critical ones due to kid's young ages and requiring much more attention. I volunteered in DD's class once a week when she was in K and 1st grade. The class was a chaos and no way an ideal learning environment. Especially wide range of skills was a big problem - kids who doesn't know ABC and kids reading chapter books in the same K class doesn't mix well.

Yes, and when the teachers do attempt to pull small groups to differentiate the rest of the class just wanders around or acts up in this age group. It's a lot of wasted time with lots of kids doing nothing.

I would love to see some actual decent research on what works and doesn't work in education. It shouldn't be that hard to at least take a look at the more successful countries and compare what they are doing to the U.S.

Have read "The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way" by Amanda Ripley a few weeks ago and it was very interesting to see different school systems from Finland, South Korea etc. It was especially concerning for me to read that math teachers in US doesn't need to take many math classes to be able to be a math teacher.

It's a content for another thread maybe, but class sizes probably is not the only thing that needs to be fixed here in school system.

There was a 2002 book "The Academic Achievement Challenge: What Really Works in the Classroom?" by Jeanne S. Chall. It only looks at education in the U.S. I think. The U.S. is a big, diverse country. Some countries participating in international comparisons such as TIMSS are the size of U.S. states. I don't think one should expect that average results of the U.S. to be the best or the worst in international comparisons, and they are not.

Apologies if this news article or the study it's based on have already been discussed here, but this is interesting in that context, though based on Pisa not TIMSS:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-27442541

I'm afraid that even intra-country, never mind inter-country, comparisons are extremely difficult to get solid conclusions from. There are always many more factors that vary than the educational one you want to study, so such comparisons are always subject to different interpretations.

Speaking as an elementary teacher...

When you have classes this large, with students at various levels, something has to give. It's not unusual to have students' ability levels span 3 or 4 years. I might have a 1st grade class with some students on a K reading level, and others on a 3rd grade reading level. The math levels don't seem to have a range quite as large, but again a 3 year span would not be at all unusual. Now let's make it more challenging - throw in some kids with LDs and a gifted kid or two. It gets really difficult to plan engaging lessons to meet the academic needs of all these kids. I mean sure, I can run off some different worksheets, but I'm talking about planning deep lessons that have excitement and challenge for each kid.

But this is only looking at the academic aspect. What about the social-emotional needs of 30 students? I've got students who are painfully introverted, students who are ridicuously outgoing, students who are being bullied, students who are bullying, students who are shuffled between various homes due to divorce, probably at least one student who is neglected or abused, and likely a student or two coming to terms with an LD diagnosis. This is the stuff that keeps you up at night. How can I help Sarah make friends? How can I convince Jack that he really is smart? How can I get Henry's divorced parents to stop fighting and get him an evaluation for dyslexia? Should I call DHS for Sally?

There's no teacher that can do it all for this many kids. At least not in the average American classroom. Maybe if you could hand-pick the kids so there are no outliers... but outliers by what measure? Academic? Social? Emotional? Family situations? It's impossible. And frankly, I wouldn't want to teach in a school like that. It would be terribly boring if all kids were round pegs.

If you've made it this far, please forgive my disjointed rantings!

Kathryn, the parents of polyhedra everywhere applaud you.

2 threads on this article.
http://giftedissues.davidsongifted....eaching_to_the_choir_but.html#Post192082
http://giftedissues.davidsongifted....sting_article_about_US_m.html#Post192480

I don't know what studies might support this, but I'd bet that if you had 240 students in a grade, then it would be more effective to make 6 classes of 40 grouped by ability, and teach each class to its level, than it would be to have 12 randomly selected classes of 20, and try to cater to different ability levels with in-class differentiation.