Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Reciprocal Learning

Obviously reprocal learning can happen successfully. Any process involving reflection and progressive re-evaluation has long term learning benefits - a similar process is supposed to happen when preparing a presentation or an essay, right? Having to externalize a thought/concept causes one to tease/comb out the mental tangles, right? Deeper processing helps better encoding into long term memory and connections to other concepts are forged.

I was once (decades ago now) quite into Lev Vygotsky and I am convinced of the existence of the ZPD. Within this zone, learning is optimal but it does require some degree of grouping by ability (ZPD bands, if you will) even in a heterogenous classroom. This after all is why Math club competitions are so effective, i would think - which validates recprocal learning when applied correctly.

Not to 'dis' other perfectly wonderful kids in our SD I have yet to meet any with the same ballpark of interest, let alone ability in Maths as my DD. This is a function of living in a small rural district more than a boast about my DD's LOG btw, which I fully realise is dwarfed by many kids represented by their proxies on this board.

My main fear is that putting her alone into a classroom of kids 2-3 years older will be socially isolating anyway - both within her grade 'peer group and the other class. Additionally, another class designed for an NT audience i(no tracking here) is just not going to progress and her speed to concept acquisition.

madeinuk, you have made a valid point about the relative merits of peer-tutoring.

While there is good and bad in everything, if peer-tutoring was found to be such a strong classroom strategy for reinforcing learning, possibly the teachers would have the lower performing students engage in teaching each other, while the students who've demonstrated readiness/ability to move on to other material, do so. This approach may more closely mirror the "aha!" moment described upthread when a person struggling with a concept talked it through (to Dude) and in doing so, came to a fresh realization and solved their own problem.

That said, acceleration, including single subject acceleration, even into a mixed-abilities (heterogeneous) classroom, can be quite effective both academically/intellectually and socially, expanding the child's circle of friends. There are many threads on the forum about acceleration (single subject acceleration, whole grade acceleration, multiple grade (radical) acceleration). The Iowa Acceleration Scale ( IAS ) is a tool often used to document and weigh pros and cons of acceleration for a particular child and learning environment at a given point in time.

A sensible concern. I had the same one about isolation from the regular class when my DD's school proposed the GT pull-outs, and they assured me that all their kids are going to a variety of pull-outs all day, so it wouldn't make her look unusual.

As far as age, that wasn't something we worried about, because DD always seeks out and befriends the oldest kids in any mixed-age activities (drama, gymnastics). How does yours get along with older ones?