Looping

Today I met the teacher that I will be student teaching with. She's amazing. I also learned about looping - the process they use where students stay with the same set  of teachers for two years (middle school). I had a nice conversation with her about the different things that are going on, and I must say I'm pretty excited. This does coincide with my last set of questions for my survey: I asked if they could team teach or teach one subject, would they consider keeping the same students for 2-3 years at a time. Imagine my surprise when I found out that is happening in a middle school right where I live. One of the advantages that my co-op teacher gave me was the ability to know your students. Things are really hard that first year getting to know your students. Personally, I think that it is hard because you spend a whole year getting to know students and learning their quirks and mannerisms, figuring out where they are education-wise, and then you hand them to somebody else. She also mentioned that it helps to know where your kids are at in the beginning of the year.
When I asked if you team-taught or only taught one subject would you consider keeping students over 2-3 years, 67% of my participants said yes, while 33% said no.


Reasons for looping:

• Relationships are the key to success; the better relationship you have with your students the better you can educate them.
• To teach a child you must first know and understand that child.
• Greater continuity of subject matter from year to year.
• Being able to see the tracking data on it would be interesting.
• Knowing what your students know or don't know will help make the following year even more successful.
• Third through sixth grade to help them prepare for middle school would be good.
• Growing together; knowing their strengths and weaknesses and trying different approaches to enhance their learning would be beneficial. We could learn as much from them as they learn from us.
• It would help the students feel comfortable knowing they would see the same teacher in the fall.

Reasons against looping:

• If you have a difficult group, you will be stuck with them for a few years.
• Students benefit from being placed in a new classroom each year, making new friends, learning from different teachers, learning to treat all people with respect, and adapting to change.
• Students will benefit more with a variety of teacher flexibility.
• "Students and teachers need to expand their horizons. The beauty of having a new class of students each year is that good teachers challenge themselves as they find other teaching strategies. Students who are with the same teacher get 'mentally' tracked into performing according to one personality."

What I found interesting about this part of the survey is the types of responses that were against looping. Most people who didn't agree with it gave some form of this reason: students will be expected to work with many different kinds of people after they finish school. When I think about this response, I think about the many classes I've had with the same students each semester. I know most of the people in my program, if not by name, then by face. We are expected to work together in groups, and many of us tend to stick to the same group of students because we are comfortable and we know what level of work to expect from our group members. More importantly, you learn really quickly in college which professors are great and which ones are not so great. We tend to stick with the ones we know and like, and avoid those we dread. The difference is, we have tutors available to us to help with the things we don't understand, which makes those dreaded professors not so scary.

In contradiction to the last response, I think that having the same teacher for a couple years can help students to learn healthy study habits. An ideal situation would be to have students keep a portfolio with the different tips and skills they've learned that help them learn better. This folder would follow them through their education, keeping themselves and their teachers aware of what their strengths and weaknesses are, how other teachers have helped them, and what they do to get around obstacles. 

I think a lot of those responses didn't take into account that this would be something to do if you taught single subjects or team-taught with another teacher (splitting the subjects into 2 per teacher or so).