Yeah, it’s amazing how often the articles I see about schools which have super-tiny classes, fully-personalized attention… are about schools which are also fully private, do not have any scholarship kids or anybody with physical or medical problems, if they do have any kids with learning disabilities there’s no mention of them in the article, and the tuition costs more than those of private universities. Hey, if you give me a ton of sugar I can make you sweets too, no problem!
A major difference is class size, regardless of the teaching methods used. If you really wanted to judge the effectiveness of Mortessori methods, you’d have to compare them to schools with similar class sizes (plus account for income levels et cetera). I’ve seen sources that claim that the optimal class size is 6-10 and once you get above 12 it doesn’t make much difference between 20 or 30, but there’s a huge difference between 20 and 12.
Our school would be much easier to work in if we didn’t keep kids with serious behavioral issues. We’re a lottery school, so we never know when we’ll get a kid who got kicked out of another school and/or has no Motessori background.
I heard positive feedbacks about Montessori school
Egad, another clincher!
I would have believed them if they had only written “believe me”.
Personally, from my own experience, I’d say that optimal class size is probably around 12. Too much less than that, and you don’t have enough viewpoints to get good discussion going, and not enough opportunity for the students to work with each other. Smaller might be easier on the teacher, but what’s best for the teacher isn’t always best for the students.
As a librarian I find any scheduled group under 20 easy. If it’s kids coming to the the library because they need to research or read we can pack the place.
See, that’s funny, because what I always feel is missing from these “class size” discussions is the perspective of the teacher. From a practical point of view, I like classes 16-24, but I don’t feel like my effectiveness declines until about 30, even 32, in terms of classroom instruction/interaction. However, if I have 6 sections of 30 kids, my teaching–which encompasses not just classroom instruction, but giving feedback, having conferences, following up with students who are under-performing, parent contacts, tracking data–all that will completely crater. Give me a single class of 16 and a single class of 30 and nothing else to do all day, and I suspect you’d see no difference in student outcomes. Give me six sections of each–96 vs 180 total student load–and the difference would be night and day.
My Montessori class size was still a good 20+ kids. We just had more than one teacher in a room–a main teacher and an assistant that could also teach the lessons. You’d have three in preschool, to have one always free to monitor the kids.
Still, lessons were taught one-on-one. The teacher sits down with you and demonstrates the lesson, which is usually about 5 minutes long, then you’re left to work on it for a while, while the teacher moves on to another student. The student doesn’t get to finish until they get everything 100% right. They take it to be graded by the teacher, who then circles the answers that are wrong and hands them back to the student, who must then figure out what they did wrong. If they can’t figure it out, then the teacher will eventually go back and teach the lesson again.
That’s the part that I suspect has value. No one gets left behind not knowing how to do the work.
Just curious, what age/level do you teach?
High school English, so not super applicable, but the discussion had wandered quite a bit.