more able child paired with less able

[hibbledobble]

I know this is something that happens frequently at school, and has done for a long time. How do people feel about it?

I don't know if it's fair to put children in a quasi - teaching role, rather than having them focus on their own learning. Otoh I know that teachers are stretched.

A child who is gifted benefits more from an effective intervention than from setting

How gifted? 1 in 10? 1 in 100? 1 in 1000? 1 in 10,000?

I agree that the 1 in 10,000 child would not have benefited at all from setting within their own year group - and that an effective intervention was access to the Sixth form Maths lessons followed by a university Maths tutor. However, I don't think that is what is normally meant by 'intervention'....

My ds was sent to yr2 for maths in reception, again in yr2 to yr4. (Yr1 teacher was maths specialist so she didn't send him up, but did worst job of differentiation.)
Didn't work so well. Timetabling was an issue, but also even 2 years ahead was still not enough to challenge him. He still found work too easy.
All died out after introduction of mastery, without any alternatives.

At first, I thought mastery might be a solution. But teachers seems think bigger number = extension.
I just want to shout in their face, just give him something from nrich or something!

The problem with the old G&T label was that schools had to identify the most able pupils in each class which is utter nonsense as we all know. So when I talk about gifted I mean those exceptional individuals who would stand out in any setting.

There are intestine points about research in the area, however I do feel that the implications of this need to be individualised. If research shows that most children do best taught within their year group, that doesn't mean it is the case for all children.

Personally I found setting at school to be extremely beneficial, and found mixed ability classes to be very frustrating. Perhaps mixed ability class teaching can work well in certain circumstances, but there are many hurdles to overcome.

In Dd's school there is a very wide range ofabilities, as well as children from very difficult backgrounds with challenging behaviour. I understand this must be difficult for the teacher, who I do believe is good.

Interestingly, I was told prior to the year starting that children would be put into sets for certain areas of teaching, but this never happened, and instead there are mixed ability groups. I don't feel that this works for dd, as she is complaining of being bored and the work being very easy. Looking at the level of work that she is doing at school compared to home I agree with her.

I'm not sure how to best manage this. I am offering her 'extension ' work at home at her request, but the result of this is also her becoming further ahead of her peers, and becoming increasingly bored at school.

Do some extensions like these and not works further ahead, if she gets bored at school? Luckly, my ds works ahead of school at home but never complains boredom. He seems to have learned how to entertain himself some how.

nrich.maths.org/primary-upper

wild.maths.org/

My children were regularly paired with less able children through secondary school and didn't suffer any restrictions on their attainment as a result. In fact, it enhanced their performance and skills in all sorts of ways including academic.

I may have the wrong idea, but so much of school work is pretty easy for lots of students, especially in early years - as so much of the skills needed are speed (speed and accuracy of writing, speed of calculation etc.) which is got from quite repetitive drilling, not from learning what are to me quite easy techniques.

DD could answer all of the KS1 SAT paper in reception, her handwriting would've been slow, her spelling erratic, her arithmetic slow. Yet you could easily say she could do it - she wan't actually ready to do the KS1 SAT. Maths for example, she's just too slow, sure she could answer the multiplication question in Matilda in reception when we read it, but it probably took her 5 minutes.

As for extension work at home - or indeed school - for me would ideally be things wholly outside the curriculum, I'd rather DD was taught to juggle than some year 4 maths or something. I just don't get why the extension work should be on the curriculum such that you'd get further ahead, there's so much other stuff to learn, don't waste the time on something that will be covered in school.

I do partially agree with sir, but not totally. It's only natural that child may find truly interesting to explore something they love.
Child who is a good writer wants to write. Good reader wants to read.
Good mathematician wants to do maths, I think. It's not always the parents that is a driving force to go further.

sirfred we are already offering a lot in terms of extracurricular activities (5 different ones each week!), I don't think that should be expense of curricular related extension though.

irvine Thank you, I will look at that.

irvine that is spot on. Dd wants to extra maths, reading, writing etc at home because she finds it easy and enjoyable. I would find it very mean to deprive her of that.

irvineoneohone There's loads of maths not on the primary curriculum though, or only slightly touching it, and the way of expanding it is the why? questions in the mastery stuff you referenced in the other thread. Rather than teaching more stuff that you'll learn in school later.

Extra reading and writing don't make sense to me - they're open ended activities - and feed off each other, you simply do as much as your interest and access entails. Maths you can argue is less open-ended (in that there are just right/wrong answers rather than the aesthetic concerns of written work) but if you're interested in doing the sort of workbook puzzles for fun - then that's fine, but it doesn't take you further in the curriculum, just more skilled at doing it, but not particularly getting you further forward. (More skilled is not a bad thing of course)

Extension work is different, it's not just doing more of the same, it's new stuff.

The big question is what are teachers/parents seeking to achieve by accelerating a child's learning? When one considers the outcomes for the 1 in 10,000 or the bright kids that were accelerated at school, it can be quite sobering.

I think that learning shouldn't be focused on being the brightest but rather about the pursuit of understanding and discovering.

Er, this would explain why my dc told me they thought their classmate is annoying, classmate keeping on questioning she/he on work and following them around.

I'm guessing this is why. Not happy

Sounds unlikely to be honest.

sir, I am not teaching him anything. I can't. He was able to read without any attempts from me to teach him. He learnt to write(handwriting) using workbooks, but demanded me to erase everything so he can practice again and again. these happened when he was 2/3.
He learns himself using online sites/you tube. In yr1, he was obsessed with indices. I didn't even had a clue how they worked.
He loves watching science crash course video, I haven't got a clue what they are talking about.
Now he is doing more of MFL and piano than maths. But still do maths.
How can I regulate what he learns at home? It's all his choice. I did question and stopped him learning trig in yr2 when he needed it for programming, but that was only thing I intervened so far.

irvineoneohone You can't regulate certainly (although other people certainly think regulating screen time is useful, not that I'd agree with them) but simply by suggesting more alternatives that might interest them - as you have done - the science videos, the languages, the piano. Few kids would be so single minded as to be only interested in maths, and if they were, then it might be worth more active intervention trying to get them to apply that to other areas.

It was really written in the context of extension work, workbooks, pushing able kids on etc. Rather than in genuine own interest - workbooks aren't pushing a kid on though, workbooks don't teach on, they're just repetitive puzzles. Nothing wrong with puzzles, but personally I'd've thought there could be found more interesting puzzles to do.

misstic what are these outcomes? I was accelerated at school and don't seem to have suffered too badly from it either intellectually or emotionally.

sirfredfred totally agree about the learning to juggle, and we've tried this at various points in time with school, but they're just not set up to do this (and we used to take DD out for another activity but then the rules changed and this became a problem).

mrz what are you quoting from there? I actually don't disagree at all. It's perfectly true that attainment overall can be greater on average, but that the most able children can be disadvantaged at the same time.

The problem is that the 'appropriate interventions' are expensive in time and effort; in a big class with limited resources, they don't happen often enough, and can't.

I wouldn't actually argue for setting. I'd argue for 'gifted clustering' where you try and get a small group of gifted children in one place so that only one set of interventions needs to be developed and the resources are available. Best of both worlds: other children aren't disadvantaged, gifted children get taught at the level they need (this is one of the approaches used in the US)

The Education Endowment Foundation

mrz you are doing some fairly selective quoting there. That report on setting says quite clearly:

"Overall, setting or streaming appears to benefit higher attaining pupils and be detrimental to the learning of mid-range and lower attaining learners. On average, it does not appear to be an effective strategy for raising the attainment of disadvantaged pupils, who are more likely to be assigned to lower groups. "

"studies show that higher attaining learners make between 1 and 2 additional months' progress when set or streamed compared to when taught in mixed ability groups. "

Yes, it is detrimental to lower ability children, but like I said, then we need to be honest about this. What this is not saying anywhere is that setting holds back higher ability children.

I'm not quoting from a report

Chop, education can be seen as an end in itself or a stepping stone to achieve other broader goals. Bring the brightest or most educated does not, by itself, lead to success no matter what you may conceive it to be.

The study looks at the effects of setting on attainment and came to the conclusion that mixed-ability grouping was preferable due to its impact on the tail of underachievement and its social and equitable benefits.
It also concludes that there is no support for the view that lower key stage 2 children learn more effectively in sets for maths at any attainment level: “The expectation of greater gain by schools choosing to set by ability was not supported by the figures; in fact the results supported a tentative conclusion by the author that children of all levels of attainment do better when taught in mixed-ability groups.”
It reports that pupils in mixed-ability classes showed an average gain in test scores of up to seven per cent over those taught in set classes, and suggests that “policies of setting were adopted primarily to make the teachers’ tasks more manageable

We could argue back and forth for a long time, because we can both back up our arguments with different studies. And in the end because both things can be true at the same time. But I don't think that this is true of the very highest ability children.

There's no way to separate outcomes due to setting from other influences. I suspect those other factors play a significant part in success or failure.