I found this article a while back and meant to comment on it: “Grades soar after school floods classes with 17 teachers - one for every two pupils.”
A leading secondary school has improved the grades and behaviour of its students after flooding classrooms with 17 teachers at a time.
Culverhay Boys’ School, which has 375 pupils aged between 11 and 18, trialled the experimental scheme which saw 16 trainee teachers assist in subjects including science, music, PE, maths and English.
The group came into the Bath school once a week to teach classes of between 22 and 26 boys.
Culverhay Boys’ School is among the top 10 per cent of UK secondary schools according to last year’s results.
The experimental project is the brainchild of John Lee, a Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) course leader at Bath Spa University. He said that the saturation teaching scheme was beneficial to both the children taking part and the trainee teachers instructing them.
I find two things annoying about how the issue is framed.
One, the article (and perhaps John Lee himself) never considers whether more plentiful adult attention might be worth making the regular diet of children in classrooms. It remains an issue of how to use teacher trainees rather than how to use teachers. So all the results it touts are momentary and necessarily localized to only a few places that any system’s finite number of teachers-in-training could visit. There is a naive emphasis on how amazing the results were when they were actually quite predictable, which leaves the question hanging in the air of how long the results will last when it’s back to just one adult—back to normal.
Two, if you were going to use this sort of special event approach and not connect it to anything more systemic or enduring, why not go to a school that really needs the help? Why choose to go to a school that ranks in the top 10 percent in test scores and that only has 375 pupils and class sizes that are at the national average? If you’re going to use these limited resources to make a momentary difference for kids while training your teachers, why not go to a large school with large classes that’s getting below-average test scores? Weird.
