Nice to see you tracing into your Stanford, and Math Ed, roots. As a high school student, my school was one of the ‘experimental’ trial schools for the SMSG curriculum. Oh, you should have seen (maybe you have) the mimeographed materials we worked from.

My personal example is a discussion technique called Accountable Talk, which I’ve been trying to learn to do for years. I’m not sure it’ll ever work for me. That said, each of these techniques can be mastered, and when they are, you usually get great results. (This is a falsifiable statement, in the sense that recognized experts in these techniques can reliably identify others teachers who are using them faithfully, and those other teachers’ students will generally be found to learn quite well).

Begle lost me at the end of paragraph two.

Also: if established players can’t do it (old processes) and insurgents can’t do it (no political capital) — who can do it?

Chris W:

Let’s use progress monitoring to make sound decisions about what our students know and what they need more time to learn.

It’s interesting to note that this isn’t a new idea, and it’s a tried idea, and it’s been found wanting in the era of the SMSG. (Read Begle on IPI in the linked speech.) Before I can get excited about another adaptive learning proposal, I’d want to understand how it differs from every other similar proposal that’s been tried.

Scott Hill:

Practice is good, exploration has its place and rarely (if ever) does any student truly benefit, at least in math from being socially promoted. Getting acceptance of these ideas is hard enough (on par with me getting 100% compliance from my students on their homework at least)

Confusingly, neither do students benefit from grade retention. #begles2ndlaw

Howard Phillips:

Can you get a better scan?

Short of driving to (I believe) UT Austin and tracking down the original microfiche, nope.

Practice is good, exploration has its place and rarely (if ever) does any student truly benefit, at least in math from being socially promoted. Getting acceptance of these ideas is hard enough (on par with me getting 100% compliance from my students on their homework at least)

First, we make a broad and, in my opinion, inaccurate assumption that all children are capable of learning a defined set of information solely because of their age. Many children never gain a mastery of skills before they are introduced to a new set of skills. In all likelihood, the new skills require a mastery of the previous set of skills.

It is no wonder that the above described situation leads to two things; students who don’t feel confident in math and students who don’t like math. The first feeds into the second.

We are stuck in a system that was developed at the dawn of the industrial revolution and we treat our students as though they are part of an assembly line.

We need to think creatively about how we group children for success starting at an early age. This idea conjures up that I advocate “leveling”. This term developed its negative reputation as a result of how ineffectively it was used in classes prior to the heterogeneous classroom grouping. Children were leveled based on very little data. The delivery of math education that I envision is far more complex.

What is vastly different now is that we have solid tools understand the needs of each learner. Let’s use progress monitoring to make sound decisions about what our students know and what they need more time to learn.

My prediction is that if we created a system based on this approach, it would be extremely cost effective. A regular teacher could effectively meet the needs of his/her students. There would far less demand for special education thus saving districts money.