It’s a favourite myth of the fashionably minded that you can teach children of different ability levels all at once. This is based on the idea that you can set them different work, and help them individually or in groups. Unfortunately setting work is not teaching, and talking to small groups is not teaching a class. The one thing you cannot do with a mixed ability class is teach it. Teaching involves telling the class what they do not know. This is not possible with a class where some students already know what you want to tell them, and some of them know so little that they won’t understand it if you do tell them.
This is, of course, why the movement for mixed ability classes is indistinguishable from the movement against teaching. The mixed ability class teacher is not a teacher at all. They are, often quite explicitly, a facilitator. They are a person who designs educational activities for children but doesn’t actually tell them what they need to know. They are a friend to the child, but not an expert on an academic subject.
Of course even setting work and leaving the kids to it can be fairly impractical to arrange, and in my experience, here’s how teachers cope with mixed ability classes:
- Colouring in and drawing. The most able can design a poster illustrating the topic in question. The least able can draw a car or write the name of the topic in bubble writing. Where mixed ability classes are most common (e.g. humanities subjects at Key Stage 3, PSHE lessons, etc) students can be forgiven for thinking that the entire subject revolves around colouring in and the drawing of posters.
- Group work. This is actually misnamed as it is highly impractical for an entire group to do the work. A better name for it would be “Sarah, the bright girl and her friend Lucy’s work”. However as long as Kevin, who sat at the same table picking his nose, is allowed to write his name on the back of the piece of work then the teacher can claim that Kevin has also worked in the lesson.
- Copying down. As long as you have a lot of writing in the textbook, and you have at least some actual questions for the fastest writers to do when they’ve copied the whole of pages 57-63 then an entire class can be kept busy copying down the same piece of work. Admittedly, Sarah and Lucy will have copied an entire text book by the end of the year and Kevin will never get beyond copying the first paragraph, but it keeps them all busy.
- Ignore a large chunk of the class. Let’s face it Kevin probably wouldn’t learn anything even if he could understand what was going on. Sarah and Lucy will be fine in exams, and life regardless of whether they learn anything today. The lesson is pitched at the child who is about two thirds of the way through the ability range. Sarah and Lucy can spend any spare time they have after finishing their work decorating it with ornate borders. If you deliberately forget to tell Kevin he should be getting on with his work, he may never notice he can’t actually do it.
- Project work. This is where you give students a variety of exercises to do, but they can be done in any lesson, in any order and they all have to go in a folder. If they finish too soon they can decorate the folder for a lesson or two.
The worst thing is that despite the fact that these are obvious scams to get round the problems of teaching an unteachable class, there are now advocates of group work and project work who believe that all lessons should be conducted in this fashion. It just goes to show the lengths teachers will go to convince themselves they are doing a worthwhile job, even when students are learning less than they would if they were sent home with a book to read.
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April 15th, 2007 at 5:12 pm
It is more important to be able to show on paper that the class has moved from point A to point B as indicated in your minutely detailed planning, based on someone else’s currently trendy idea of what should be happening in a classroom, than it is for them to actually learn anything.
April 15th, 2007 at 6:30 pm
Sorry, but that’s just so depressing
How do you all stick at the job? I couldn’t, on those kinds of terms.
April 15th, 2007 at 7:22 pm
Gotta agree with you here. I teach IT and am regularly faced with a 4 tier class:
Tier 1: Love Computers have tried out the concept already
Tier 2: Bright kids. Take to anything like a duck to water
Tier 3: With encouragement reach a good or above average level
Tier 4: For all the will in the world, they can t do it because of lack of understanding, knowledge, language skills etc.
Take a topic like Programming and the gaps between tiers 1 and 2 and the rest are even more stark.
Wee Jimmy in tier 4 has no business holding back Joanna in tier 1 but this is invariably what happens unless you tailor make 20 individual lessons. Even if you did go that far (no one can) there is no way a single lesson of 40-60 minutes will change anything.
Subjects where there are a least sets made have a better crack of it.
Now, if I was remote teaching 20 kids that might be a different story but with distractions, interruptions, malfunctions and disruptions, that is never happening in a standard classroom.
Project work can be good BUT almost all the time, the poorer kids will NOT put in as much as the rest and will hide within the group as best they can.
I agree with the notion that a class of two = mixed ability, but there are kids on broadly the same lebvels as eachother that should be put together. Mixed ability, I agree, doesnt work.
April 15th, 2007 at 7:43 pm
So glad to see this written so clearly. As a Maths teacher I agree that mixed ability teaching is not successful. I think that setting at Primary School would really help achievement in Maths (or Numeracy whatever you want to call it!)
Sadly there are always those who state that a really good teacher can teach a mixed ability group successfully. I’ve not been in this job long but in schools with a lot of banding sets have a far more mixed ability and from what I’ve seen it doesn’t work and everyone is pulled down.
If behaviour was perfect you could differentiate a lot more successfully but it’s not and it won’t be any time soon.
April 15th, 2007 at 7:47 pm
With regard to the question about the will to stick with teaching, I think the best solution is to keep burning the fires of indignation. That and being good at your job.
I recently read through Zig Engelmann’s critique of Project Follow Through. One of the most striking elements of his book was the effective grouping of students to avoid the exact problem we’re discussing here - basically, eliminating that 4-tiered system that Graeme mentioned. Unfortunately, such grouping necessitates the honest evaluation of students’ abilities and the acceptance of that assessment by parents. Few teachers and administrators stay strong on these topics and, as we’ve read from a few people here, classrooms suffer.
Remember, fires of indignation.
April 18th, 2007 at 8:23 pm
A lucid deconstruction of the mixed ability myth.
I’m a primary school teacher and hate having mixed ability for everything except Lit and Num (and that was only because me and the other yr5 teacher decided to go against the grain)
Lower down in the school they have mixed-year mixed ability Literacy and Numeracy lessons.
April 21st, 2007 at 3:33 am
Around about 1999 there was a C4 documentary on the George Orwell school in Islington. The school had mixed ability classes and small but significant part of each class seemed to be kids who were either insane or bad. They disrupted the lessons and the good kids looked very frustrated - and some started to join in.
But the really STRANGE thing was at the end of the documentary about 6 of the teachers were in the pub discussing the school - and they ALL defended mixed ability teaching. eg the brighter kids can help the less able etc. They seemed unable to learn from their own experience.
April 21st, 2007 at 5:13 pm
ian, I know the one you mean. It is hard to be the one who pours cold water on a scheme that people who genuinely believe in its value (or it’s in their best interests to appear to) have put a lot of work into, and I should know because it’s usually me (naysayer, not a team player, negative thinker etc etc).
And there’s nothing wrong with being positive about something and giving it a go.
But in the case of that school, it was patently not working to the advantage of anyone but the dim but reasonably willing and yet there they were, probably hand-picked at the time and SMT now, saying in the teeth of the televised evidence that it was fine and dandy.
I have personally lost count of the number of reincarnations of Brilliant Ideas that failed the first time and will obviously fail again for the same reasons but even faster because of modern-day pupil attitudes and non-existent discipline.
I’m not a genius or an original thinker. If I can see it, loads of people will have spotted it ages before me; and yet here it comes again, generating rainforests of paper, millions in consultancies, training and resources and nothing it seems can stop it.
April 22nd, 2007 at 10:27 am
“they ALL defended mixed ability teaching. eg the brighter kids can help the less able etc.”
Ugh. Of course the brighter kids go to school precisely to prop up those less able, not to nurture their own talents and stretch themselves. *sigh*
December 2nd, 2007 at 12:39 pm
I would not bang the drum of mixed ability teaching at any cost and in any circumstances. However I teach D&T and have only ever taught mixed ability classes (which sometimes include supported SEN students). I have been surprised at the progress made by the weaker students in a climate where exam outcome is not capped.
My exam cohort is sufficiently small that setting beyond my class is not an option even in the run-up to GCSE’s so I set internally at that point (yes, ok “top tables” & all that) so that the students get the chance to stretch against others of similar ability.
I agree this would not translate into all other subjects. I pitch my teaching high in the knowledge that not all will get all of it (although I’m often pleasantly surprised) and provide opportunity for independent learning for the very top end.
April 24th, 2008 at 5:47 am
Oh this is so so true! I’m doing my Diploma of Education (Australian equivalent of the PGCE) at the moment and my tutors won’t SHUT UP about bloody group-work, ‘collaborative learning’ and not ‘labeling’ children through streaming or ability grouping. The ONLY tutors who warn of the possible perils of group work are those in the ‘Gifted and Talented’ school, who freely admit that group work is total crap and does a complete disservice to anyone who is not absolutely smack on middle ground ability. I used to HATE HATE HATE group work at school (I would either have to do all the work, the tasks were idiotic and simplistic, it was fraught with social anxiety and the only thing that I learned was that any form of collaborative learning should be avoided like the plague) and it’s so depressing to be taught that I will have to inflict that misery on my students. As for mixed ability, I really can’t see how we can serve either the very bright or the ones who struggle in the same 40 minutes … and as for differentiating tasks, surely that just means that the ‘labels’ are still enforced in the classroom …
ARGH!!!