Discovery Learning…Can We Do It?
October 14, 2007 
From Joe McConda’s blog….. Our current system seeks to educate all students and often levels the field by holding back the most precocious while trying to bring up the most unmotivated. Some other countries allow those motivated students to go on while they find other avenues for the others.
I think most teachers are torn between the desire to accept this method of teaching and the fear of letting go of tradition. I think one reason for this is that most teachers have never been trained to think this way, and simply do not know how to manage a classroom of this type. Then there’s always the fear of “what if I do this and my students don’t learn what they need to?”….which really translates into “what if they do poorly on the state test?” I also agree that we want to treat every student as if they have the same abilities and goals, which is simply not fact. I’ve had classes that I could have used this type teaching without apprehension, and I’ve had classes that probably couldn’t have functioned in this way. If we were allowed to schedule students in such as way that we could ability group them, this could be a very effective method….of course then you also deal with the complaint of “why do I always get the bad classes?” which would happen a lot with ability grouping such as this. However, I feel we hold so many kids back who could accomplish so much more if allowed to move beyond the traditional ways of teaching.
One solution for grouping the kids by ability is to take turns getting the ‘bad’ class. One year they are yours and the next they are somebody elses, and so. This at least gives every teacher an opportunity to work with more gifted students. This is how it’s done in my daughter’s elementary school.
At a lot of high schools, you often have only one or two teachers that have the AP or advanced level certifications. I’ve never understood why teacher complain about getting the so called “bad classes”, yet are not willing to pursue more certification to be able to teach the more advanced groups.
I feel that in math has a natural way of separating the good students in the higher level classes and lower level classes. This is a problem that also groups the “behavior”problem students into the same classes with the lower level classes. What you get is low level students in the classes with behavior problem students that aren’t low level just low motivation that disrupt the lass for the lower level students. If you can’t follow me, what my point is, is that some times the students are segregated even though they don’t do it on purpose.