A column in the New York Times here describes a teaching model for
math that utilizes as many as six tutors in the classroom, so students can work
in small groups the whole time.
The model doesn’t work as well for
English, because to do better in English, students need to become avid
readers. Tutoring doesn’t help too much
with this; what is needed are curriculum
changes that allow students to choose most of their own reading. As long as the model for teaching Language
Arts is a teacher pulling a class through a teacher-assigned book, reading
scores will stay low.
Very interesting point--I don't think I'd ever thought of it before. I agree, of course, that everyone who is good at reading and writing got that way by reading a lot, but I do wonder if intensive tutoring could work too. This might be worth some researcher's looking into. There is a fair amount of evidence that just reading a lot is better than regular classroom instruction, but I haven't seen any that compares reading a lot to intensive tutoring. On the other hand, why would any school district want to pay for the tutors, when books are a lot cheaper...
ReplyDelete