Thursday, May 16, 2013

Tutors in the Classroom


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.

1 comment:

  1. 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...

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