Wednesday was a Day of Meetings for me, starting at 8am, which means I didn’t have time to type up a bunch of blog posts and schedule them as usual. Having just clawed my way out of Meetingville, though, let me take a few minutes to throw up another Academia post, before the topic gets too stale.
Steinn has been thinking about the differences between the European and US educational systems (first post, second post), and he brought up an idea that I hadn’t encountered before: “Looping”. The idea, as described by Steinn::
When I were a lad, in elementary school you had teacher – call it a “homeroom teacher” if you like, and that teacher stayed with you for several grades, before rotating back down to pick up a new class. Further, you generally stayed with “your class” between grades, with little re-mixing of students.
This had several effects: the good thing is that the general syllabus was quite coherent, not repetitive except to reinforce previous learning, since it was dominated by the same teacher from year-to-year. It also fostered a strong class identity – I felt part of my class, not just part of my school, and classes developed quite distinct identities. I guesstimate that we had 85-90% retention of students within the class from year-to-year.
I hadn’t heard of that before, but it’s an interesting idea. I can immediately see both pros and cons, and the basic arguments for and against the idea are presented in Steinn’s comments. It occurs to me, though, that you could possibly argue that some of the educational beenfits of small colleges are, in fact, related to this phenomenon.
Take my department, for example: We require all majors to take at least ten courses in the major in order to graduate (plus a handful of courses in math and other sciences). We also have ten full-time teaching faculty. This means that, while it is mathematically possible for a student to go through four years of a physics major without repeating any instructors, it’s very common to have the same student two or three times in the course of their career (upper-level courses are not distributed evenly among the faculty).
That means that a given faculty member really gets to know at least some of the students very well, and know their strengths and weaknesses. As a faculty member, this means that it’s possible to tailor the presentation of the material in an upper-level class to better suit the abilities and preferences of the students in that class. On the student side, they have some idea what to expect in classes later in their career, and don’t have to battle with both new material and new approaches to the presentation of that material.
It also means that we end up having a really tight-knit department. In the “exit interviews” that we do with students, they universally praised the sense of community within the department, and two of our recent graduates sent us very nice notes praising the almost family-like atmosphere.
My experiences as an undergraduate at a small college were pretty similar. The level of bonding may not have been quite as high, but the basic idea was the same: I got to know a couple of professors very well, and it made the major much more comfortable for me.
So, I can definitely see the advantages of the “looping” idea. Of course, I can also see the disadvantages– I took multiple classes from three different faculty members, and two of them were very good. The third, on the other hand… Had the balance been the other way around, the idea of “looping” might not be as attractive.
Returning to pre-college education, though, I wonder if this isn’t an idea that sort of breaks down in the middle period of a student’s education. At the college level, students are largely “tracked” into majors, and it’s reasonable for the same person to teach them mulitple different subjects. At the elementary level, the things they need to learn are basic enough that they don’t require a great deal of subject-specific expertise.
At the high school level, though, things start to get in-depth enough that it’s a little difficult to imagine making a looped system work. The thought of needing to be able to teach biology one year, chemsitry the next, and physics the year after that is a little daunting. I could probably do it– the level isn’t all that high– but I think I’d burn out on that pretty quickly.
Any readers with experience of this sort of system? Anybody with really strong opinions they’d like to share?