I was fortunate enough to attend a school with curriculum compacting in elementary. It was awesome then, and would be awesome now. I don't know exactly what went into our program behind the scenes, but I suspect one of the teachers had some kind of advanced training that qualified her to oversee the program. Of course, there's tremendous bottleneck downstream of credentials. Curriculum compacting for one year means you just... go into the next year and take your standard course (or honors course) again.
If credentials is the bottleneck, this seems like a case where public funds or covered loans might actually help, and probably pay off. Teacher compensation is a hot-button issue, but this would probably be an easier sell. I hope our math teacher paid off her loans quickly, she was great!
Curriculum compacting seems to have a big advantage. Teachers actually get to do more of what makes the job fun - watching a kid go on a hot streak, and giving out merited high grades. They'd do way more of this on the margin, right? Like, the kids who are struggling in this program are still struggling currently? Time per kid would probably go up (maybe groups of five are optimal) but the return seems so much higher. And although this might slow truly elite students, there's no concern that self-directed learning is being abused by the kids (or the teachers lol).
Thanks for reading, Mark - appreciate the comment. Adaptive software isn’t perfect and there are genuine risks in implementing across the board (under existing imperfect conditions, to put that mildly) but I do think the tradeoffs are good especially for relatively self-motivated gifted kids.
If they learn in a shallow manner, the apps/tests will soon reveal (and can correct it). We know from research, after all, that good candidates for acceleration tend to perform at least as well as students in the next level up (if not better), even when they’re not age peers.
I was fortunate enough to attend a school with curriculum compacting in elementary. It was awesome then, and would be awesome now. I don't know exactly what went into our program behind the scenes, but I suspect one of the teachers had some kind of advanced training that qualified her to oversee the program. Of course, there's tremendous bottleneck downstream of credentials. Curriculum compacting for one year means you just... go into the next year and take your standard course (or honors course) again.
If credentials is the bottleneck, this seems like a case where public funds or covered loans might actually help, and probably pay off. Teacher compensation is a hot-button issue, but this would probably be an easier sell. I hope our math teacher paid off her loans quickly, she was great!
Curriculum compacting seems to have a big advantage. Teachers actually get to do more of what makes the job fun - watching a kid go on a hot streak, and giving out merited high grades. They'd do way more of this on the margin, right? Like, the kids who are struggling in this program are still struggling currently? Time per kid would probably go up (maybe groups of five are optimal) but the return seems so much higher. And although this might slow truly elite students, there's no concern that self-directed learning is being abused by the kids (or the teachers lol).
Glad to read, thanks for writing!
Thanks for reading, Mark - appreciate the comment. Adaptive software isn’t perfect and there are genuine risks in implementing across the board (under existing imperfect conditions, to put that mildly) but I do think the tradeoffs are good especially for relatively self-motivated gifted kids.
If they learn in a shallow manner, the apps/tests will soon reveal (and can correct it). We know from research, after all, that good candidates for acceleration tend to perform at least as well as students in the next level up (if not better), even when they’re not age peers.