Well it looks like another of my beliefs on the "ideal" way of teaching students has gone down the drain! Since my position as a student in high school, through my university years, and during my three years as an educator, I always though it was best to have students separated accoridng to their ability so that, as I thought, "they were learning at a learning they were capable of" and "being taught at a level they understand." I was convicned, not knowing why however, that this separation was necessary and vital to student success. Looking back I think many of my reasons as a teacher for having such a stance was to curb student misbehavior, to increase student interest, and as a result have better results. However, if we were to visit many of the general math classes today, do you think we'd find an abundance of interested, motivated, well behaved students? For that matter, would we find these behaviors in our academic classes? advanced classes? I've taught at all three levels in our high schools and in all cases there still is a lack of motivation by some, great work ethics by others, and interest (or lack thereof) in the subject matter. As we discussed in class ability grouping seems to be more of an advantage for the teacher than it does for the students in general.


Needless to say reading about Boaler's research has opened my mind up to an entirely different way of believing how we can best ensure learning takes place with our students. All of the reasons she highlighed such as working at a fixed pace, the pressure, anxiety, and restricted opportunities, as well as the setting decisions were all points I could certainly identigy with. We, as teachers, do have influence in the courses our math students enter. Can we be accurate by making a judgement based on a grade, 50% of which was decided in 2 hours on a warm day in June? Are we basing some decisions too ont he behavior of a 15 year old whose behavior is not idyllic, who doesn't fit the typical? I think we make too many assumptions about the inabaility of all our classes to achieve higher grades that we percieve them to be able to attain. Then again, our sacred textbook style may have something to do with this notion. The system we have set up in our high school sof ability grouping still pits students against each other, still makes them feel as though they are being judged. The excuse we use that "competition helps raise achievement" is relaly insignificant when you weigh that against all the implications of ability grouping.

As we noted during our discussion in class, ability grouping classes at AMber hIll did not achieve better results than Phoenix Park's mixed ability classes, despite an increased amount of time spent "working" by Amber Hill students. At this point, it really does not take much convicing to see that working is not equal to learning. Our classrooms today are full of students being busy. But, busy at what? We assign enough questions on the board to keep them working (there's that word again) for the rest of the period I don't think we ever title the time students spend a their desk as "class learning" but rather "class work", "seat work", "homework". How can we really measure how much they know through all of this work? We're trying, obviously it's not working as successful as it needs to be, especially for those with weaker math abilities. The mixed ability grouping our schools adhere to now seems to be grosely inadequate in raising the learning levels of all students.

And so as I finished reading this chaper and reflecting back on the discussions we had in class I wish now I had the opportunity to initiate a mixed ability experience with my classes. However, the textbook approach got to go if we are imlement such a trial in our classroom. Mary said in class one night that our job, as teachers, is to design effective lesson plans that can allow for multiple entry points to problems, that asks the questions in effective ways to ensure connections are made. I believe we relaly need to begin making these attempts, we really do need to step away from the status quo and develop a new plan. Phoenix Park teachers taught a wide range of students in the same class and still provided stimulating and enriching experiences for all their students. There's no reason why we can't either.