Challenges in School Education

Schools are challenged when asked to provide more flexible learning arrangements to better meet the needs of individual learners.

As discussed in a previous post, schools have been managed in the same way for decades. Although composite classes are common, students tend to be grouped into year levels, by age, and two progress automatically with their age peers from one year of school to the next. A curriculum is developed for each year of school, students are placed in mixed-ability classes, teachers deliver the curriculum for the year level they are teaching, and students are assessed and graded on how well they perform on that curriculum.

This approach to organizing teaching students and the process of learning might be appropriate only if students of the same age started each academic year at more or less similar comprehensive levels. But this is far from the case. The most advanced students beginning any year of school are typically five to six years ahead of the least advanced students. This shows that the less advanced students are struggling every school year after the other and are judged to be weak and treated as such. On the other hand, the more advanced students are left unchallenged by each academic year's curriculum and are easily excelling without even putting any effort in to it.

Thus, thinking that the same curriculum is appropriate and effective to all students of the same age is illogical. Going through with this tactic for decades now has proven to be a failure year after year because learning success and failure became defined as success or failure in mastering this common curriculum. This age-based approach to organizing teaching and learning is deeply entrenched and reinforced by legislation that requires teachers to judge and grade all students against year level expectations rather than each student's abilities.

Solving this challenge depends on more flexible ways of personalizing teaching and learning, for example, by using technology to better target individuals’ current levels of achievements and learning needs. Solving this challenge also requires defining learning success and failure in terms of the progress, or growth, that individuals make over time, regardless of their starting points. In this way, excellent progress becomes an expectation of every student, including those who are already more advanced. This will encourage all students to improve their performance.

APEC provides you with a tutor that will measure your child's performance by their improvements and not by where they stand in their year level.

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