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I just picked up my kids from a day of ski school. It was a great experience for everyone. The kids seemed to enjoy the day. And as a parent, I felt like they learned a lot and were challenged appropriately for the day.
The experience made me wonder: What if academic schools were taught like ski schools? Here are some things that might change:
1. Children would be grouped by ability, not age.
Ski schools are organized by ability group, with age separation only for adult vs child. This means that the classes have children with different ages. For example, my older son, who is 8 years old, was in class with 10- and 13-year olds. And my 5 year old was in class with 3 and 4 year olds. From what I could tell, instructors, parents and children weren’t rattled by this notion.
If schools were to do the same, children would be in class with their academic peers, not their age peers. This would make it easier on teachers and students, as students would be able to focus on building the skills that they need to build, not on some arbitrary standard that someone their age should be able to do, and teachers could focus on skill-building for *all* students in the class since they would have similar ability levels.
2. Parents would be given very specific feedback about what their child need to do to get to the next level.
At the conclusion of the day, I was given very detailed feedback. For example, my older son needed to stay on the “fall line” consistently as he did the moguls. When I probed further, the instructor told me in detail what my son needs to do because the instructor had a very clear idea of what a skier of a given level should be doing.
Imagine being given very specific feedback in a parent-teacher conference: “Currently, your son has mastered 456 of our 1,234 spelling words that students need to master at this level. To get to the next level, we are focusing on subset of 124 words, mostly dealing with long vowel sounds. Here’s a list of the reference words, with your son’s progress noted.”
It would make our job as parents easier, provide transparency into the classroom, and help me answer the question “What do you do all day?”
3. Students would only be allowed to advance to the next level when they have demonstrated mastery of the current level.
My older son is attempting to get to the next level. However, they will not advance him until he consistently demonstrates the skills that are required at that level. And there is no negotiating this point. Everyone recognizes that promotion without mastery is a disaster waiting to happen.
Imagine hearing something similar from your child’ teacher: “Your son/daughter needs to become proficient at all multiplication tables up to and including 12x12, as measured by our proficiency exam . . . he’s very close, but he’ll need to focus on these problems to advance to the next level.”
4. The instructional approach and techniques at the beginner level would look quite different from that at advanced levels.
In the beginning of ski instruction, instructors use the “wedge” to teach skiing. It’s an artificial construct to help students learn how to turn and shift their weight from ski to ski. As the student progresses, the wedge is abandoned as skiers are taught to ski with their skis “parallel”. In the final stages, independent use of upper and lower body is taught. Each of these stages looks quite different, yet no one worries that it won’t eventually work.
What if the same approach were used in reading instruction? You might get this in your child’s backpack:
“Dear Kindergarten Parents,
. . . In reading instruction, we are continuing to teach children letter/sound correspondences. We are limiting our instruction of vowels sounds (e.g., short a, long a, long “o”) to isolate the effect of an “e” has at the end of some words. During this phase, the stories your child is reading won’t be “authentic”. In fact, they will sound contrived and silly because we are focused on helping them to improve their tracking skills with decodable text, and teaching them how to use punctuation marks to identify sentences and paragraphs. Eventually, as they become proficient decoders, the stories will become more authentic and sound more like stories you are used to hearing as an adult. Please bear with us and help us make this phase of learning fun by emphasizing tracking, going left to right when they read, and helping them use punctuation marks to tell them how to group words. When they don’t know sounds, simply provide the sounds to them and help them feel good about their experience with reading.”
If we could only get educators to realize the beauty of this approach . . .
