Focus on Grade Level Standards or Meet Students Where They Are? How an Unintentional Experiment Informed Our Strategy for Addressing Learning Loss
May 17, 2021By Joel Rose, CEO and Co-Founder of New Classrooms
What is the best way to support acceleration in mathematics?
Should schools stay rooted in grade-level instruction and ask teachers to address the most relevant pre-grade gaps in service of getting students to proficiency? Or, should schools be meeting students where they are in order to provide them a path to where they need to be?
It is a question that teachers and administrators are wrestling with as they prepare to return to school in the fall. Many will acknowledge that addressing unfinished learning in math was a challenge long before the pandemic. It’s now just far more acute.
Over the last ten years, our non-profit organization has dug deeply into this very question. We’ve consulted with top educational researchers and experts, dissected each and every standard into its component parts, mapped out and refined all of the predecessor and successor relationships among those concepts, and gathered over 100 million academic data points through the innovative learning model we operate across the country — Teach to One.