Miami Mortgage News

How to make mixed ability work

Teaching mixed ability classes can be challenging, but one primary teacher suggests that allowing children to take control of their own learning could be the answerBack when I was a dewy-eyed NQT, children were routinely labelled as being lower, middle or higher ability from as early as five years old.They were slotted into aptly-named groups, such as circles, squares, triangles, pentagons and hexagons. “The more sides and corners, the more brains,” an older teacher explained to me.Needless to say, at every parents’ evening there were a string of middle-class parents wanting to know why their child was not a hexagon. Heaven forbid they were a circle: the group usually populated by children from underprivileged backgrounds, or with special educational needs.It was also regular practice in many schools to assign the circles, or equivalent group, to work with the (usually unqualified) teaching assistant, while the other groups had the undivided attention of the teacher. What’s more, it was rare for these children to move groups, or have the opportunity to do the same tasks as other groups.If the odds in life were already set against poor kids, schools certainly didn’t help to address the issue here.