Kevin's Watch

As you may know school over here in Germany works a bit different than in the US. We are a secondary school and we got "secondary I" which would be 5 - 10 graders and then for those who want to go on (and are good enough to qualify) "secondary II" which is 11 to 13 grade.

When you become a class teacher in sec I you usually start in 5th grade and stay with this group until they drop out of sec I six years later. Then you start another round with new 5 graders. You can imagine that after six years there are strong ties between students and teachers - for some of our kids it's the only kind of family they'll ever know.

Yesterday was the prom for our all our 6 groups of 10th graders. I had to say goodbye to the first group I followed from 5 to 10. It was a wonderful party with all the kids and their parents - and very emotional. I guess your frist group will always be something special.

Now I'm looking forward to meeting my new 5 graders after the summer break and seeing a lot of my old kids back in sec II (where there is a course system rather than fixed groups staying together).

Cool Vader. My Dad's a high school teacher. Since he can handle them, he tends to get the disadvantaged/underachieving classes. Sounds like he has a similar situstion to yourself where he sees off some kids every year that he's been encouraging along since 4th form. Good luck, and keep representing.

Vader wrote:As you may know school over here in Germany works a bit different than in the US. We are a secondary school and we got "secondary I" which would be 5 - 10 graders and then for those who want to go on (and are good enough to qualify) "secondary II" which is 11 to 13 grade.

When you become a class teacher in sec I you usually start in 5th grade and stay with this group until they drop out of sec I six years later. Then you start another round with new 5 graders. You can imagine that after six years there are strong ties between students and teachers - for some of our kids it's the only kind of family they'll ever know.

Yesterday was the prom for our all our 6 groups of 10th graders. I had to say goodbye to the first group I followed from 5 to 10. It was a wonderful party with all the kids and their parents - and very emotional. I guess your frist group will always be something special.

Now I'm looking forward to meeting my new 5 graders after the summer break and seeing a lot of my old kids back in sec II (where there is a course system rather than fixed groups staying together).

Seems like a much better system. I would have loved to stay with one teacher throughout those formative years. Meeting a new teacher every year was very difficult. And leaving a teacher every year was heartbreaking.

I am glad you enjoyed yourself. Your accomplishment is something to be proud of.

A friend of mine teaches at a school that uses it for elementary/middle school...there are some in the u.s...though most are private/charter, I don't know if any major public schools use it.

There is some evidence that it leads to better scores/behavior...but only a few studies I'm aware of, and none at the high school level.

Grats on your first full cycle.

I would also guess that the stability of knowing your students leads to a happier teacher.

sounds great unless you get a terrible teacher. and i had plenty of those...

sgt.null wrote:sounds great unless you get a terrible teacher. and i had plenty of those...

Perhaps...but I think it also makes spotting bad teachers a helluva lot easier. I do know that where my friend teaches, unlike the field as a whole, almost none of the good teachers leave the profession [perhaps related to Lorin's happier teacher thought].

i am sure the teachers unions will be more than happy to do their best to weed out bad teachers.

That sounds like a great system - as much as I loved having certain teachers in school, I can only imagine how much more effective it would have been to stay with them for 6 years!

Anyway, congratulations!

I described the German school system here --> kevinswatch.ihugny.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=686590&highlight=elementary#686590

I'm proud to say that out of all six classes in 10th grade mine has got the best degrees and 18 out of 25 will stay in school. The rest has got jobs.

Congrats, Vader.

In elementary school, Magickmaker had one team-taught class for which she was supposed to have the same two teachers for two years straight (4th and 5th grades -- 9 and 10 year olds). But at the end of the first year, one of the teachers moved away. The remaining teacher was teamed with another teacher for the second year.

Well, okay, Magickmaker tells me it was more complicated than that. We were in Colorado for the first half of her 4th grade year, so she was only in this combined class for 1.5 years. And apparently the classroom had an accordion-pleat divider down the middle, so sometimes she had class with just one teacher. And then she was getting pulled out of class for TAG English, too.

Her middle school assigned the kids to teams every year. Each team of teachers taught a specific group of kids. All the kids on the "Stars" team had Teacher X for math and Teacher Y for English and so on, while all the kids on the "Panthers" team had Teacher Z for math and Teacher D for English and so on. That school also had this diabolically intricate "block" scheduling system -- not only did the kids not go to every class every day, they didn't even go to math, for example, every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. The system allowed for most class periods to be 1.5 hours instead of 45 minutes, which the teachers liked. But everybody had to keep track of whether it was an A day or a B day. It was madness.

aliantha wrote:That school also had this diabolically intricate "block" scheduling system -- not only did the kids not go to every class every day, they didn't even go to math, for example, every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. The system allowed for most class periods to be 1.5 hours instead of 45 minutes, which the teachers liked. But everybody had to keep track of whether it was an A day or a B day. It was madness.

The schools I'm familiar with that use block and team teaching work very very well, consistently in top 5%....but they seem to have it blocked slightly less chaotically than you describe, and the team teaching really IS team teaching...as well as being inter-subject for overlapping areas [for instance English/History/Social studies together...so while learning about essay composition, you're learning it in the context/in conjunction with writing about a historical event/period you are also learning about...or if learning about the solar system, working the math of orbits/gravity calculations at the same time.]

We never did team teaching, but we had block scheduling. A/b/c days, with the week being a/b/a/b/c. Fridays were the "C"s, which were the traditional 6 period short classes, while A and B were 3 longer periods.

I seem to recall at least one block scheduling year for one of my kids in which the choices were more than just A or B -- but it was never as easy as what you're describing, Rigel. I don't think the kids ever had a day in which they had every class.

Vraith, inter-subject classes make sense for certain things, but I don't think this middle school could have pulled it off.

Oh, and combine that craziness with the school being under construction -- they were building an addition at the time. (9/11 happened while Magickmaker was attending this school. She thinks they heard the plane crash into the Pentagon, but they wrote it off as construction noise.)

Vader wrote:As you may know school over here in Germany works a bit different than in the US. We are a secondary school and we got "secondary I" which would be 5 - 10 graders and then for those who want to go on (and are good enough to qualify) "secondary II" which is 11 to 13 grade.

When you become a class teacher in sec I you usually start in 5th grade and stay with this group until they drop out of sec I six years later. Then you start another round with new 5 graders. You can imagine that after six years there are strong ties between students and teachers - for some of our kids it's the only kind of family they'll ever know.

Yesterday was the prom for our all our 6 groups of 10th graders. I had to say goodbye to the first group I followed from 5 to 10. It was a wonderful party with all the kids and their parents - and very emotional. I guess your frist group will always be something special.

Now I'm looking forward to meeting my new 5 graders after the summer break and seeing a lot of my old kids back in sec II (where there is a course system rather than fixed groups staying together).

Wow, that SOUNDS like an emotional experience! Sorry you had to say "Goodbye"; bet you'd built up something quite amazing.

And yeah, that sounds like a brilliant system; for a student to not only be with the same teacher but the same community of students for SIX years... I'm thinking that would really make an amazing level of commitment. Knowing "I'm going to see this same group next year." would really make what you say and do matter.