Yes, there is the danger of low expectation becoming low reality. My assumption is that the children would have more than one teacher at each level; it's clear that some children do better with one teacher and some with another.
What's needed, IMO, are much better tools for analyzing where a student is in their physical brain development, and matching their teaching to that. If the brain paths they need to learn multiplication, for example, aren't in place, they will have a much harder time learning it, and both they and the teacher will think they are incapable, which as you said feeds on itself. If they realize that the child physically isn't ready for that, and wait to introduce it until they are, I think we'll see much better results.
But that sort of testing and evaluation simply aren't in very many schools, if any, yet. |
