Over on Successful Teaching Pat Hensley had a post a few days ago that she headed “Class Size – Learning to Live With It.” In it she recounted her experiences with an extraordinarily diverse group of students. She leads with an experience about facing a large number of students, but there’s lots of other factors to think about when reading her post. Here’s a snippet:
On the first day of classes at my new school, due to a schedule mix up, I ended up with 30 students in one high school English class. Now, some of you might say that this wasn’t as bad as some could be. The problem was that this was a self contained special education class with students from 9th to 12th grade with all different disabilities (learning disabled, emotionally disabled, mentally disabled, and autistic). I also shared a paraprofessional with another teacher, but it was not my turn to have her.
As this snippet hints, there are other administrative factors that exacerbate the problem. She goes on to ask questions of teachers who have faced atypical situations.
Link to Ms. Hensley’s post (and check some of her other posts; there’s lots of perspective there about in-the-trenches issues). Of course, there are other posts about class size on Teach Effectively here, here, and here.
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