Let me tell a story to illustrate why I don't think you can ever completely do away with streaming:
In seventh grade French, for which the seventh-graders in my split-grade gifted class were integrated with a regular class, I often helped a student (let's call her Teri) with her work.
Teri was very, very intellectually slow. It was obvious even in casual interaction with her. It was even more obvious from her efforts to do schoolwork. She wanted to just copy my answers to our French work. Due to my scruples about cheating, I insisted on walking her through every question, or at least one or two of the questions in each exercise, in the hope that she would be able to actually learn the material. My hope was almost always in vain. I would walk her through the material in the slowest, most step-by-step way I could think of, and she still wouldn't get it.
I specifically remember one exercise where we had to fill in the blank: one question was "Tu ________ la cuisine." ("You ______ the kitchen.") We were supposed to choose between the verbs "manger" (eat) and "ranger" (tidy), and then conjugate the correct verb. I said, more or less, "'Manger' means 'to eat'. 'Ranger' means 'to tidy'. Do you eat a kitchen, or do you tidy a kitchen?" She STILL didn't get it.
That was a representative sample of what attempting to help Teri with French was like. No matter how much support I gave her, she just could not grasp the concepts. I realize my seventh-grade self couldn't teach nearly as well as, say, velvetpage probably can, but I'm not sure anything would have gotten the concepts into Teri's head. She just wasn't very smart, no matter how much support she was given, and she failed French that year in spite of my efforts.
I'm pretty sure Teri was a special ed student with an IEP, but she was integrated with a regular class for the majority of her school hours, even though French was not the only class that went completely over her head. I just...it would have taken a bona fide miracle for Teri to ever be able to learn calculus. The idea is about as plausible as pigs flying. I hope that analogy doesn't come across as likening her to a pig, because she was really a nice kid. She was just very, very slow.
In any case, holding Teri to the same expectations as a strong student or even an average student was, really, rather cruel. She shouldn't have been expected to study a second language at all, and she most certainly shouldn't have been lumped in with gifted kids who found the assigned work mind-numbingly easy. She needed to be streamed out, or at least to be given a curriculum with a different set of expected outcomes, probably ones involving basic literacy and numeracy in English. (She failed math that year too.) She should also probably have been in a setting with a lower student:staff ratio--that's something I totally agree with Erin about--so that somebody trained could walk her through everything in the teeny tiny steps that would have been necessary for her to learn it. That would have meant either a separate special ed class, or an aide with her in the regular class who could help her complete her customized curriculum rather than expecting her to do the same work as the other kids.
Kids are different. They can't all learn the same stuff, and we need to respect that by giving each kid a high level of support in completing a curriculum that is suited to their ability, whether their ability level is high, low, or in between.
no subject
In seventh grade French, for which the seventh-graders in my split-grade gifted class were integrated with a regular class, I often helped a student (let's call her Teri) with her work.
Teri was very, very intellectually slow. It was obvious even in casual interaction with her. It was even more obvious from her efforts to do schoolwork. She wanted to just copy my answers to our French work. Due to my scruples about cheating, I insisted on walking her through every question, or at least one or two of the questions in each exercise, in the hope that she would be able to actually learn the material. My hope was almost always in vain. I would walk her through the material in the slowest, most step-by-step way I could think of, and she still wouldn't get it.
I specifically remember one exercise where we had to fill in the blank: one question was "Tu ________ la cuisine." ("You ______ the kitchen.") We were supposed to choose between the verbs "manger" (eat) and "ranger" (tidy), and then conjugate the correct verb. I said, more or less, "'Manger' means 'to eat'. 'Ranger' means 'to tidy'. Do you eat a kitchen, or do you tidy a kitchen?" She STILL didn't get it.
That was a representative sample of what attempting to help Teri with French was like. No matter how much support I gave her, she just could not grasp the concepts. I realize my seventh-grade self couldn't teach nearly as well as, say,
I'm pretty sure Teri was a special ed student with an IEP, but she was integrated with a regular class for the majority of her school hours, even though French was not the only class that went completely over her head. I just...it would have taken a bona fide miracle for Teri to ever be able to learn calculus. The idea is about as plausible as pigs flying. I hope that analogy doesn't come across as likening her to a pig, because she was really a nice kid. She was just very, very slow.
In any case, holding Teri to the same expectations as a strong student or even an average student was, really, rather cruel. She shouldn't have been expected to study a second language at all, and she most certainly shouldn't have been lumped in with gifted kids who found the assigned work mind-numbingly easy. She needed to be streamed out, or at least to be given a curriculum with a different set of expected outcomes, probably ones involving basic literacy and numeracy in English. (She failed math that year too.) She should also probably have been in a setting with a lower student:staff ratio--that's something I totally agree with Erin about--so that somebody trained could walk her through everything in the teeny tiny steps that would have been necessary for her to learn it. That would have meant either a separate special ed class, or an aide with her in the regular class who could help her complete her customized curriculum rather than expecting her to do the same work as the other kids.
Kids are different. They can't all learn the same stuff, and we need to respect that by giving each kid a high level of support in completing a curriculum that is suited to their ability, whether their ability level is high, low, or in between.