We are often asked, "What makes Sparhawk School different from public school?" There are a multitude of answers, but first, I will focus on three related factors upon which all else depends. These defining differences are: our dedication to maintaining ideal teacher-student* ratios, overall group sizes**, and student-student*** ratios. The 'right' ratios are those that assure the best support for both our students and teachers.
Research supports the common-sense wisdom that group size, not simply ratio, is what matters most in terms of best attention for students. Small group sizes makes everything else possible. Students in a group of 20 elementary school students with two teachers simply cannot get as much emotional and academic support as a student in a group with 10 students with one teacher.
The reason stems from the nature of human needs, and the younger the child, the more important and immediate they are. The mixing together of the various wants, abilities, interests, needs and behaviors of each of 20 personalities creates an aggregate of complexities that is greater in combination than what would exist in two groups with a 1-10 ratio each. In a larger group, there are more distractions, in general, including visual, spatial, and auditory stimulation, and greater diversity of social challenges. If two students require attention in a classroom of 20 students, that leaves 18 children remaining with all of the aforementioned human complexities brewing. This is an overwhelming prospect for even the most experienced teacher, and even more so for a child.
This is all particularly true with younger students who have greater natural egocentricity and proper dependency on the teacher to assist them in so many ways. And, the younger the children, the greater overall diversity there will be. For example, a first-grade group may have students who do not know all of their numbers and letters and students who have been reading for a long time. What is the common ground for the teacher? In many traditional schools, it is the mid-point of the group’s abilities, or whatever state-mandated tests require be taught, no matter what the children’s statuses are. There will be children who have very little experience outside of their home and children who have traveled the world. This is where the importance of creating the ideal group in size and student-student combination comes into play.
Consider, for instance, the ability that Sparhawk has to create small, mixed-age groupings of students. This begins with the admissions process, when we select individual students not only for personal attributes that indicate age-appropriate levels of ability, motivation, and self-discipline, but also for their contribution to our community as a whole. These qualities are assessed based on day visits and, after sixth grade, also by the review of questionnaires and letters of reference from previous school personnel. Not every applicant is accepted. Public schools, on the other hand, are mandated to accept all students in its district. Students are then divided by age into groups of a certain number without regard to ability, motivation and self-discipline.
Furthermore, at Sparhawk, we consider the whole child, not simply their academic ability, but their social and emotional ability as well when assigning groups. Where is this student going to be most successful, and what is the best grouping of peers that will help them along the way? We assign students to peer groups of others who can support one another, creating a positive student-student experience and an overall enriching habitat for all.
During the elementary school years, the foundation for future education is set. These are the formative years. Students not only develop academic skill sets, but also character traits such as self-motivation and the panoply of celebrations-of-learning that the emotional safety of small-group learning offers.
Resources
For more information on group sizing and dynamics, please click here.
For more on class size reduction research, click here.
The Seven Myths of Class Size Reducation--And the Truth
*Student–teacher ratio or student–faculty ratio is the number of students who attend a school or university divided by the number of teachers in the institution. For example, a student–teacher ratio of 10:1 indicates that there are 10 students for every one teacher.
**Group size, as defined by Wikipedia: Size (the number of people involved) is an important characteristic of the groups, organizations, and communities in which social behavior occurs. When only a few persons are interacting, adding just one more individual may make a big difference in how they relate. As an organization or community grows in size it is apt to experience tipping points where the way in which it operates needs to change. The complexity of large groupings is partly because they are made up of interrelated subgroups.
Herbert Thelen proposed a principle that for members of groups to have maximum motivation to perform, the number of members in each should be the smallest "in which it is possible to have represented at a functional level all the social and achievement skills required for the particular required activity."
***Student-student ratio; The ratio of students to one another, or what we like to call the human scale. The larger the group the more interaction there is between students, and the younger the student the greater the challenge to negotiate the world of other children, whether for academic or social help. Lessons safely learned over time, in intimate groups, are often a challenge for teachers to provide at all, let alone individualize, and for the children to request.