My Teaching Experience

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Introduction Throughout my 10 years teaching, I have had the opportunities to teach in several different schools, subjects, grades, and achievement levels. I have had experiences that were amazing, and some that really made me look within myself to discover how to improve the situation for my students and myself. I feel like as an educator, I must always observe situations around me, ask questions, and when I disagree, speak a voice of concern. I believe far too often in education, we get comfortable, things get easy, and we get complacent. However, I believe our students deserve much more. In my current teaching situation, I am teaching 8th grade English at a fabulous Arts Academy, filled with good moral teachers and students who come every day ready to learn. However, after observing my teaching situation for the past 3 years, I think we are doing something wrong. It began with just a gut feeling in the pit of my stomach, but it has now blossomed to a full blown critical analysis of this topic. The issue at hand is we are grouping our students in English based on ability. We have bilingual classes, which are considered the highest achieving, and then there are the advanced classes, then lastly the …show more content…

In general, they have concluded that ability grouping is associated with an unequal distribution of school resources across students by ability, including teachers ' talent, curriculum differentiation, academic role models, and the behavior of peers. Furthermore, they point to ability grouping as a device that creates an academic and social hierarchy within a grade or class that enhances the stature of high-ability students but handicaps those with lower

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