A different kind of learning model: Grouping kids to succeed

SALT LAKE CITY — Walking down the halls of the K-8 school, you can hear students reciting in sync.

"Insolently. Insolently. Insolently," one advanced class at Reid School recites as fast as they can as their teacher points to the word during a language arts class. Another group on the other side of the school is learning how to write the letter "r."

"Pull, push, curve, 'r,'" the fifteen students in the class repeat out loud as they watch their teacher model the writing on the board. They all shout at her when she writes the lowercase letter too tall or writes it backward.

While most of the students in the latter class at Salt Lake's Reid School are five, the advanced class has students who would traditionally be in fifth to eighth grade — and they are learning at a college level.

For the first few hours of the day, the students are broken up into reading levels like this. No matter what age the students are in, they are placed according to how well they perform on certain writing, reading and communicating tests. This year the school has a kindergartener up in a traditional second grade reading level and it has had the opposite effect as well. They are also tested and broken up for math instruction during this time. For the second half of the day, the students study with peers their own age.

While Reid School has been around for 25 years and practicing this kind of grouping, there has been a gradual push away from this practice and a recent push for students to be more heterogeneously mixed in their own grade levels.

People like Sharon Gallagher-Fishbaugh, president of the Utah Education Association, feels that students should be together with their own grade level as they are emotionally and socially not ready to be with students who are two and three years older than them. In this type of setting, the teacher than should group the kids when studying certain subjects and individualize instruction within the grade level, Gallagher-Fishbaugh said.

Yet Ethna Reid, who co-founded the private school with her husband, believes that students learn much better and are able to progress faster in the model she has created and has been asked to teach her method in all 50 states. She also has more than a dozen awards hanging outside of the main office for her technique.