AEG Blog

It is no secret that children learn differently.  Finding a way to customize and individualize education is one of the core values of American Education Group.

Class Struggle by Jay Matthews in The Washington Post featured a letter from educator Susan Ohanian entitled Elementary gifted ed made easy.  Ohanian recounts how she changed things up for students and made Resource a place of learning and exploration through open-ended "messing around".

Eons ago, I persuaded my principal, who was starting a new school that had a state mandate and funds to be innovative, to do away with remedial reading (I was the remedial reading teacher). We called my room Resource and I announced I was an adjunct of the media center.

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Mind you, I was still the remedial reading teacher--but we kept this secret from the kids. Teachers had a list of students who had to come to the room x times a week to fulfill our obligation to the state. For everyone else (K-6), it was student initiated: A child came when he could persuade his teacher to let him. There was no schedule and there were no bells.

(snip)

In the spring, state Education Department officials came to see why the reading scores for the identified remedial readers soared. As expected, they were mystified. Building bridges, making musical instruments, discovering the law of gravity in Remedial Reading? (One day my principal came into the room sputtering, "You mean to tell me that this heavy box and this ball fall at the same rate?" A student team dropping objects in the stairwell had been explaining their experiment to him.)

(snip)

I'm not trying to say what a good teacher am I. I'm just trying to say "yes" to your point about flexibility being the key. Different kids have different needs, and providing choices allows all children to soar at different things.

Understanding the learning style of each child is of paramount importance.  Accepting  learning differences and personalizing learning opportunities based on those realities means greater opportunities for all students.