Looping School Systems Are Regularly

Looping

School systems are regularly looking for new ways to enhance learning and the student's transition from one class level to the next. Looping, or when students stay with the same teacher for more than one grade level, is a method that is being utilized by some schools to reach these goals. The concept is to increase student comfort by creating a longer term relationship between students and their teacher. As with any educational approach, looping has both its positive elements and drawbacks. School systems have to weigh the two to determine what is best for their students.

The practice of "looping" means advancing teachers from grade to grade along with their classes of students. At the end of the second (or third) year in the pattern, the students move on to another teacher, and the looping teacher receives a new group of students at the lower grade level. Looping is not used in multiage grouping, since a multiage group does not comprise a single class grade.

As noted by Denault (1999), "With the spotlight in the United States on public schools, educators continue to struggle with the problem of how to improve the quality of education for students. At national, state and local levels, schools are looking at different ways to organize themselves for success."

Looping has long been supported by the Waldorf Schools, based on the work of the Austrian educator Rudolf Steiner who believed that students must be led and mentored by one person through the early education years. In the Waldorf School system, one teacher stays with the children from first through eighth grade (Phi Delta Kappa, 2001). Similarly, the West German-based Koln-Holweide system uses the looping approach as well. Their schools use a Team-Small-Group-Plan where about 85 to 90 students are team taught by six to eight teachers for a six-year period. Smaller groups of five or six students work together for the success of the whole team. Certain schools in Israel, Sweden, Japan and Italy have varying types of a looping program (ibid).

The basis of looping comes from Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs, where individuals require a pyramid of needs from the basic physiological ones such as food and water to the highest need of self-actualization. Looping may provide students greater personal security as well as enhancement of social interaction that leads to self-esteem, which are both on the hierarchy to reach self-actualization.

Proponents of looping give several reasons for why it is important. At Linden Elementary School, six teachers started looping in 1996 for the kindergarten and first, first and second and third and fourth grades. They hoped that it would put less pressure on the students and have them feel more at ease at the beginning of the school year. They also thought they would need to spend less time teaching new rules and testing students for their strengths and weaknesses and have more opportunity to develop better relationships with the children and parents (Little & Dacus, 1999). Students were equally distributed in these classes on the basis of factors such as intelligence, reading levels, race, behavior, work and socioeconomic status. The principal sent a letter to the parents of each student chosen saying that the teachers wanted to stay with the students for another year.

Positive comments from the teachers regarding the looping experience include the fact that it "made me a better teacher," "curbed the nonacademic interruptions," "I search for new ways to enrich the curriculum and tailor my lessons for my students' needs," and "In the past, I have had a hard time getting to know my students' parents. Now I know them on a first-name basis...They trust me completely." The parents say: "The continuity has made my kids more stable socially and psychologically..."

Denault (1999) discusses some of the other studies that have indicated positive results from looping. For example, resarch by Milburn at the University of British Columbia tracked the progress of children in similar urban schools for five years and found little difference in skill level, but a major difference in attitude toward school that he attributed to better social contacts. Boyer says that looping offers special connections between the students and the teacher, and home and school. Langley Park-McCormick Elementary School in Hyattsville, Maryland is an inner-city school with students representing 37 countries, multiple languages, poverty, homelessness and lack of formal education among parents. Looping has improved attitude and helped students find greater success.

Similarly, in East Cleveland, Ohio, there are multi-class assignments where one teacher remains with the same students from kindergarten through second grade. They have had "dramatic improvements" in academics and parent involvement. Other positive findings on looping include, according to Denault (1999): a strong sense of community of learners, increased time on task by the teachers, more freedom in the curriculum, social benefits, advantages to at-risk children, and professional growth for the teachers.

Jordan (2000) loved the fact that there was no backsliding at the beginning of the year after the long summer break. She also saw a much more self-assured and confident attitude with the students who "feel safe."

Those who question the value of looping are concerned about a student who is with a teacher for more than one year that he/she does not like. Also, the question is whether or not there is any academic value? In their study titled "Does Looping Make the Grade? A Preliminary Study of the Effects of Multiyear Assignment on Academic Achievement, School Attendance, and Learning Behaviors," the investigators (Schaefer, Khoury & Ginsburg-Block, 2003) sought to determine whether students who remain with the same teacher for consecutive years are better off. The researchers made a comparison of students at two elementary schools in the DuBois Area School District in central Pennsylvania. One of the schools had looping and the other did not. At the looping school, 48 children remained with the same teacher for both first and second grades. They were compared with 88 children at the non-looping school with different teachers for first and second grades.

The students were measured on reading and mathematics achievement, learning behavior, and attendance -- at the beginning of their first-grade year and at the end of the second grade. Schaefer et. al measured the students' academic achievement in reading and mathematics and assessed cognitive ability in skills such as verbal reasoning, verbal comprehension, pictorial reasoning, figural reasoning, and quantitative reasoning. To assess the children's learning behavior, they asked teachers to measure students on specific learning-related behaviors along the dimensions of competence motivation, attitude toward learning, attention/persistence, and strategy/flexibility. The researchers found that, after the two-year period, looping did not have any significant effect on the students' reading and math achievement, learning behaviors, or attendance rates. The conclusion: "Our findings were equivocal, as looping didn't demonstrate any positive -- or negative -- impact on the outcome variables measured."