We're Baaack!

NEA Today, Apr 2004 by O'Neil, John

What results when a teacher follows her students up the elementary school ladder from first to fifth grade? You guessed it: A classroom that functions as a family-minus the sibling rivalries.

"Sometimes, when you first go into a class, you get a really nervous feeling because you don't know anyone and you really don't know what to do."

That's Dillon, a fifth grader at Bailey's Elementary in Falls Church, Virginia, explaining those rough first weeks every fall, when anxious kids bearing the latest backpack fashions try to figure out their place jn a new classroom with a teacher who knows very little about them.

But Dillon and most of his peers in Melissa Fleischer's fifth-grade class at Bailey's haven't endured that rocky transition for a while now. That's because Fleischer has been "looping" with her students since the first grade. In 1999, she started with a group of 17 first graders. Eleven students from that original group are now included among the 22 students in her current class. Many of the others joined the experiment in the second or third grade. Only two students joined the group this fall and one of them, Catryna, fit in so quickly that the class voted her Student Council rep.

Across the country, looping is used in a relatively small number of schools, mostly at the primary level. Fleischer's approach-sticking with a class for five consecutive years-is almost unheard of. Currently, only one other grade-level teacher at Bailey's is looping with her class, moving together from first to second grade this year.

But, though it's rare, looping is paying big dividends in Fleischer's diverse classroom, where many of the students speak English as a second language, some are labeled as gifted, and others have been diagnosed with learning disabilities.

"When you go into Melissa's class, you get the sense that the students and the teacher share a very deep understanding of each other's personalities and strengths and weaknesses," says Kristen Neshati, whose daughter, Niku, started with Fleischer in the first grade. "Niku is the kind of student who would not have come into her own as easily and confidently as she has with one teacher who's been committed to her over the years."

"One of the biggest benefits of looping is the community it helps establish," explains Fleischer. "We're like a family. It's an environment where kids can take a leap-they'll try for an answer or share a piece they've written aloud. They're much more likely to do that than if they just had a year together."

Not only does the class have fewer discipline problems, kids are quick to help one another out. "Listen to the way they talk to one another," says Fleischer. "They ask questions of each other; they give 'wait time.' If a kid says, 'I don't understand this,' and I can't be over there in 30 seconds, another kid will explain it."

Their self-assurance and teamwork showed during a writing lesson just before Valentine's Day. With everyone out of their chairs and sitting on the carpet, Fleischer led a discussion on good lead sentences, giving examples from Charlotte's Web, The True Story of the Three Little Pigs, and other books the class had read.

After some time to draft their pieces, the students, one after another, fearlessly mounted a stool at the front of the class and began reading from their works-in-progress.

"I stared out over the open landscape long after they had gone," one student offered. "Hurry, put on your gloves!" read another. "Pop-ups [ads] are an ongoing, money-sucking, time-waster, and they should be against the law," said a third.

The presentations were devoid of the putdowns you might typically hear, and many of the listeners offered thoughtful and polite comments in return. "All these [lead sentences] make you want to find out more," one student noted insightfully midway through the presentations. "I've been inspired," added another. The kids were so into it that Fleischer had to rein the conversation in after 20 minutes to give more time to complete the drafts.

"They take risks," Fleischer says later. "Ever since the first grade I've been putting their writing up on the overhead projector and teaching through their examples." At first, the kids just reacted to misspellings and poor grammar. Now they all understand that "if your piece is up there, we're going to tell you the great things about it and also help you improve it....The single biggest benefit of looping is the trust: the kids trust each other, and they trust me."

But that's hardly the only thing. Fleischer's multi-year experiment has actually helped her teaching by providing:

A FAST START. Most teachers spend lots of time each fall introducing students to classroom rules and procedures-and to one another. Fleischer's kids hit the ground running. "If we've saved a month or two each year-and we've been at this five years-you figure we're a good clip ahead of where the kids might have been at this time," she says.

ENHANCED KNOWLEDGE OF EACH CHILD'S LEARNING. Kids have different learning styles and they tend to learn in bursts, going a year or more between "breakthroughs." That's a challenge to teachers who spend September learning students' names and finish with them just nine months later. Fleischer says she's better able to troubleshoot students' learning problems and build on their strengths because she knows them so well.