Small Class Sizes: Why it’s Just the Starting Line

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Small Classrooms and Learning Support

I want to talk about small classrooms, or classrooms with fewer children in them. So, small classroom sizes.

It’s very important to know that small classrooms don’t automatically solve the problem that you’re having, or that your child is having, in the bigger classrooms.

What’s happening in the bigger classrooms is they’re falling behind because they’re not getting personal attention. They really are struggling to learn directly from the teacher without being able to ask too many questions, or the teacher’s going too fast, or they’ve missed something, or visual processing, sensory integration, that kind of difficulty is getting in their way of processing learning.

What Smaller Classrooms Actually Do

So you take a classroom of thirty children and you put them into a classroom of, let’s say, fifteen, or you go smaller, where we are, which is a classroom of anywhere between five and eight, and what that does is it gives your child more access to the learning.

But the smaller classroom itself doesn’t solve the problem. It solves the problem of access to learning.

We still need to catch up. We still need to figure out what the barriers to learning are. What the small classroom does is it gives the teacher an opportunity to manage them.

She gets to know the child. She observes. She sees where the problems might be. She tailors some of her approach to see if she’s right or if she’s wrong. Does it really help? Does it not help?

All of that is the benefit afforded by a small classroom.

But the small class itself doesn’t change things other than to give more access to learning. That’s sort of where the work starts.

The work starts with the teacher being in a position to have time to spend with your child. Then she needs to be able to figure that out.

Understanding the Child Over Time

So she’s figuring your child out over a period of time. The more feedback you give her, the quicker she can figure it out. Otherwise, she has to start from scratch.

As she gets to know the child, she’ll develop a better understanding of what’s going on. Hopefully, she reflects that back to you, and you can reflect it back to her, so you can get to the crux of the issue sooner.

Now, in my experience, it’s more like an onion than a single crack. You identify the presenting problem and work really hard to help the child overcome it.

If that works, and that starts to become a layer that’s no longer a barrier and goes away, what happens is there’s another layer. Sometimes, the next layer can seem worse than the first because it’s masked or obscured by the first layer of difficulty.

So we’re going to peel away this onion and all these difficulties, finding new ones as we go, getting to the core of your child and their real learning style, and hopefully helping them succeed and progress in their academic studies.

The Goal Is Independent Learning

But that doesn’t happen automatically just because it’s a small class.

It happens in a small class environment which is targeted towards your child’s learning difficulty and how to help them overcome it.

So it’s not the teacher that overcomes it, because if it’s the teacher that’s overcoming it, if she changes her teaching style in order to match your child’s learning style, that gets them to learn, and there’s a huge component in that, definitely.

But then there’s the other component: how your child is learning. Do we need to adjust that learning style so that, no matter what the teacher is doing, he is still learning? Then he can move on to a new school and be alright.

So it’s about strengthening your child. Not so much, no matter how the teacher is teaching, but to give him the skill rather than to say, “Yes, they can do it, but only under the conditions of,” and then it’s the teacher’s approach.

While we might start that way to figure out the approach that gives them an opportunity to start learning, because that success will breed further success and motivation and confidence in themselves, ultimately, we want the confidence, motivation and success in the child.

So no matter who is teaching them, and where they are, and what grade they’re at, whether it’s school or varsity or beyond, they are able to manage their own learning.

That’s the goal.

Why Small Environments Help

That really is more possible in a small environment where the teacher is well-trained, knows what she’s doing, and she has fewer children, so she can spend more time with each child.

In a classroom of thirty to forty, your child unfortunately just gets lost at the back because nobody’s slowing down. They can’t slow down. They’ve got so much curriculum to cover.

So, a small environment, like ours, typically has more time on its hands. The teacher has more time on their hands, and we strip away the curriculum a little bit so we can put more emphasis on mathematics, literacy, study skills, organisation and planning, and on all the things that are keeping them from learning.

So it’s very therapeutic in nature.

The Real Work Starts After the Move

But the message that I want to put across today for you to think about is, are you relying on the fact that you moved your child to a small school and now everything’s fine?

Because that just isn’t the case.

Moving them to a small school means that they now have an opportunity to start building their learning skills, and the work really starts when you move them. It doesn’t end when you move them.

It would typically be a two to three-year process.

It’s a shorter process when the home does as much as they can, when they take lots of ownership of what needs to happen in order for children to succeed, as well as the school.

If it’s only one and not the other, then it takes a lot longer for children to figure out their own learning style, their own barriers, develop the skills, and become powerful learners.

But when everyone works together, I’ve seen it happen in six months. I’ve also never seen it happen.

So the partnership is very important because it’s a long-term process. It’s a two to three-year process.

Your child is going to have difficulty to some extent forever. A great example is dyslexia. If you are truly dyslexic, you will always be dyslexic.

You’re either going to be a high-functioning dyslexic or a low-functioning one, and you can really get to high functioning, and the kernel of that starts with