Looping Classrooms: A New Educational Trend

Looping classrooms have become more and more popular in the US in recent years. Looping is when a teacher moves with his or her students at the end of the year to the next grade level rather than sending them to a new teacher. In many schools, looping has been integrated as a regular procedure  and has become normal for students to spend more than one year with the same teacher(s). Of course, as with any methods or practices, there are pros and cons that need to be considered when deciding if looping can work for your classroom or your child.

Pro: Strong relationships with students and parents. Looping allows teachers to get to know their students and parents extremely well. They can look back together and laugh at shared experiences over the years, and also look ahead to what things they might do next year. There is a level of trust that can only be built up over time, and looping allows for that time. Parents are also able to know and count on the way the teacher works, as well as what to generally expect during the year. Additionally, looping classrooms give teachers more opportunity to identify individual student strengths and weaknesses right from the first day of school. This means no wasted days at the beginning of the year because coming back from summer vacation is like coming back after a long holiday; the classroom just picks up where it left off.
Con: Less exposure to different teaching/learning methods. Every teacher adopts methods that work for them and fit with their style and personality. In any school, just walk between different classes and observe them each in turn, and you will see as many different teaching styles as there are teachers. They may be covering the same programs, but delivery varies greatly from one teacher to the next. While it’s great for students to become comfortable with the way their class is structured, it’s also important to be exposed to as many different ways of learning as possible. We all need to find strategies in life that suit us, and school is the perfect place to try out different things and figure out what works.

Pro: Benefits to classroom management. The typical classroom is inundated with established routines, procedures, and rules that must be followed for almost everything. There are also often set consequences or punishments for stepping out of line of which the students are well aware. Staying with the same teacher from year to year means that these policies are less likely to change, so teachers save time on teaching them to students at the start of every year.

Con: Students adapt less to change. There are also benefits to having that learning period at the beginning of the year, however. In life, we need to be able to adapt to changes, and when each school year is very similar to the last in structure and attendance, then the students are not given opportunities to adapt to new ways of working. Additionally, when things have been done a certain way for several years, it can be more difficult to change them. With looping especially, teachers may find themselves encountering pushback from students in the way of comments like, “we always do it like this” or “you never made us do that before.”

Pro: Promotion of teacher innovation. Having a new batch of students in the same grade each year can tempt teachers into teaching the exact same lessons in the exact same way every year. Looping does not allow for this because teachers must teach different grades each year, so new skills and competencies must be developed according to the curriculum. When teachers have the same students for multiple years, they need to think of new projects, new texts to read, new activities to do, and new units to cover, which prevents them from reusing the same materials over and over for years on end. It can also help with keeping up to date on new technologies and ideas in education, as teachers may need to spend time searching for new things to incorporate into classes.

Allison Green
Boston Tutoring Services