Posted June 01, 2012, at 6:07 p.m.
GRAY, Maine — A cutting-edge education experiment at
Gray-New Gloucester Middle School could become the norm in Maine if
Education Commissioner Stephen Bowen has his way.
On any given day, students from as many as three grades can be found
studying together in the same classroom. Instead of letter grades,
student performance is based on a numbered system in which 4 means
proficient and a 1 or 2 means the student has more work to do before
moving on. And teachers who were used to pulling entire classes of
students through the same lessons at the same speed now are responsible
for monitoring each student’s progress individually.
Only a handful of schools in Maine are embracing proficiency-based
learning to the degree that Gray-New Gloucester schools do, though Bowen
said many more are in the early stages. That’s why Bowen, who is
pushing a new education strategy for Maine that includes many of those
concepts, visited the school Friday, where students, teachers and
administrators told him their experiment is a work in progress and
hasn’t advanced without challenges.
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