There is no standard perfect number for what constitutes a good student-teacher ratio. The number will vary according to budgeting, as smaller class sizes and more teachers cost the school more to staff and train.
There are now nearly 1. Support our journalism. Subscribe today. The more individual attention a student receives, then, the more his learning improves and the higher his chances for academic success become.
In order to achieve lower student-teacher ratios, many schools have begun to hire additional support staff, not just additional teachers. We have found that small class size does in fact impact student achievement. It also impacts the overall culture and success of an organization and through creative assessment and teacher scheduling, can be possible for many school types. One major advantage to teaching a large class in secondary school is that classes are usually high energy, fun and exciting; the classes go by quickly and are rarely boring; and most students are willing to participate.
Because core lessons take longer to complete, filler lessons that students dislike rarely happen. A new statistical analysis of data from a long-term study on the teaching of mathematics and science has found that smaller class sizes are not always associated with better pupil performance and achievement. With smaller class sizes, teachers can more easily maintain control and give more attention to each pupil. Class size remains the same for all class intervals. All I had to do was pull back the curtain.
Two days later I was on the phone with Mary Filardo, executive director of the NCSF, a nonprofit that supports K—12 school facilities officials in more than 25 states. I walked her through the mystery at hand—the school plan, the consultant, the Education Week guide, and, finally, the diagram credit pointing back to her.
My knee was bouncing, fingers at the ready at my keyboard for transcription. At last, the enigma would be no more. But before I could even finish asking the question, she interrupted in a tone that was equal parts alarm, annoyance, and puzzlement. But Filardo told me this was meant to be done using the total square footage of each room, before subtracting out the space for furniture.
Moreover, this calculation had nothing to do with any proposed three feet of personal space for each student, and 6-foot perimeter.
Of course none of this added up. But there was still another layer below. I could feel the heat of magma burbling just beyond. When I pressed for further details, Filardo put me in touch with David Sturtz, executive director of assessment services for Cooperative Strategies.
He did not subtract any space for classroom furniture. Now, with 20 students present, each one only needs an average of 35 square feet instead of Or what if you really did give each kid a radius of 3 feet for social distancing, as Sturtz suggested?
In that case, by nestling those circles like cookies on a baking sheet, you could actually fit 23 desks into the allotted space, for an average of 30 square feet per student. How much difference would this make? Remember, many of our classrooms are about square feet.
If each student needs 44 square feet, then 16 of them could safely be inside at any given time, plus a teacher. But if that requirement had been figured out correctly, it might well have ended up one-third smaller, at just 30 square feet—in which case the same classrooms could, at least theoretically, hold 25 socially-distanced students every day, plus a teacher.
For example, a college lecture hall will typically hold at least students and should allow approximately 12 square feet per student chair or desk area. Similar to square footage of classroom space per student, the size of the student in the actual room can significantly change the standard.
A standard room for an elementary school class may look very different than that for a secondary school. This is primarily due to the obvious fact that a first grader and an eleventh grader differ widely in height and weight.
Imagine a group of 20 seven-year-olds and another of 20 seventeen year-olds. These two classes clearly require varying degrees of space for movement and comfort level. According to the University of Georgia's School of Design and Planning Laboratory, the 20 elementary school children would need 1, square feet of classroom area, while the same number of secondary students require over more square feet to total 1, Based in Pittsburgh, Erica Loop has been writing education, child development and parenting articles since She has a Master of Science in applied developmental psychology from the University of Pittsburgh's School of Education.
Regardless of how old we are, we never stop learning.
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