The Benefits of Having the Same Teacher More Than Once: A Brown University Study
When students have a teacher for more than one year, they benefit academically and behaviorally, as shown by a working paper by the Annenberg Institute at Brown University.
“Student-teacher relationships are a key and core feature of a successful school, and one way to help develop those is by giving teachers and students more time to get to know each other,” said Matthew Kraft, an associate professor of education and economics at Brown University and a co-author of the paper.
Waldorf schools utilize the benefits of looping in many ways. Teachers are not only experts in their field of study, but also experts in each individual student, and in the class community as a whole.
Early Childhood: Most students in our mixed age kindergarten have the same teacher for 2 years.
Grades 1-8: Students have the same classroom teacher for several years, and sometimes for the full 8 years. Students also get to learn from the same subject teachers in Mandarin, Spanish, Music, Handwork, Eurythmy, and P.E. throughout their 8 years.
High School: Students learn from subject teachers throughout their four years in high school. Our graduates regularly share that their relationships with their teachers was one of the most transformative elements of their time at PWHS.
An article in Education Week details the findings of this paper. With intentional looping, teachers can adjust academic content to maximize learning over two years, the paper says. And learning how to support an individual student is a teaching skill that can take time to develop, just like classroom management and teaching a certain subject, said Leigh Wedenoja, the lead author of the paper and a senior policy analyst at the Rockefeller Institute of Government at the State University of New York.
