Why Levels are Better than Grades

Heart of Dakota: A Leveled Curriculum

I have noticed that, in homeschooling, there exists materials that are "level" based.  This means that they are for a range of ages or grades or developmental stages.  They aren't just for third graders or seventh graders, they are for ages 9 to 11, or grades 2 through 5.

I like this!

I have written previously about how my youngest daughter often is in more than one grade level at once.  My older daughter did the same thing through the years as she was being homeschooled. It was standard to use levels for education in the past.  Take the McGuffey readers, once a staple in the American school systems.  Students were in a "reader" level, not a "grade" level.  Those books, when placed into modern reading levels, go well into college level reading.  This explains why a student that mastered all the McGuffey readers was well-educated.  It also explains why we had a  96% literacy rate and why the farmers could easily grasp The Last of the Mohicans, Shakespeare, Dickens, and The King James Bible all through the 1800s and early 1900s.

The truth is that our modern education system has been dumbed-down in many ways.  And while that saddens me to a great degree, I can pick and choose from the modern educational methods and ones used in the past in deciding how to educate my children. In so many ways, homeschooling brings freedom in that my children can learn in ways that suit them best, with instruction that is individualized to a large degree.

Megan is in the second reader.  She could easily read into the third reader, because she is an advanced reader.  I placed her in the second reader so that her writing could catch up to her reading level.  She probably won't stay there long, as she is telling me that she is bored by the level.  The second reader corresponds to a 3rd through 5th grade reading levels.

I have discovered that this type of learning, progressing through levels, or mastery learning, works in nearly every subject.  We have been doing mastery learning in many different ways this year.  I have a book list sorted by reading levels.  I have math sorted by levels.  Even grammar is sorted by levels.  She works slowly, methodically, through each level, gaining skills and not simply grade levels.

 Many of the homeschool curriculum sellers know that mastery learning works.  They write their materials to span grades and ages, easy to customize, with a focus on skills and concepts, not specific to a restrictive narrow age and grade level.

The modern system sets skills they want students to master every year.  The problem is that if a student struggles in an area, they are considered "behind."  If a student can easily master the standards, they are considered "advanced."  Most students fall in the middle, where they can easily master some concepts and struggle in others.  The truth is that, if left to master one concept at a time, taking the time to master the harder to understand ones, then moving more quickly through the ones they can grasp easily, then a student will progress at a more natural pace, often a quicker pace.  They will have mastered concepts by taking them line upon line, precept upon precept.  They won't be rushing through the materials to keep up with a class.  There won't be any moving ahead until a concept is grasped.

This means that most of the time a child won't be moved on to the next skill level if he or she doesn't understand.  Occasionally, when a child is struggling, I have moved on to something different or reviewed other skills for awhile, and then gone back later to the area that was not understood.  I have found that this helps in many ways.  It gives the child's brain a rest from what they weren't grasping.  Sometimes their brain needs the rest.  Sometimes their brain simply needs to mature a little more to grasp the concept.  Nearly every time when I have taken a break and then gone back to the concept later, the child understands it without the struggle they had earlier.  In a classroom environment, this can't happen because the teacher has thirty students and an academic plan that decides what is taught and when it is taught.

Most often, in a homeschool situation, even if a mom has five children, she can easily stop a skill and review.  Working in levels helps in this because it is not a big deal to review skills for a bit before tackling a tough area.  The student is not going to get to a new level and be lost because he or she hadn't mastered the material in the previous level but understood enough to pass.  Incremental steps, a little at a time, building and building, until the student is working at an advanced level, has developed critical thinking skills, and is developmentally ready for the next step means that a child isn't going to feel inferior or superior based on ability alone.

I have seen over and over that learning this way works.  There is one thing that is key in this type of learning... no comparison.  In contemporary education, students are pitted against each other and measured against each other.  They are tested and tested and tested some more.  Competition does not always breed healthy learning.  With levels, students are in competition with no one.  They only have to master the material before them, engage in the learning, not feel that they have to do better or be better than the student next to them.  It becomes about learning, not competing.

This past semester has been one of experimenting more with "leveled-learning."  I took some time off of our regular curriculum with my ten year old, even though it is also level-based, to focus on increasing the level in the basics.  I like the results.  As my daughter makes her way through the McGuffey reader, she is mastering the vocabulary, the sentence structure, the spelling.  We are doing the same thing with dictation.  She is slowly mastering each lesson, one day at a time, growing and learning without pressure.  I even have been doing something similar for math, even backing up a bit and reviewing so that she has truly mastered the concepts before moving forward.

Soon, she will jump back into her curriculum.  She was struggling with the writing.  She will have had a semester of review and slow skill building, especially in her writing, to ensure that she can  more successfully get the most from her studies.  I am slowly moving her from the grammar program we have been using to one that has more writing, to build her skill level even more.  She has focused on increasing her dictation level and completed a lot of copywork through her McGuffey readers.  Mostly, she has done a lot of reading.  In the words of Sally and Clay Clarkson, "If you want your children to be good writers, have them read good books."

There is a sense of relief and peace that comes from leveled learning.  A child isn't pushed to conquer skills that they aren't ready for developmentally, but they are still learning and growing all the time.  They can come at a skill from multiple ways, or maybe just take a break from it for awhile.  Suddenly, their brain matures and they have that light bulb moment.  They learn easily and quickly what was taking them months to previously learn.  It is not uncommon for a student to jump the traditional grade levels in weeks or months.

 My youngest did this in her reading one summer.  She was involved in the summer reading program at the local library.  Every week I would take her to the library for books, and let her check out materials that interested her.  When fall came and we jumped back into her phonics program, she read through material she hadn't gotten to the previous school year as if she had already learned it.  I had her read every book in the program.  What should have taken a year, she completed in two weeks with ease.  Reading for fun had boosted her reading level by at least an academic school year in weeks.  She had been making steady progress in her skills, but giving her brain a break and coming at reading a different way, even if unintentionally, helped her to grow her skills quickly.

Leveled learning is not common, except in environments such as homeschools and tutoring centers.  It is very difficult to do such individualized, leveled learning in public or even private schools where the teachers have large class sizes.  However, it is not impossible, as this is how the one-room schoolhouses of yesteryear taught. 

The one-room schoolhouses had students of a variety of ages and levels in one classroom.  They were sorted by levels, slowly advancing in their level, progressing at the pace they learned best.  Not all children in the same levels were at the same pace in those levels, either.  It was very individualized, andA person who won’t read has no advantage over one who can’t read. students learned with some one-on-one time with instructors or older students in their levels of reading and math, and what amounted to unit studies for other areas such as history and science.  Some of the greatest minds came out of those one-room schoolhouses.  Even more, the rate of illiteracy was small.  There were immigrants and a few uneducated that couldn't read.  It was illegal for slaves to be taught to read in the South.  However, there was also an emphasis on Bible reading and understanding the Bible well was of utmost importance.  That couldn't happen if the population was illiterate.  As a result, the literacy rate was high.  Today, the literacy rate is around 85% in the United States, but the problem is not just literacy.  The problem is that many can read, but average materials are at a fifth grade reading level.  High School students struggle to understand our founding documents.  It is no wonder the Constitution isn't a document that is respected when many can't even understand it. 

Then there are the people that don't read.  Many people simply don't read and instead choose to gain their information though television and the internet.  In the words of Mark Twain, "A person who won’t read has no advantage over one who can’t read." One-third of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives.  80 percent of U.S. families did not buy or read a book last year.

What does this have to do with leveled learning?  Leveled learning keeps a child engaged because the learning isn't a cause for burnout.  A student may read a thousand books over the course of his or her education, but they are reading at a level they built up to, not one that is above their comprehension and skill level.  The result is that a student won't see reading as the enemy, as a drudgery.  While it might not be a favorite past-time of every student, a student that doesn't see learning and reading as a form of torture will be more apt to stick with what helped them succeed when they were younger.

We have done leveled learning since beginning homeschooling.  We will continue to take this route because it works.  Leveled learning individualizes education, creating a tailored experience, giving the student the ability to reach their potential.  While there are many motivations for homeschooling, this is one of the most important reasons to me.  If a child can learn and grow in healthy ways
, they are more able to be all the God calls them to be.