Grade level instruction to ALL students during core content time 

On the first day of school, many students are already behind.  What students already know when they start school can be a strong predictor of how well they will learn new curriculum. Concepts, skills, and vocabulary from the previous year, and the grades levels before can haunt students' efforts to acquire new information.

 

The following explanation is borrowed heavily from Learning in the Fast Lane by Suzy Pepper Rollins: remediation, the correction of deficiencies, attempts to fix everything that has gone wrong in students' schooling—to fill in all those missing pieces.  Remediation is based on the misconception that for students to learn new information, they must go back and master everything they missed. So, for example, all of the students who are weak in math—probably determined through a pre-test—are brought together and assigned a teacher who will reteach them basic skills. The students who have the largest gaps and are thus the most academically vulnerable are sent the furthest distance back.  In the end, this remedial model may produce a student who can finally reach the basic skills they missed but at the cost of never catching up with their peers.

 

This failure to move forward can lead to decreased student motivation. Aside from the fact that students who have already grown to dislike the subject that they have had remediation in now have additional classes in the subject they despise, it's difficult to feel motivated when there's no apparent progress.  Boredom creeps in, and students often give up and/or shut down.

 

The primary focus of remediation is mastering concepts of the past. Acceleration, on the other hand, strategically prepares students for success in the present—material from this week, or relating to the content at this time. Rather than concentrating on a plethora of concepts that students have failed to master, acceleration readies students for new learning. Past concepts and skills are addressed, but always in the purposeful context of future learning.

 

Acceleration jump-starts underperforming students into learning new concepts before their classmates even begin. Rather than being stuck in the remedial slow lane, students move ahead of everyone into the fast lane of learning. Acceleration provides a fresh academic start for students every week and creates opportunities for struggling students to learn alongside their peers.