> Who needs a better teacher? The gifted student or the remedial student?
Both “gifted” (well prepared) and “remedial” (poorly prepared) students benefit dramatically from expert teaching. The well prepared students can continue to progress very quickly through challenging material. The poorly prepared students can get help finding and correcting their weaknesses and misconceptions, and practicing underdeveloped prerequisite skills.
The ideal is for everyone to get significant weekly 1:1 attention from a dedicated tutor/coach, who can help the student to deliberately practice. This significantly outperforms even the best classroom, and students with direct coaching improve probably 2–3 times faster than students without. Essentially all world-class performers in competitive events (sport, music, chess, math contests, ...) have significant amounts of 1:1 coaching.
Unfortunately as a society we don’t have the budget/manpower to provide hours per week of skilled tutoring for every student for every subject. So we try our best to balance available resources with students’/society’s needs.
Both “gifted” (well prepared) and “remedial” (poorly prepared) students benefit dramatically from expert teaching. The well prepared students can continue to progress very quickly through challenging material. The poorly prepared students can get help finding and correcting their weaknesses and misconceptions, and practicing underdeveloped prerequisite skills.
The ideal is for everyone to get significant weekly 1:1 attention from a dedicated tutor/coach, who can help the student to deliberately practice. This significantly outperforms even the best classroom, and students with direct coaching improve probably 2–3 times faster than students without. Essentially all world-class performers in competitive events (sport, music, chess, math contests, ...) have significant amounts of 1:1 coaching.
Unfortunately as a society we don’t have the budget/manpower to provide hours per week of skilled tutoring for every student for every subject. So we try our best to balance available resources with students’/society’s needs.