Response to Boaler and Staples article

Although a bit lengthy, I enjoyed reading Boaler and Staples article as it gave some valuable data on the differences between the "standard" and "Railside" teaching styles.  The two main points of emphasis were on improving overall learning of mathematics, and creating/attaining an equitable environment.  I personally enjoyed reading about how Railside tried to reduce inequalities.  This is something that I previously thought was extremely hard to incorporate into a mathematics classroom but the teachers at Railside used some creative and effective pedagogy to attain this.  It basically boiled down to group work, collaborative discussion, multidimensional solutions, and justification for these solutions.  One idea that struck me was having groups work on a particular problem, then randomly picking one of the group members solution, if the solution was wrong then the rest of the group had to help out that individual.  This gave a sense of responsibility for the entire group.  In addition, the idea that

"high attaining students developed deeper understanding from the

act of explaining work to others,"

grabbed my attention because one of the math workshops I attended had a teacher from Oak Bay who was experiment with peer teaching and was having great success with it, despite it being somewhat controversial. I am quite intrigued by the idea of students teaching students because it potentially has great benefits for both students.  Overall the article presented some creative teaching tactics and they had solid evidence to back it up.

The actual study was done quite well in my opinion.  They had accurate numerical data, and even written feedback from students to back up their results.  They had a good sample size, duration, and methods.  In terms of weaknesses I couldn't see any major flaws in the study.  A minor weakness was the fact that Railside mathematics classes were half a year long where as the traditional schools were a year long.  I think the study could have been more accurate if they had another school that had half year math classes. Nonetheless I don't think the impact was that big as it just allowed Railside students the option of being able to take more math classes and get further ahead.  Also, the CAT 6 scores were significantly lower than the traditional schools but they justified this due to the language being unfamiliar to Railside students. A fairly legitimate argument in my opinion.

As a whole, I found their conclusions to be quite accurate and I found it difficult to come up with any arguments against them.