Improving Public Schools (#1): Looping

John Merrow Uncategorized

Want to make public schools better for students and teachers?  Try “Looping.”

All over the US, public schools are reopening.  You can picture what’s happening  in about 85-90% of the classrooms: The teachers are spending the first week just getting to know their students, explaining (or developing) the rules for classroom behavior, working out the routines, setting expectations, and doing other important (but not particularly educational) stuff.  It’s a week of getting to know one another, with very little teaching and learning.

But in the other 10-15% of classrooms, the teachers will say “Welcome back” to their students, perhaps spend some time hearing about their summers, and then get down to work.  That’s because they taught the very same students last year and then moved up a year with their kids.  In other words, if they taught students the Fourth grade curriculum last year, this year they’ll be working together on the Fifth grade curriculum. They have the benefit of beginning the year with established personal relationships, and, as the MD turned educator James P. Comer has said many times, “No significant learning occurs without a significant relationship.” 

This practice is so rare in the United States that it has its own name, ‘Looping,’ but its effectiveness has been demonstrated in research studies over the years, most recently in a 7-year study in Tennessee. This sums it up: “(W)e find that having a repeat teacher improves achievement and decreases absences, truancy, and suspensions. These results are robust to a range of tests for student and teacher sorting. High-achieving students benefit most academically and boys of color benefit most behaviorally.”

“This is a nearly zero-cost policy,” says Leigh Wedenoja, a senior policy analyst with the Rockefeller Institute of Government and a lead researcher on the study. “Longer relationships are likely resulting in better behavior.”

As Kate Rix noted in US News & World Report in February 2023, “Spending more than one year with students is not a new idea in education. In multiage classrooms, such as in Montessori schools, children typically stay with the same teacher for several years. And Waldorf schools have looped teachers for more than a century. About 12% of public schools across the U.S. used some form of teacher looping in the 2017-2018 school year (the most recent year for which federal data is available). The practice is most common in Vermont, where more than half of schools use it.”

The professional organization of the nation’s school superintendents, AASA, explored the pluses and minuses of Looping back in 2010, making a compelling analogy with other professionals in a child’s life.  

“The notion of finding a new dentist or physician each year for every child seems absurd. We want children to know their doctors and to feel comfortable with them. It is important for physicians to know their patients as they grow and develop. Yet for many of these same children, their schools assign them to a new teacher and require they learn a new set of classroom routines and adult expectations every year.

Toward the end of the school year, many teachers have the feeling that “if I could just have more time with these students, I could teach them what they need to learn.” After spending eight months with a group, a teacher has learned each child’s academic and emotional needs–just when the educational opportunity is ending. Looping allows the relationships between teachers and students to blossom and deepen over a two- or three-year period.”

When the public schools in Attleboro (MA) studied the effects of Looping in grades 1-8 over a 7-year period, the results were stunning: 

  • Student attendance in grades 2 through 8 increased from 92 percent average daily attendance to 97 percent;
  • Retention rates decreased by more than 43 percent in those same grades;
  • Discipline and suspensions, especially at the middle schools, declined significantly;
  • Special education referrals decreased by more than 55 percent; and
  • Staff attendance improved markedly from an average of seven days absent per staff member per year to fewer than three.

The aforementioned AASA article, “In the Loop,” explores the history of the practice, noting that it was studied by the US Department of the Interior in 1913 (64 years before there was a federal Department of Education).  The pro-Looping writer asked, “Shall teachers in graded schools be advanced from grade to grade with their pupils through a series of two, three, four or more years so that they may come to know the children they teach and be able to build the work of the latter years on that of the earlier years, or shall teachers be required to remain year after year in the same grade while the children, promoted from grade to grade, are taught by a different teacher every year?” 

Today, of course, those who question Looping raise the specter of a child having a bad teacher two years in a row, or being taught the same material over and over because a disorganized teacher can’t get his act together.  The 1913 article anticipated those legitimate concerns. “The answer to both objections is easy and evident. The inefficient teacher should be eliminated. The man or woman who is unable to teach a group of children through more than one year should not be permitted to waste their money, time and opportunity through a single year.”

Looping also tells teachers that they cannot give up on a child.  They cannot shrug their shoulders about some difficult child and say to themselves, “Well, he won’t be my problem next year.”  Because he will be!  Which means that teachers have to figure out how to get through to every child, using all the available resources, and calling on peers for help, and so on.  No giving up on anyone!  Truly, no child left behind….

Looping isn’t perfect, because sometimes a teacher and a student just do not connect.  That requires intervention and a new arrangement.  

But Looping works, so why isn’t it common practice?  Inertia is probably the most important reason. Change requires effort, and it’s easier to just go on doing what you’ve always done.  Sadly, that means that a teacher becomes known not for his or her teaching but for the students they teach.  “He’s a Sixth grade teacher.” Or “She teaches Second grade,” instead of “They are teachers. They teach children!”

Doing Looping properly requires an effective teacher, responsive administrators, and support of the teachers’ union and the parents.  That’s workable, but it is real work. However, Looping is virtually cost-free, educationally effective, and, by most reports, extremely satisfying for the participating teachers, who finally have time to develop relationships with their students….and often with their parents.

That additional benefit–connecting with families–in a time when insidious forces are working hard to undermine public trust in public schools strikes me as reason enough for school administrators and school boards to seriously consider embracing Looping.

22 thoughts on “Improving Public Schools (#1): Looping”

  1. Glad you highlighted this. Everyschool district in America should engage. As you point out it’s virtully no cost…and it “works”. You may remember we had started looping in Philadelphi through middle school into high school. Tough to get teachers to try it but we never had one that I knew about who ever wanted to go back. One time I rrepresented the U.S. at n OECD gathering in Paris. I sat next to the Minister of Education from Finalnd who said that there one teacher, at least at the time, “looped”(not his word) with a group of kids throughout their entire schooling expeiience. Relationships are key. I’ve become convinced that looping does not go far enough. I have become convinced that properly staffed with appropriate training that restorative practices is and essential part of the mix. You might be interested in http://www.restorativeschoolsmaryland.org, a new organization I founded in March with the objective of all schools in Maryland becoming Restorative Schools over the next ten years, changing to school culture throughout the state.

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    • We ought to explore the obstacles. Yes, it’s initially tough to implement, in part because change is almost always resisted. But what happens? Why doesn’t it become automatic? I have a hunch part of the problem lies with teacher training institutions (surprise!).

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  2. Thanks, John and David. I agree with you and the research cited 100%. I worked in a K-12 district school option that started in 1971 and continues to this day (as a grade 7-12 school). Every student has an advisor who stays with that student for several years, for reasons outlined in the research you cited. The advisor-advisee relationship is very strong.

    Our younger daughter attended a district option that practiced looping for a number of years. It was hugely helpful, again for reasons cited in the research. For reasons that have not been explained, the school stopped doing this a few years ago.

    Many more schools should loop, and I’ll try in the coming year via a newspaper column I write to share the research you’ve gathered. Of course you’ll be cited as the source of some of this.

    Thanks again.

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  4. Looping can be very effective. I know because I pushed for this practice 9-12 for over 30 years in my high school. I was primarily an ESL teacher but also a soccer and baseball coach. I taught 1) Spanish for Native Speakers 2) ESL US History 3) ESL ENGLISH. Sometimes I had the same student three times a day and coached them in the afternoons. I tutored and talked to them on long bus rides home after games. Many times I had the same students for three and four years in a row. It made a big difference for classroom control and for academic performance. And I am proud of the fact that many of my students have a high level of bilingual competence. One of my former students who knew NO ENGLISH in grade 9 graduated and went to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo where he studied engineering. His English was so good that one of his professors asked him what private school he had gone to. Then he asked him if perhaps he was a Canadian. He was one of those students I taught for multiple classes, was on my sports teams and who studied hard. He was an ESL student and came after school to get tutored in PHONICS and get spelling lessons. He was highly motivated (the first in his family to graduate from High School) but also benefitted from TIME ON TASK. Sadly what happens in American schools? Programs like mine have a moth-like existence. Some of my knowledge was passed on to some students some of whom became teachers but the programs I taught no longer exist. They were not required by the state and so despite their success gradually faded away. All the textbooks and dictionaries were thrown in the garbage (everything is online now). Many of the classes are APEX online classes. Better than nothing but no comparison to the native speaker classes and AP classes we used to teach Teachers struggle to have successful programs but often these programs just go by the wayside in large part due to administrators who only care about ADA and retention (it seems to me).

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  8. John, as noted above, we agree on looping. Another thing we agree on (and David Hornbeck is a big authority and advocate as well) is service learning.

    Here’s info about a free zoom meeting we’re doing in Oct. We helped get this legislation passed (to significantly increase # of programs in which students learn construction skills as they build homes for low income families & families experiencing homelessness.

    While so far only the Mn legislature has passed this law, there are similiar programs called Youthbuild in many states. So some of you might be interested. If you’d like to participate please contact me – joe@centerforschoolchange.org

    PLEASE CONSIDER PARTICIPATING – OR ENCOURAGING SOMEONE ELSE FROM YOUR SCHOOL TO PARTICIPATE

    What a free zoom mtg presented by Center for School Change with guest Tal Anderson, director, Manager, Community Initiatives, Minnesota Housing Finance Agency, along with a teacher & student from GAP School
    Why: Anderson will explain the Challenge Grant Program, which allows high schools to apply for up to $100,000 to create a program in which high school students learn construction skills as they build a home for a low-income family or a family experiencing homelessness. More than $45 million is in the pool of money to be distributed – so there is a decent chance some schools will receive these funds, along with other organizations working to help provide affordable housing in their communities. Schools can apply in partnership with other organizations. Star Tribune story here about GAP School in St Paul, which is doing this. The RFP will be issued first quarter, 2024 but we are doing this webinar now to
    a. Help educators understand the RFP and what they could do this fall to get ready to apply
    b. What are some lessons learned from other schools that have done this
    b. Identify some of the things that MHFA will look for in the application.
    When: Oct 23, 3-4 PM

    To register for the zoom meeting, please send an email by Oct 16 to joe@centerforschoolchange.org. On registration, we will send the zoom connecting information.

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