I saw an anecdote from a parent with two children somewhere, saying that when going outside, they used to reward the child who would get dressed first. This caused competition and bad feelings between the kids. Then they switched to rewarding both based on how quickly they got to the point where both were dressed. Since the children now had a common goal, they started helping each other.
I wonder if one could do apply something like that to a classroom, to make the smart kids be perceived as an asset by the rest of the class.
And perhaps, students will start asking their smater classmates to tutor them; which will in turn increase the status of the tutors. Maybe.
Datapoint: Finnish schools mostly don’t grade on a curve, and some kids did ask me for help in high school, help that I was happy to provide. For the most part it felt like nobody really cared about whether you were smart or not, it was just another personal attribute like the color of your hair.
I saw an anecdote from a parent with two children somewhere, saying that when going outside, they used to reward the child who would get dressed first. This caused competition and bad feelings between the kids. Then they switched to rewarding both based on how quickly they got to the point where both were dressed. Since the children now had a common goal, they started helping each other.
I wonder if one could do apply something like that to a classroom, to make the smart kids be perceived as an asset by the rest of the class.
Datapoint: Finnish schools mostly don’t grade on a curve, and some kids did ask me for help in high school, help that I was happy to provide. For the most part it felt like nobody really cared about whether you were smart or not, it was just another personal attribute like the color of your hair.