Piloted during the 2022-2023 school year, combined English honors and general education classes aimed to make honors classes more accessible to every student and promote multi-level collaboration to boost overall learning. In the face of a growing literacy crisis, teachers believe that the heterogeneous class environment is helping them to challenge students in new ways, while some students report that the combined classes remove much of the appeal and rigor presented by separated classes.
English teacher Hannah Blue was a key member in pioneering the new English class model. Inspired by her master’s on the topic, Blue finds that mixed classes provide benefits to students across the board. By facilitating and encouraging collaboration between students with a wide range of English abilities, she hopes to further every student’s learning.
“There’s a lot of research that shows that having mixed groups, heterogeneous groups, does have benefits for student learning,” Blue said. “There’s benefit for both. If a higher-achieving student is helping a lower-achieving student, that re-teaching reinforces their own knowledge, and it benefits the lower student as well. Really, though, the biggest benefit is going to be for those students on the lower end of skills and abilities.”
For some teachers, the merge has helped them reframe teaching in a more holistic way. Instead of simply focusing on assignments and rigid curriculums, English 11 co-teacher Brent Sjodin believes helping students means adapting to their literacy needs and abilities.
“You have to identify where they are, go to where they are and then work with them to bring them further along,” Sjodin said. “I like to think of it as if we’re all in a cave. I’m gonna go back to you in the cave, and I’m gonna move you further along in the cave, whether that means getting to where I am or farther along the path in that direction because I’ve walked that path a few times already. I know where some of the big stones are that you might trip over.”
Many honors English students like junior Esther Baker, however, find that the combined classes lack much of the rigor a designated honors English classes typically have. She believes the issue might stem from the difficulty presented to educators trying to teach multiple levels in a single class period.
“It’s very reminiscent, for me, of elementary school and the way that some kids memorized their timetables much faster than others did – while other students might be taking their tests still, these other students are just sitting there, doing nothing,” Baker said. “I feel like a lot of the honors-level work was just adding onto assignments because there wasn’t really anything else they could do. There’s not enough time in a class to both teach the regular thing and then also have separate discussions and teaching time for honors students.”
Some honors students report not just a lack of rigor, but that the curriculums for honors and general education English in combined classes feel virtually identical. Freshman Nico Johns found that students in either level are completing the same work and taught the same lessons, with only slight differences in wordcounts or rubrics.
“Specifically with Gen Ed, the classes were more tailored for them. The classes feel introductory and not taken seriously, and the teachers have to work so hard to get their students’ attention that it sort of takes away from the honors feel of the classroom,” Johns said. “I just don’t see the point of having any honors classes if you’re going to make them combined and then teach the Gen Ed curriculum to the honors students.”
Above all, a main goal of merging honors and general education English classes into one was to create a more collaborative and diverse education environment for all students. Sjodin finds that the combined classes provide a unique learning tool for students in which students of all backgrounds and skill levels are exposed to different perspectives that help them grow.
“I’ve watched students who didn’t get things before get things eventually, and I’d love to say that was all my teaching skill, but I don’t think that it is. I think it’s the synergy of the group. It’s the ability to come together with a bunch of different ideas, and then they find one that they can all identify with,” Sjodin said.