What Is Looping?

You may already have heard of looping under another name such as “continuous
learning,” “continuous progress,” “persisting groups,” “multi-year grouping,”
“teacher/student progression,” or a number of other terms. Looping, a term
coined by Jim Grant, author of “The Looping Handbook,” refers to the not-so-new
but increasingly common practice of keeping groups of students together for two
or more years with the same teacher.

The History of Looping

Looping has been around for a while in various forms. Rudolf Steiner, an Austrian
educator and philosopher living in Germany in the early 1900s, founded the
Waldorf Schools. These schools educated the children of the Waldorf-Astoria
cigarette factory workers. Steiner believed that a long-term relationship with the
teacher was beneficial to children. Waldorf teachers stayed with their students
from grades one through eight. Today in Germany, students and teachers stay
together from grades one through four. “Shall teachers in graded city 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...?” This
question was posed in a memo by the U.S. Department of Education in 1913.
The memo went on to discuss the advantages of such a class structure, outlining
some of the same advantages of looping that teachers today are noticing. (Grant,
Johnson, & Richardson, 1996). Deborah Meter, an award-winning New York City
educator and the author of The Power of Their Ideas, began using multi-year
assignments in her school in 1974. She considers looping essential because it
allows the teachers and students to get to know one another well.
Today, many teachers, administrators, and superintendents are “rediscovering”
the logic behind multiyear placements.