If a teacher can't "learn" the next year's curriculum faster than the children they are teaching, there is something very wrong with the selection and hiring process for teachers...
It’s one thing to learn from a teacher who knows the material and a wholly different experience to learn from someone who knows the material.
My literature professor in high school knew literature. His class was amazing. He spent each period bringing the material to life and telling stories from authors’ lives, the background behind each story and poem, additional anecdotes etc, and really put the whole thing in context. Then for the last 10 minutes he explained what we needed to know for the standardized curriculum.
That sounds more like he knew the subject (literature) rather than knowing the material (n'th grade literature). In my experience the people best equipped to do something like that are people that have knowledge beyond the class they teach - the high school teacher that has a phd in the subject they are teaching, the university teacher that is currently involved in research etc. Especially in physics and mathematics I think this is relevant, as there are many times where questions naturally lead into topics from a much more advanced level. Like say the teacher explains that 3 isn't divisible by 2 and someone pupil says it is in fact divisible and the answer is 1.5. A teacher with solid knowledge of abstract algebra, that knows peanos axioms, and how Q is constructed from Z will be better equipped to deal with that.
On the other hand I could see how teaching one and the same class over and over might lead to a bored teacher and a narrow perspective.
A teacher can learn the curriculum far faster but any educator will tell you they do a better job of teaching a lesson when they’ve already taught it before. Looping literally means every lesson you teach will be your first time teaching it. It’s silly to give up on all the advantages that come from adapting a lesson after seeing what works well and what doesn’t. The challenges from having a different teacher in grade two and grade one aren’t larger than the benefits of having a grade one teacher who’s delivered the same lessons many times and constantly improved them.
> Looping literally means every lesson you teach will be your first time teaching it.
I don't think that's literally true, even if you're correct that looping for more than a year is suboptimal. A proportion of teachers are teaching a curriculum for the first time even "without looping" (i.e. looping for only a year). With two-year looping, teachers only take a year longer before they're teaching a curriculum they've taught before.
Is there any advantage in looping for less than a year (e.g. changing teachers each semester)? What's the optimal amount of looping?
