An Experimental School

An Experimental School A Study Of A Possible Renewal Of Public Education

Caleb Gattegno

Educational Solutions Worldwide Inc.

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First published in the United States of America in 1973. Reprinted in 2009.

Copyright © 1973 – 2009 Educational Solutions Worldwide Inc. Author: Caleb Gattegno All rights reserved ISBN 978-0-87825-022-6 Educational Solutions Worldwide Inc. 2nd Floor 99 University Place, New York, NY 10003-4555 www.EducationalSolutions.com

The Twin Parks School C.S. 234 and C.S. 129 The Bronx, N.Y.

Table Of Contents Foreword..................................................................... 1 Introduction ................................................................ 5 Part I ......................................................................... 17 The Birth Of An Institution ...................................................19 Part II ........................................................................ 41 The Summer Seminar Of 1971.............................................. 43 The Professorial Seminar ......................................................67 Part III....................................................................... 75 Views Of The Consultants’ Work...........................................77 1 The View Of A Teacher Of Teacher ....................................79 2 The View Of A Psychologist ............................................. 101 3 The View Of A Data Recorder..........................................109 How Precision Teaching Was Carried Out At The Twin Schools: ................................. 117 Using Counts In Observation: ....................................... 135 Where To From Here? ................................................... 141 Footnotes........................................................................143 Bibliography ...................................................................143 Technical Note: ..............................................................144 4 The View Of A Chief Consultant ......................................145

Part IV ..................................................................... 155 Appendix 1 Experimental Schools ......................................157 Appendix 2 What Is An Educational Experiment? ........... 165 Appendix 3 The Experimental School Of The Bronx, C.S. 129 .............................................177 Adult Population Of School And Their Functions: ....... 188 Appendix 4 The Professorial Seminar Of The Experimental School C.S. 129 .................................191 Appendix 5 The Phenomenon Of A New School ................197 Appendix 6 Notes On Open Books ....................................207 What Is An Open Book? ................................................208 What Can Be Studied With An Open Book? .................208 How Does One Fill An Open Book? ..............................209 What Makes A Good Open Book? ................................. 210 How To Proceed When Inviting Students To Use An Open Book? .................................. 212 Appendix 7 The Open Book For Teachers Of Reading ...... 215 Appendix 8 Models For Our School ...................................223 New Possibilities............................................................226 Appendix 9 An Open Book On The Luncheon Period At C.S. 129-234 ...............................233 Appendix 10 An Open Book: Looking At Our School ........ 237 Appendix 11 A Community Educational Program For C.S. 129 .....................................243 Appendix 12 A Note To Solutions’ Staff Members Working At C.S. 234 And C.S. 129...................... 245 Appendix 13 A Graphical Model ......................................... 251

Appendix 14 A Letter To The C.S. 129-234 Staff.................255 Appendix 15 The Twin Parks School As A Bilingual School ..............................................261 Appendix 16 Published Progress Reports On The Twin Parks School .................................... 271 Voices Of The Children From The Bronx (Via Katherine)............................................. 271 Elimination Of Illiteracy At C.S. 129 ............................ 276 I................................................................................. 276 II. .............................................................................. 280 The Twin Parks School (Progress Report) ................... 283 The Professorial Seminar ............................................. 286 The Professorial Seminar (Progress Report) ............... 289

Foreword

As I collected and prepared the writings which form this book I realized that they are an offering to everyone interested in education, for at least these reasons: •

They give evidence that there has been and perhaps there still is at least one Experimental School in the United States.

•

They will confirm that a complex, decisive educational adventure can be set up, started and pursued by a relatively small number of educators who are determined to do something and clear about what they engage in.

•

They will be testimony to the possibility of getting things done quickly which ordinarily would require lengthy processes and red tape. Indeed, so many hurdles were removed because the proposal was attractive to many people in all sorts of positions who wanted to see such a school in operation and learn what was possible from it, that in only four months the school was under way.

1

An Experimental School

The plan for the book was dictated by the desire to serve as many readers as possible and to offer enough documentation to assist those who might wish to undertake a project related to the one that made it possible to have a public school as an Experimental School in New York City. Of the whole story of this educational experiment certain of the parts are interesting in themselves and have an appeal for educators with specialized needs — administrators, researchers, people interested in bilingual education or in eradicating illiteracy in their schools.

Part I, The Birth of an Institution, will let people know how such a project can be nurtured and brought into being. It should be of special interest to superintendents and school boards.

Part II describes seminars, one for the training of teachers and one for the professors who observed the project. It should interest teachers of teachers as well as teachers of children.

Part III contains the reports of some of the consultants from Educational Solutions who worked in the school. When it is seen that so few people could contribute so much in a short time, the economy of this way of working becomes evident.

Part IV (Appendices) contains all of the proposals and documents related to the funding and approval of the project, as well as papers written by me and others on various occasions in response to challenges we met while working at the school. It seems important to remind readers that such writings were not theoretical, but were a way of working by responding to problems on the spot with all of the resources we could muster.

2

Foreword

Our thanks to all those who made the Twin Parks School into a most exciting experiment and made it possible for so many educators to learn so much in such a short time.

3

Introduction

When over many years as an educator I asked the question, “How can we really bring about change in education?� different answers came my way. At a given time the answer was what it was because of the school system I was contemplating, or because of the level of my understanding of the question, or because of which problem had been solved since I last considered it.

The present answer took almost 36 years to emerge. Over the years I have come to see: 1

that only if I could manage to express an answer in terms of perception and action would anyone reach it; ideas in verbal terms lead to confusion and soon become political issues,

2 that demonstrations, people,

not

lectures,

convince

3 that when one is moved one can act and justify the action inwardly,

5

An Experimental School

4 that people’s own interest is the prime mover in their lives and that change follows the perception that one’s best interest is best served by that change, 5 that a too narrow solution cannot be acceptable to enough people to produce a noticeable change and a too vague solution, though accepted by many is not effective, but that a precise formulation of a specific meeting of a well-grasped broad challenge could bring together enough people to be sufficiently sure of the consequences of the change to want it and work for it.

6 that such a position would be available if we learned how technically to subordinate teaching to learning in specific fields like mathematics, reading, spelling, etc., 7 that to subordinate teaching to learning in any field meant we must produce a shift in emphasis from knowledge and memorization to knowing, the process of learning, which would place the focus of teaching where it belonged, on the powers of students rather than on the body of information one wished them to assimilate, 8 that once the effectiveness of the subordination is known in any one area no one would refuse to apply it in other areas if technically feasible, 9 that soon the people who benefit from the techniques of the subordination want to know why they are effective and thus are ready to know just what is the nature of those mental powers they see at work in their charges,

6

Introduction

10 that however demanding this shift from knowledge to knowing, from memorization to structuring, people seem to need to understand more deeply where the springs of knowing are, 11 at that stage they may find the obvious: that only awareness is educable in man and that the baby and the very young child in each of us knew it and used this awareness spontaneously in all the learning which remains with us all through life.

That means that the best teacher every one of us had was himself, and, 12 that the only true education is self-education.

To remain in contact with one’s awareness — though the birthright of every child — becomes the privilege of only a few as we grow in an environment where our energies are demanded for activities which do not let us keep that contact. To maintain from babyhood the contact with one’s powers, the subordination of teaching to learning is a workable tool. But for educators to make awareness the privilege of each of us at any age we need to understand that they must have a new awareness of their own which allows them to have criteria for what is human in each of us.

Since to live is to consume time and the wise ones among us are those who have exchanged the given time for the “most valuable” experiences, we are confronted with the question who is to define these most valuable experiences. If we decide to leave the definition up to each of us we may run away from an educator’s duty. By taking it upon ourselves we may equally trespass. But by noting the qualities of the spontaneous use of

7

An Experimental School

time by each person of whatever age, we may become what somebody is doing with himself at any moment and at the same time take the learner beyond what he might live in the normal course of life in the street or at home.

Because we subordinate teaching to learning we do not risk losing what children do with themselves all the time and are ready for, and, also because we want to go beyond chance opportunities we recognize the place of the responsibility of the grown-ups in education. We humanize education by not letting preconceived ends affect the relationship between grownups and children, essentially a person-to-person relationship lived from day-to-day.

The demands on teachers of this humanization of education are great in the beginning, for most teachers are more interested in their own lives and ideas and at first find it very hard to look at people in a different phase of life as having vital jobs to perform.

Until one opens one’s eyes the concerns and activities of children do not seem vital, but once one’s eyes are opened, the lives of others become qualitatively as rich and interesting as one’s own; for now it is clear that the change of time into experience is a continuous process that goes on from the start of life up to the end, for most.

The humanization of education begins to be realized when teachers, seeing man’s conquest of knowledge as the work of his awareness, express every learning in terms of awareness. This places the responsibility of learning squarely on the students who will be the authorities for knowing when skills have become

8

Introduction

a part of themselves and whether or not they can use them. The teacher’s responsibilities no longer rest in the transmission of knowledge, but are those of a challenger who offers an invitation to people he knows have some equipment, to extend their awarenesses of it by being involved in certain activities he chooses to bring to them, activities that would not come their way otherwise.

Awareness of the whole content of the universe involves awareness of awareness. Educators must reach this awareness so they can be independent of authorities and theories and meet each person and each opportunity singularly. Unless there is a glimpse of what awareness of the awareness is, the humanization of education remains a slogan.

No one can pretend to be aware of awareness. One must own the power if he wants to use it. It follows then that a school aiming at humanizing education will show only as much proof of its work as it actually achieves and will be unable to use a show window to fool anyone.

Since to my knowledge there was no place on earth where it was possible to learn about humanizing education, where educators could learn by themselves making their own mistakes and without pretense to infused knowledge or omniscience, I thought that the concept of an “Experimental School” could be the answer.

Francis Bacon almost 400 years ago clearly saw that to meet the unknown one must give it a chance to strike one’s awareness. An

9

An Experimental School

experiment is a deliberate move of a person towards letting the unknown be met. After the experiment one can say, “this goes like that.”

In recent times, however, experiments had come to be looked upon as ways to test the correctness of hunches. In education, experiments were means for eliminating one opinion after another, as inadequate in their simplicity, for the meeting of demands of such a complex activity. An experimental school was likely to be an ad hoc materialization of the ideas and ideals of specific people wanting to justify their vision.

To put education among the sciences, i.e., the activities of men who want to know, there was one way: open a true experimental school, with no interest in proving anything (except incidentally, if warranted), devoted to the daily study of the daily problems arising in it.

In January, 1971, I submitted to the U.S. Office of Education, “Experimental Schools” section, a paper (see Appendix 1) in which readers will see that it is possible to define an experimental school as one would a laboratory in any established science. In March, the Superintendent of District 12 in New York City called a meeting at her office in the Bronx to consider how myself and Educational Solutions, Inc. could be involved in making the Twin Parks School, a new school not yet opened, into a public school where some desirable things (early reading, for example) might happen. I told Dr. Gaines I was not interested in proving again and again that my solutions to some educational problems (math, reading, foreign languages)

10

Introduction

worked, but that I was deeply interested in showing that a public school could become a place where education could be improved because teachers were more aware of children’s powers and of their own. I offered to submit to her a proposal, which would state what such an educational experiment might be (see Appendix 3).

The course of the development of this project is a story in itself.

Readers will find it in Part I, The Birth of an Institution.

As soon as it was established that Educational Solutions’ proposal was acceptable to the Community School Board of District 12, I turned to the Bureau of Personnel Development (as it was then called) of the U.S. Office of Education to suggest that the opportunity be taken to see to it that whatever there was to learn at the first experimental school in the world be learned.

One way to do this was to arrange for 28 education and liberal arts college professors to study what would happen at the school through the year and report to the nation.

The Office of Education was quick to seize the opportunity and to fund the City University of New York through its Educational Research Department, under Dean Rosner, to do a job that was consonant with the established rules of research in education and with the demands of the new project.

After a few meetings in May and June at C.U.N.Y. with Dr. Rosner, Dr. Weiner and some of their associates, I proposed to assist in the recruitment of the observers by writing a document I called “The Phenomenon of a School” (see Appendix 4).

11

An Experimental School

In my proposals to the district, I asked for an intensive seminar of five weeks to be held with the staff during the summer preceding the opening of the school. Considered essential by all, it took place after the usual complicated administrative procedures associated with Title I fundings. This seminar was attended by a number of observers from the C.U.N.Y. seminar and may also be reported upon in their publication. The report appears in Part II. I had also asked in my proposals that there be a top administrator who could be relieved of all chores of running the school and be devoted to the maintenance of the spirit in all quarters. I was glad to report to the Community School Board that Mrs. Dellora Hercules, the principal of C.S. 133 in Harlem, had agreed to move from that most successful elementary school to the Twin Parks School and use her many gifts so that the Experimental School might be truly experimental. The School Board appointed her “Project Director,� leaving to all concerned the definition of her duties. Ms. Hercules invited some of her staff at C.S. 133 to apply for transfer to positions open at the new school. Three of the twenty-four teachers at C.S. 133 got transfers from District 5 to District 12, one non-tenured teacher also applied. I recommended two other names, so that in all seven people who had some contact with me and my work became part of the large new staff of the Twin Parks School.

To maintain some of the features of the Experimental School as I conceived of it, I did not take part in the selection of the principals and their assistants; nor in the interviewing of those who responded to the ad placed in April 5th and 12th, 1971, in the New York Times (nor in the writing of the ad); nor in the 12

Introduction

choice of the kind of materials to be used in the school (furniture in the libraries and labs, art and music rooms), nor for instruction; nor in deciding whether tests should be given and which; nor in the number of students in classes nor the schedule, etc. This school had to be run as all other schools in the city by its personnel and if I had a role, it was to see to it that we learned all the lessons that could be learned, and to advise those concerned of what we saw.

Educational Solutions became the consultant firm having made certain requests which were then accepted by the School Board.

Since this represented on our part a decision to alter the usual structure of the school staff, it must be spelled out. The New York City schools have developed over the years a number of programs to meet the challenges of schools. One is the practice of having guidance counselors. With guidance counselors in schools teachers get used to neglecting a part of their function that is concerned with understanding problem students, by sending them to the counselors who usually treat them outside the classroom. Because in the subordination of teaching to learning it is possible to work with each individual as a person, we had to eliminate this easy way out of challenges that consisted in sending difficult students to a non-teaching teacher.

I asked for the option to try to see if the teachers could manage a public school without reference to counselors, leaving open a correction of this option if the experience demanded it.

To sum up, let me put in relief the significant events which form the basis of this study:

13

An Experimental School

•

A Community School in the Bronx guided by a Superintendent with a clear vision of the direction in which public education should move to meet its challenges, decided to change an as yet unopened elementary school into an Experimental School and hire as consultants Educational Solutions, Inc. to assist in the first steps.

•

A number of civil servants at the U.S. Office of Education understood the importance of such an event on the national scene and managed to fund, in spite of the squeeze and the lateness of the proposal, a professorial seminar. This seminar would report to the nation on the first attempt to educate educators by learning from mistakes in such a way as to take education from a state of routine to a state of awareness.

•

A number of teachers who were acceptable to any school in the city in terms of ordinary qualifications, and only prepared by what happened to them in the five-week summer seminar, took upon themselves to learn to work with the powers of their pupils rather than stick to their prejudices and preconceptions.

•

Administrators gave up much of what is usually considered to be their privilege in power and prestige, to become facilitators at every moment in the myriads of circumstances found in a working school and to lead the experiment with care and trepidation since the unknown was confronted more often than the known.

A consultant firm while deeply involved in all aspects of the school, remained scrupulously within the terms of a hands-off

14

Introduction

relationship to the people in the school and what they intended to do, so as to make the Experimental School teach its own lessons and not simply prove whether so and so is right or wrong.

15

Part I

The Birth Of An Institution

A new school opens everyday, perhaps every hour, but how many people know all that goes into the process of bringing one into being? The story I am going to tell here is the human side of the birth of C.S. 234-129, a public school in the Bronx, New York City. There is an architectural and engineering story to tell, but I shall leave the telling of it to others. At the time I entered the scene, it had already been decided to erect a two-school educational complex of a certain design on a certain site in the Bronx.

This is the story of people and institutions and their interplay in the birth of a school, a human adventure.

On February 18th, 1971, Dr. Edythe Gaines, Community Superintendent of District 12, called me on the phone and asked whether I would be interested in being associated with an elementary school in her district. She hoped I might do there something similar to what we at Educational Solutions had been doing for three years in C.S. 133M in Harlem.

19

Part I

My contacts with Dr. Gaines had been indirect. A year earlier she had visited C.S. 133 where we were working with teachers in the use of Words in Color and Gattegno Mathematics, and she expressed interest in what she saw. She had seen two television programs in which I was involved, the last one a few days before she called me. On one occasion she was present at a workshop that the New York City Board of Education had arranged for the benefit of the newly elected Community School Board members.

I was on one of the panels and instead of lecturing, I involved the people present in an exercise with their hands leading to some mathematical awareness. Dr. Gaines on that occasion had enjoyed the variety.

When we met to talk things over, I told Dr. Gaines that I was not interested in indefinitely repeating the kind of work we had already done in public schools, but that if there were a chance of linking the opening of the school (known then in the District as the Twin Parks School or as C.S. 129) with something new that had come my way a month earlier, both our interests might be met. I said that I would submit an outline of what I saw as a project that might interest all of us.

In December 1970, Dr. Robert Binswanger was brought from the Harvard School of Education where he was a Dean, to the United States Office of Education to direct Experimental Schools, an office in whose work President Nixon was personally interested. Dr. Binswanger had been Chairman of the Board of Schools for the Future, the organization that persuaded me in 1965 to leave my new residence in Switzerland and come to live in the United States. In January, I was invited to a meeting in New York City where the Experimental Schools project was 20

The Birth Of An Institution

explained by Dr. Binswanger. I asked him whether I could submit a paper to him to contribute to his definition of an experiment in education. I must have seemed naive, as I was the only person at the meeting who was not a politician or concerned with money or power matters. This theoretical paper was written and sent and followed by another.

This paper (see Appendix 1) served to introduce Dr. Gaines and her colleagues to my thinking. A paper written later for Dr. Gaines (see Appendix 3) shows how the encounter of a request with a general preparation can produce a concrete proposal.

From mid-March it became clear that the involvement of Educational Solutions, Inc. with District 12 was irreversible from our part.

Negotiation of a contract for a project involving the New York City public schools had not been part of my experience and I had everything to learn. I believe that the Community School Board of District 12 also had to come to understand what it meant to talk of having the first Experimental School ever in their district.

In my naivetĂŠ I trusted that what was going on in my mind was what the many people involved in the negotiations had in theirs.

In fact, there were many steps we would have to go through from the moment the gentlemen’s agreement that bound the District 12 Board and Educational Solutions in this project was made, to the moment we could do the work legally and be in business.

21

Part I

Informal transactions are so easy. I preferred them, but they did not make matters advance. I deliberately kept myself in my place: that of a resident alien here to serve education and not involved in the politics that clearly entered into every stage of the process leading to an official contract requiring public funds and the support of a number of agencies, many established solely for political reasons.

On a number of occasions my sight met the truth, but I preferred to continue as if indeed an Experimental School in the Bronx, as I saw it, was the most important thing in life, and in the world, and that soon everyone would know it. Did such a Don Quixotic attitude endear me to the various politicians I was meeting? Did it change itself into an Open Sesame? The appearance and perhaps the fact, was that at all stages of the preparation the outsider, the foreigner I was, received support from those involved.

In March, at a meeting in Dr. Gaines’ office, she expressed the view that much of what happens in any school depends on who is its principal and that her function as superintendent was to find the best person available and then let that person choose the staff she or he wanted. She asked for suggestions.

Knowing that my contacts with New York City schools were few, I suggested with trepidation, Mrs. Dellora Hercules, a person I admired for the work she was doing as principal of C.S. 133M, and who I suspected might be interested. Dr. Gaines expressed enthusiasm about the choice as well as some doubt that we would succeed in moving Mrs. Hercules to leave a job which was

22

The Birth Of An Institution

satisfying to her in so many ways. I asked for permission to introduce the idea to Mrs. Hercules, and Dr. Gaines agreed.

Mrs. Hercules had first been introduced to my work in 1963, when she observed me giving a demonstration lesson on reading with Words in Color in a public school in Manhattan. She was attracted at that time to what she saw, but it was five years before she was able to open her school to my approaches to reading and mathematics.

P.S. 133M was part of the 201 Complex at that time, and a focus for students and innovators in education. Through the enthusiasm of David Outerbridge, then an administrator of the Center for Urban Education, a Title III project, it was made possible for my work to be introduced to P.S. 133. Mr. Outerbridge had noticed the effects of my work with teachers on his children who were pupils at the Day School in New York City, where my colleagues and I had worked.

In August 1968, I led a seminar of twelve P.S. 133 teachers.

When they returned to school in the fall, Mrs. Hercules found some of them so deeply changed that she became certain we had something significant to offer. It was not until December 5th, 1968, that I visited P.S. 133 for the first time. From then on and throughout the following year my colleagues and I at Schools for the Future (later of Educational Solutions, Inc.) gave seminars to teachers, paraprofessionals and parents, and lessons to children throughout the school in English and Mathematics.

Mrs. Hercules had during this period become very familiar with the way in which we worked in a variety of circumstances.

23

Part I

When I visited C.S. 133 to present Mrs. Hercules with the opportunity offered by the new experimental school, I was aware that it might appear that I was suggesting that we deprive the city of one good school in order to gain another. I told Mrs. Hercules that I would understand if she said no to the offer, but that it should come after a serious study of the situation. If she was really indispensable to C.S. 133, that meant that the experiment in her school had not been one which relied on the efforts of the teachers as they were and on the students. If she had done her work well, C.S. 133 could, no doubt, continue to flourish without her.

Moreover, the new school would offer her opportunities to put her experience to the test and to serve a much larger community of students. Mrs. Hercules admired Dr. Gaines, and felt she could work with her at least as well as she had worked with the 201 Complex Administrators, in the service of education in the so-called ghetto. Friends and relatives consulted, agreed that for her to go to the Experimental School as project director would bring invaluable experience and would also put her experience to work for a valuable cause. Dr. Gaines talked to Mrs. Hercules and the interview with the Community Board was a total success when it took place.

In my proposal (see Appendix 3) I asked for a principal who would oversee the experiment and inspire the school but would not have the usual administrative chores of principals. To grant this meant that two principals would be appointed for the two sections of C.S. 129 (which later became C.S. 129 and C.S. 234).

Mr. Walter Edge, already a principal in a school in Yonkers, was proposed by Dr. Gaines for C.S. 129 and accepted by the Board.

24

The Birth Of An Institution

For C.S. 234 a number of people were interviewed by the Board.

I was present during the meeting. Mr. Peter Negroni, already with District 12 as assistant principal at the Bilingual School 211X, was selected as the most suitable of the candidates as he impressed everybody with his competence, manner, background and promise.

Mrs. Hercules and Mr. Edge now had two jobs and at once found that the new school demanded a lot of their attention.

Fortunately, Mr. Negroni, who knew all the ropes of the administration in his district, and Mr. Eddie Rubin, who had been entrusted by Dr. Gaines to use his experience in city schools to help solve the many problems of the new school made things much easier.

Mr. Rubin had a number of meetings with me over the three months from April to July when he returned to the job he was on before he had been called in on this new project.

On April 5th, 1971 an ad appeared in the New York Times linking the Twin Parks School with my educational conceptions and practice. A slightly different version (i.e., corrected) appeared on the following Sunday.

Both were noted by many readers who knew me and told me that they thought I had made it! At last they said, a school in New York City was going to show in broad daylight what had been happening for years here and there but could only be seen by the initiated.

25

Part I

This was certainly not my way of thinking about the experiment, for I knew that what I had to offer would be proved by others, in this case by the teachers at C.S. 129 — those who would apply for the jobs offered in the ad. They were unknown to all.

The ad announced a link between the school and myself, but it was still at the informal level. Would we be able to resolve all the problems on our path? Weeks later I was still asking Dr. Gaines: “How do I know that we shall be working together?” This was a strange question to Dr. Gaines who knew that there were n steps to be taken successively, the last one finally sealing the contract, but each one necessary before the next one could be taken.

Hence, the first step was the most important, and it had been taken. The Community Board invited me to one of their executive meetings one evening and everyone seemed to agree

26

The Birth Of An Institution

with Dr. Gaines and was prepared to made C.S. 129 into an Experimental School in my sense.

The next time I was invited to an Executive Board meeting was when Mrs. Hercules was interviewed as the project director and Mr. Edge as a principal.

In April, an administrator of District 12 was asked by Dr. Gaines to arrange for Educational Solutions to give an intensive course in Spanish by the Silent Way to District 12 personnel. They wanted to learn Spanish for the purpose of increasing the communication between themselves and the Spanish speaking members of the community they served. I taught that course, assisted by my colleague from Buenos Aires, Miss Maria del Carmen Gagliardo. Those who participated expressed in many different ways what this way of teaching meant for them well beyond Spanish and even language learning (see page 15a). Dr. Gaines and Mrs. Edith Smith, a Community School Board member, were now certain that they wanted these methods in the new school at least, and felt more confident that C.S. 129 would be successful.

On many occasions since then Dr. Gaines and Mrs. Smith have referred to the experience of that Spanish course as an illustration of what Educational Solutions could do for the city schools.

When in May, at the public meeting of the Community School Board, Mrs. Hercules, Mr. Edge, Mr. Negroni and I were introduced to those attending, it was clear that we had come to a

27

Part I

new stage of the project. The superintendent wanted the Experimental School and the School Board after close examination of the proposals found that such a school would be in the interest of the community it represented and offered its support. This position was upheld at the public meeting, even by those who could have opposed it.

From then on it became necessary to work out the proposals according to the rules and regulations of the City, the state and the Federal laws. The City Board of Education would pass a resolution for what the Community School Board wanted only if the proposals were passed by Albany and Title I. Community School Boards were new in the city and there were too many details for the Community School Board staff not to stumble on, and that meant re-writing and re-submitting. Our own organization was also inexperienced at that time.

The 1971-72 contract for the school year had to wait till the end of the summer to be submitted to Albany because the summer Title I projects were being submitted first. Some proposals were being sent in after projects had already started. So we were verbally assured that the fall project would be accepted, if the one concerning the training of the teachers during the five-week summer seminar was.

28

The Birth Of An Institution

29

Part I

Only faith kept everybody going. It was my plan to approach the Office of Education and see if I could interest people in a seminar which would study the new Experimental School.

Originally, I had envisioned a graduate student seminar, twentyeight people who would observe the school and write doctoral theses using material from their observations. Then, talking at Yale with Professor Seymour Sarason, I was made aware that a professorial seminar would better serve my purposes. It would be a report to the nation from outside observers, stating exactly what could be learned from a true Experimental School and how it could be applied to help public education.

Dr. Donald Bigelow, who was working in the field of personnel development at the Office of Education, was kind enough to come to the Washington meeting, though he was still on a leave of absence, writing a book on teacher education. To him and others, I described how teacher education might be served if a professorial seminar made up of twenty-eight professors on sabbatical from leading universities might be made available full time to look very closely at what would be happening at the Twin Parks School. I asked whether this seminar could be supported by funds from some project at the Office of Education.

The lateness of the proposal to the Office of Education forced a re-formulation of the strategy. All the professors should be based in New York, since finding lodging for twenty-eight outsiders would have been then a feat; and they would not be asked to be full-time observers, since this would have meant paying the salaries of twenty-eight top people, an amount of money not to be found during a period of squeeze.

30

The Birth Of An Institution

The solution adopted by the Office of Education after intensive consultations was that the Teacher Education Department of the City University of New York would apply for a grant to the Office of Education to run a professorial seminar. This would be comprised of twenty-eight professors of the City University (which trains the vast majority of the people teaching in New York City public schools), and would be associated with the Twin Parks School.

I met Dean Rosner; then on two or three later occasions he and I met with some of his colleagues and graduate assistants. Dr. Weiner, who drafted the proposal as a research project, was present and we remained in contact until the end of the school year, as the professorial seminar met almost every Wednesday evening in a conference room adjacent to his office at the Graduate Research Center of C.U.N.Y. Dr. Weiner received two papers from me (see Appendices 4 and 5), one to inform those who had to recruit professors for the seminar and one for these professors expressing what I thought there would be to look at in the school.

The professors’ seminar is described in Part II of this book.

During May and June, I worked to bring together the people who would be the Educational Solutions teachers of teachers at the new school in District 12. I knew that much would depend on these choices, and accordingly I invited to join this team those people who I thought would have the most to offer in a new, Experimental School.

31

Part I

Miss Katherine Mitchell, who had been on our staff for two years, would concentrate on reading and mathematics in the primary grades. Miss Maria Gagliardo, who had for two years been involved in our work in teaching languages, would assist in the bilingual and Spanish aspect of the school.

Dr. Enid Friedman, whom Professor Sarason recommended to me, had been his associate at Yale. Since we had asked that there be no guidance counselors at the school until need was felt for them, Dr. Friedman, a psychologist, would be able to make observations on the progress of the school from the behavioral point of view. She would join our staff in June, and spend the months of the summer attending all our seminars and workshops in order to prepare herself as an Educational Solutions teacher of teachers.

Two other choices of mine for the team at first accepted and later were unable to be with us. Mrs. Elenita McDowell, an old friend of mine, had done remarkable things at a small private school she ran in Harlem. I knew her understanding of how a school can use a city as its premises would contribute much to our work, and I was sorry that she could not be with us, although she did give us one day a week as a consultant on trips.

The other person was Miss Helena Webb, who had studied on a double scholarship at Harvard and M.I.T. and then worked in Philadelphia for two years. I had met her at a seminar I gave in Cambridge in 1969 and she later attended another seminar of mine in New York City.

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The Birth Of An Institution

I had to continue my search for people who could serve the needs of the school as teachers of teachers and who had had experience in areas we wanted to know more about. Mr. Ian Spence (now Dr.) was a specialist in precision teaching and highly recommended by Professor Ogden Lindsley. Caroline Mirthes, author of Don’t you hear me talking to you was recommended by Ronald Gross and seemed to know how to bring people who had not written before to write about themselves and their environment.

We completed our contingent with Mr. Everard Barrett, who had been a math coordinator in Ocean-Hill Brownsville and who taught math at New York State University in Old West-bury, N.Y. He agreed to be with us for one day a week. We held in reserve other members of our staff who could be available for variable periods according to need: Zulie Catir and Caroline Chinlund for math, Rosalyn Bennett and Cecilia Perrault for the bilingual side, Ghislaine Graf as observer in a few classes.

The school was to be open. That did not mean it was to be an “open school” in the sense that that label refers to the idea brought from Leicestershire (England) and transformed in so many unrecognizable ways. It meant simply that each teacher or class would be ready to be seen at work at any moment by administrators, consultants, other teachers, the professors who would be observing on behalf of the Office of Education, and also visitors accepted by the administration. In this way it was thought, nothing that went on in the school would fail to be part of the experiment.

33

Part I

It was planned that having visitors would be an everyday phenomenon at the new school. We would invite many top researchers in education to come for the purpose of testing the Twin Parks School in a way that was different from what standardized tests could do. We felt that the way to influence public opinion was through the reports of responsible and competent people. Indeed, figures on tables rarely move anybody, and so many highly respected people in the field were to be invited, among them Professor Ogden Lindsley, Professor Seymour Sarason, Dr. Don Bigelow, and Dr. B. Frank Brown.

Hopefully, their reports would indicate any small or large changes in educational practice which had been brought about between the birth of the Twin Parks School and the first anniversary of the summer workshop.

Unfortunately, in the course of the year few such people actually visited the school. Of those mentioned above, only Professor Lindsley came. Twice on one visit to New York from Kansas City, he spent time at the school to assess the precision of the teaching we were capable of generating with our techniques and materials.

The departure of Dr. Gaines for a new position as head of the Learning Cooperative of the City Board of Education meant that she was not able to continue her inspiring work with the Twin Parks School past the date of its opening in September.

The construction of the school building was under way, but it would not be completed before a date that continuously changed according to unforeseen circumstances. The school had no

34

The Birth Of An Institution

playground except a small area which, from the equipment already installed there, seemed clearly intended for kindergarten. There were to be 2,000 students in a plant which was planned as a school with cubicles for the oral transmission of knowledge. This had long since been decided; no one had any say in the matter now. The construction firm would not allow visits to the site because of the danger of accidents, so it became necessary to visit a Manhattan elementary school that had been built according to the same plans. There we learned of the defects of the plant from educators who thought differently from us about the use of schools.

Indeed some things were learned and became warnings: 1

It was possible to so separate the two spaces which housed the K-2 and 3-6 groups as to forget they were part of one plant. Only the auditorium belonged to both sections and there was conflict over the scheduling of time for its use.

2 Some features of the construction were incentives to whoever wanted to break in and pick up what no one could really protect; one library was particularly vulnerable.

3 However much light could filter through the bay windows, the school was built so as to force one type of education: the traditional one in which teachers control students.

On that visit Mrs. Smith of the Community School Board accompanied Mr. Rubin and the three administrators, and I went along to learn what we could. I was, however, determined

35

Part I

to accept the plant as a given for the Experimental School. The human element struck me and prepared me to watch whether a lesson would be learned from this visit, or whether at the Twin Parks School the existence of two principals would generate rivalry and isolation. Separate entrances and lunchrooms, a door that can be open or closed may have no weight or be decisive. I wanted to see what would happen in “our� school.

One day District 12 got word that Albany had rejected the original proposal of the School Board for the summer seminar.

It became clear that new directives had been issued to the Albany Title I personnel but had not reached the offices of the Community School Boards. The funds could only be available if the training fell within the requirements that no basic subject should be considered (reading and math were thus excluded) and that learning labs and their uses should be the object of the training.

For weeks the preparation of the seminar had been going on in a quite different direction. One hundred teachers had been selected from among the 300 applicants who responded to the ad and had been screened by a number of examiners of the applications. I read all 300 applications, but did not discuss them with the two principals and the project director. Only once I sat in the background at the interviewing of about twenty applicants.

By this time I had met two more members of the supervisory staff. One of the candidates for the principalship of C.S. 234 had been offered a job as assistant-principal for that school. Mrs.

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The Birth Of An Institution

Meryl Natelli had been with Mrs. Hercules at C.S. 133M, and had participated in some of my seminars for the staff of that school. I was pleased to see her on the staff of the new school.

Mr. Edge had introduced me on that day to Mrs. Frances Barry who was to be one of his assistants.

Late in June, when I was in Europe, all the applicants who were acceptable to the district, in particular because they could be hired according to the city regulations, and those who were still possibilities were invited to a meeting which was a warming up session for the coming summer seminar.

The vast majority of the applicants had neither heard of me nor of C.S. 133M, but were attracted by the ad and many believed they were coming to a school with an “open corridor� program.

Mrs. Natelli encouraged everybody to come to the summer seminar even at the cost of changing present summer plans.

Only one person was unable to take the seminar; another came three out of the five weeks, taking off two weeks in the middle to attend a course elsewhere.

The criteria, bilingual and bicultural, in the ad did not seem to stop people with only one language from applying. Only five people knew Spanish well, and so the bilingual characteristic of the school had to be abandoned at least for the beginning of the academic year, although beginning Spanish was taught at the summer seminar.

37

Part I

In my mind the summer seminar, lasting five weeks and demanding an intensity rarely maintained in summer schools for teachers, was to be sufficient to jolt people out of their restricting educational habits. I therefore asked only for this time in which to do that job. The year of work in the school was to tell us whether it would be enough time for everybody.

Although the summer seminar is part of the story of the birth of a new institution it will be told in the next part of this book.

We are telling a story of institutions and the people in them, in so far as they make human events happen, or only transform events in order to maintain themselves as institutions. The significance of this story seems to be that it shows how much “the will of society” can be directed by the will of people.

Because I was a foreigner, a relative newcomer to this country, I was able to bypass a variety of involvements with society’s agencies and concentrate on reaching a few individuals who knew what they were about. As a consequence, the birth of the institution described in this book looks less like the result of the coming together of wills to accomplish something definite than of wills to yield so that something which had never existed before might come into being: an Experimental School where everyone can learn — students, parents and educators.

When we do not know what is required to attain a certain end we look for existing answers and these answers are kept in places known to those who look after them and who find themselves because of this, holding power. What they have on

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The Birth Of An Institution

their shelves or in their desk drawers only gains value when someone asks for them, otherwise they remain pieces of paper or drawings. It is the fragmentation of bureaucracy that makes bureaucrats important people at certain moments, those moments when something comes to their desk and depends on their action to proceed further.

When it is clear what the end should be, the various elements of the chain of actions are integrated and none is overlooked as incidental. In the case of the Experimental School the end was the beginning and people at all stages and levels were essential parts of the implementation. Society as a whole never showed its tail. It was as if it did not exist. In fact, it did not exist in my mind for it had no place whatever in the project. At no moment was it necessary explicitly to think either of the needs of society, or the demands of society, or the regulation by society. Instead it was always: “How does one meet this challenge?” or “What does so and so need to do to remove these obstacles?”

Society has no will. People have. Hence, to get things going we go to people and things happen. Such a simple acquaintance with reality is at the basis of the birth of this institution.

The so-called “revolutionaries” work in this way because they look at things from a turned-around point of view; they see them differently, but no less normally or naturally than the others.

Clearly the revolution represented by the birth of this experimental school is in the statement that “to change schools you only need to make the people working inside them change.”

39

Part I

The change we were after was neither intellectual nor social competence as so many reformers asked from the time of Comenius. It was simply the two-fold change that could occur when anybody “opened his eyes and saw how competent children are as learners� and that games are what children engage in seriously more than in anything else. The job of changing, therefore, was to open one’s eyes, learn about learning by watching children play, and offer students games that make sense to them and lead to mastery of the activities behind scholastic skills. This is functional teaching. This is the subordination of teaching to learning.

A new institution has been born with the Experimental School of the Bronx, a human institution, deliberately dynamic more an organism than an organization. In all organisms all parts are integrated and watch each other, one taking over functions that another can no longer perform.

Thus, watchfulness and immediate feedback were deliberately made part of the plan for life at the school, so that people could be kept informed and able to act.

A human institution working as an organism aiming at growth in awareness for all is, in summary, what was set about by all the wills that made the Experimental School be.

40

Part II

The Summer Seminar Of 1971

Except for the staff of Educational Solutions and the five or six people from C.S. 133 and I. S. 44 and 55 who had had seminars with me, no one among these one hundred participants had ever before worked as intensively for as long as this seminar demanded of them.

This fact in itself could have caused some of the strains that were felt in the beginning, but the true reason for their discomfort was that most of the participants had acquired the bad habit of not thinking for themselves, and that I was determined to change them into independent and responsible teachers.

Complacent, uncritical, note-taking, note-reciting, used to opposing opinion with opinion, the participants demanded of me a display of extreme rigor and continuous vigilance from 9:00 to 12:00 and 1:00 to 5:00. No wonder I was described by casual observers as arrogant and stubborn, as wanting to regiment everyone and suppress individual opinion.

43

Part II

Still towards the end of the five weeks very few could hold this view any longer, for many had learned that they had not been prepared by their studies to delve seriously into a difficult challenge.

As far as I am concerned, I know I prepared myself for this seminar by generating an inner climate where my past would not exercise any pressure and where I was available to study with these people (and no other people I might find somewhere else) what would confront them in an Experimental School. I knew no one alive had the experience of working in such a school since none had existed. It was my job to assist everyone in reaching the state one must be in to cope with the new, or else see the whole project become another blueprint defined in advance and run by semi-robots.

Therefore, I had to devise techniques for work at this seminar which while unsettling and often startling, would produce enough material to keep the group working in the direction of the target, however vaguely defined this target was.

I began by asking a question: “What to you is an Experimental School?�

Since confusion could not be the answer, all answers were rejected one after the other; neither a model school; nor a school to prove so and so right; nor a school where classes were open and schedules flexible, etc. could be, for education, the sort of place scientists dwell in to find the truth in their field. Indeed, the rejection of an answer was never off-hand, but the person

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The Summer Seminar Of 1971

who gave that answer so often identified with it that its rejection meant rejection of one’s ego. This was felt as hurtful. No statement of mine that we were there to study, to examine the content of our minds, to prepare ourselves and that the use of words was not the best for the task of clarification, was actually heard. The few participants who were already seasoned into this way of working had a hard time mollifying quickly hardened attitudes. Some vocal people who were used to dominating meetings were furious at being cut down when trying to steer a meeting towards their views. Instead of working on the challenge, people were siding with those representing various opinions.

I knew that only when we discipline ourselves and let the problems guide us can we make any progress, so I did not mind what we worked on so long as we showed that we were becoming more sensitive to a question and readier to put aside our habits of expecting a ready-made answer. Often it was heard: “Since he knows the answers, why doesn’t he tell us?”

They could not believe we were confronting a new challenge, one for which there was no answer.

I had written a paper on “The Phenomenon of a New School” (see Appendix 5) for the professorial seminar. Mrs. Hercules had it duplicated for distribution to the summer seminar, and it was given out on the first afternoon. It did not help much, since no one really had the preparation necessary to take it in.

The work had to be done at these sessions.

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Part II

One additional disturbance at the seminar was the request for feedback. Periodically, I would ask that the members of the seminar tell what they were finding out that was new, and in general respond to what had been going on. The participants never thought that there was need for a leader to know what people think, and what they gain in taking part in exercises.

Until the very end of the five weeks, almost half the participants had not managed to be at peace with these repeated calls: “Feedback now.�

Still the technique is vital and I needed it so that I would not go home everyday carrying confused and confusing impressions of what one hundred minds bent over a question had managed to make of it. The final feedback session each day, though dreaded, served as a measure of the advance of one day upon the previous one with respect to who joined in, who found what, who was now clearer and to what extent, who was enjoying the struggles, who was changing more or less profoundly, who was emerging as a reliable student of the phenomena at the seminar, who was acquiring the know-hows to tackle problems, and so on.

There were feedback sessions all through the day. First, to allow feedback to become a tool for everyone who wanted to know how to find out what members of a group think on any particular point. Second, because the answers were needed to steer the study ahead. And thirdly, to take stock of what had been gained. Some participants who saw the value of the technique took it to groups they worked with outside the seminar.

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The Summer Seminar Of 1971

For most of the five weeks we worked as one group. It was thought by many to be too large. Whenever small groups were formed people were not always sure the time had been best spent, although many liked the chance to hear everything people were saying in their group — which was not always possible on noisy Tremont Avenue — and they even liked having a chance to hear their own voices. The main reason for liking the large group was that we could all have a chance to hear views which might not have been represented in the particular small group we were in.

In the first discussions it was established that there was only individual learning; this would be true whatever field we entertained. We proceeded to examine carefully the following matters: 1 Since we can only reach appearances, to what extent do appearances represent reality? Could we ever say, “So and so is not learning because he seems never to pay attention to what the teacher says” and be sure that we are right?

On that occasion I told them the story of Nancy reported below* and the distinction between appearances and reality remained with us all through the seminar.

*

Reported from pp. 71-72 of Psychology and the Process of Schooling in the Next Decade, Maynard Reynolds (Ed. D.) U.S. Office of Education publication, distributed by University of Minnesota.

“In a small demonstration class of twelve, I had one child ‘Nancy’ who played all the time during the one-hour class on Monday. Everybody in the audience said, “You did nothing about Nancy.”

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Part II

2 Do we know the difference between explaining and understanding? The importance of this question for teachers is obvious since so much explaining goes on in classrooms.

Unfortunately, there is less understanding.

We worked through exercises to reach the difference. How could we understand what a baby does in his crib soon after birth, or at a few weeks or a few months old? How could we understand what a number is?

These exercises served us well, for everybody soon discovered that what furnished his mind was not direct contact with the challenges and the problems, but a lot of not too well digested opinions gleaned uncritically in textbooks.

The study of early childhood, particularly the first year of life, gave us an opportunity to develop a common approach to learning, the spontaneous learning that is so successful that its effects last for life for all of us. We contrasted school learning with spontaneous learning, and it became plain that in the acquiring of skills it is not enough to count on memorization.

3 To find out the difference between knowing and knowledge we examined how we can produce knowledge using our own intelligence. The numerals in the Chinese Mandarin language served as the vehicle. One of the participants of

“What could I do?” “You could have forced her to respond.” How do you force a child to respond?

I did nothing. On Tuesday, Nancy did not respond again and the audience accused me of neglect.

She was not learning. All I could say was that she was playing. On Wednesday, the same. But on Thursday, the one who answered all the questions was Nancy.”

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Chinese background pronounced eleven sounds, and from them it became possible to produce 999, resulting from combinations of the eleven. One more sound allowed the leap to 9999. If we call ogden the memory cost of anything we cannot invent, with 12 ogdens we could buy 9999 Chinese numerals. Hence, to own a little meant that we owned a lot.

4 The notion of the cost of learning appealed to some of the participants, but many remained doubtful that there was anything to be gained in finding out in each area of the curriculum what the cost in ogdens would be. Still the coin had been thrown in and it became impossible to assume that no one saw that there was a correct price to pay for each skill to be acquired.

For instance, learning to read Spanish costs exactly 43 ogdens, and this surprises most educators. To make it plain, the first twelve minutes of the film Leo Color were projected. In this time, at the cost of eleven ogdens, about one-third of the regular part of Spanish was acquired by all the participants who did not know that language. In twelve minutes all this! Who could have believed it?

For some the point was made: “Provided we have the appropriate techniques and materials, learning to read, at least Spanish, is a child’s game.� But for some, nothing had been proved for they did not have the same problematics.

5 One of the conditions the Albany Title I Office made for funding the Summer seminar was that it give training in the

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Part II

then fashionable subject of learning laboratories. Albany also nominated a New York City firm to evaluate the seminar in terms of the contract, so we had to orient the proceedings towards these objectives while not jeopardizing the main goal — humanizing education in the Experimental School — for which these teachers had assembled. The restructuring of the course was not too difficult, for being honest with oneself always helps and there was a meaning of learning labs which was compatible with humanization and to harmonize these two components became a creative occasion for me.

6 Many articles and books during the last few years have been offering the public ideas and proposals in which the word learning and the word laboratory were used, not always with an understandable meaning. In particular, learning was more often than not identified with either the responses to stimuli or with acquiring knowledge. A lack of broad experience with human learning was the reason for this inadequacy.

Now we had two important fields to work on! First we would learn about learning as humans do it in a number of areas, and then we would develop our own insights into what kinds of classrooms we wanted to have in this school on the basis of our gifts and our grasp of education.

The seminar was not to be a place of decision making, only the place to study the challenges to the extent we knew how.

Learning had received much more attention in my life than the organization of schools, but I felt that if the Experimental School

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were to be a place where the humanization of learning would happen, then the model for the school would follow from a correct use of people. So we gave our attention first to learning, both as a field of study and as a direct experience. The Spanish language classes were a good laboratory for direct experience.

Lasting between an hour and an hour-and-a-half, they took place over six or seven days. The group was divided into those who were being taught (almost half the contingent), and those who knew some or much Spanish who were observers and had to draw conclusions from what they saw about teaching in all subjects.

Because of my experience of teaching languages the Silent Way, that approach was the only one offered in these lessons.* I was the teacher and used the voice of Miss Maria Gagliardo, my colleague from Argentina, in order to show how it was possible to include sources other than oneself if needed to solve a teaching problem. Here it was not needed but it proved useful.

Indeed, during one lesson I called on Maria only twice to say one word each time. This for everyone was an eye-opener since the preconceived idea is that the “model” must be heard many times before students can retain “foreign” words.

The participants looked forward to these sessions with great eagerness even if they found little to say about them in the final feedback sessions. For me it was an opportunity to know the seminar members as learners, as people who give up easily or

*

For more information about The Silent Way, see “Teaching Foreign Languages in Schools,” published by Educational Solutions, Inc., 80 Fifth Ave., New York, N.Y. 10011.

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persist, as people who want to succeed in impressing others by being first with their answers, or people who only raise their voice if urged.

So much can be learned from watching students struggling with small or vast tasks, with their inhibitions or their egos, that I who did not have to give much of my attention to preparing my lesson and delivering it, found the sessions most joyous and instructive as far as knowing my students was concerned.

Technically speaking we concentrated on loosening people up so that they could listen — to the statements uttered only once by the voice, to each other, in order to recognize who gets the best approximation if it was not oneself, to the stresses on words, to the melody of the language, and so they could pay attention to the various demands of gender, number, color, size, position, order in time, etc. that one meets when speaking naturally about what one knows well.

Observers again and again mentioned the amount of material used in any one lesson, the speed of learning and of teaching, the astonishing progress made by most students, the quality of the pronunciation, their puzzlement at finding the non-verbal instructions less ambiguous than they expected. But because so much of what works well escapes one’s sight and does not awake alertness, much of what was part of the lessons had to be made explicit during special feedback sessions and brought to people’s attention for the following lesson.

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The unfolding of a Silent Way lesson is so utterly different from teacher-centered lessons that it requires much more control of oneself than any other approach. Control coupled with relaxation permit the teacher to watch each student in his or her activities and to attend to what seems to be the most urgent.

Rather than aim at increasing the amounts retained and giving vast vocabularies, facility with the non-verbal components of the language are worked on first. Hence, the first lesson does not contain a single complete sentence in the new language. But the students can still utter a long string of words in the new language, containing in different arrangements seven or eight adjectives, the indefinite article, the numeral two (each of these a number of times and for the correct situation), the conjunction and, and one noun, rod. With this raw material and a respectable speed stress quality of sounds in words and phrases, and thus melody are conquered in the new language.

A teacher of language could find grounds to object to this end of a lesson because of a preconception, but a student of learning can only be delighted that so much that is fundamental and will be useful in future lessons, can be achieved at such small cost to the students in effort and time.

Besides providing some Spanish to some of the teachers at the Twin Parks School, these lessons were to be a demonstration of how the yield of lessons increases if one knows how to subordinate teaching to learning. But few participants could say that they knew how to transfer this experience to their future teaching.

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7 Besides this direct experience concerning Spanish a number of demonstration lessons were given to produce a direct experience of what learning is in actuality.

So many of the participants had been so traumatized in their study of math in their school years that they would do harm to their future students when they met them at the Twin Parks School, unless we did something at once and before the school opened.

The attempt took the form of suggesting that each of them could be made into a mathematician even if this was only true in a very restricted field. We had to learn to mathematize any situation so that — 1

it became clear that mathematics was not a stuff to memorize and be tested on, concerned with income taxes, shopping and bank accounts, but a particular human way of looking at life in which one perceives relationships and their dynamics,

2 it became clear that everyone could acquire this sight.

We mathematized together the common experience of going up some steps. The outcome is a chapter of algebra called: arithmetic progressions.

But elementary school teachers, I was told, don’t have to teach this. We mathematized sets of Algebricks and found quickly that they could serve well in the teaching of algebra, of operations on whole numbers and fractions, because they made everyone 544

The Summer Seminar Of 1971

perceive arithmetical relationships. This was acceptable because it was part of the curriculum so many had to teach. But when we suggested that the same work be done in different bases of numeration, the stored up collection of facts broke down and fears were regenerated. Only those who sincerely threw themselves into this study gained the insight that what they had memorized at school at last made sense, that now they could teach the curriculum with understanding.

When the question of an organic sequence of presentation of the contents of elementary mathematics was raised, the fact that the seminar participants had not yet been told which grade they would teach seemed a major obstacle.

The idea behind this delay in deciding who would teach where, was that since all the teachers were new to the Twin Parks School, talents and competences would be better known during these few weeks and a more valid selection would be possible, particularly because the structuration of the school was still pending. Would team teaching be selected? Would closed or open classrooms be the choice of the group? Or would they choose specialized labs requiring specialized competence?

At the same time it was clear to me that if we could upgrade the mathematics competence of all teachers, students would benefit from it. I knew it did not require much to reach this goal if teachers showed good will.

In the mathematics I teach, the order of the material presentation differs considerably from that of any other

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program. I start with the set of fingers on our hands, a learning aid we carry with us wherever we go. By folding some fingers and not others, it can easily be partitioned into two subjects whose numerals are called complementaries, as are the subsets within the whole sets. The five partitions that result are linked by a transformation when one finger is shifted from one subset to the other.

So everyone can experience in his flesh the complements in ten.

Naming fingers differently shows how the first experience can serve another purpose: name each finger “hundred” and find complements in one thousand. Tens, hundreds and thousands are as easily handled as units. But together they provide the basis for naming all numerals in the “vulgar” system (i.e., the system in which 9 directly precedes 10). Indeed, if we arbitrarily start with ten hundreds on two hands (by convention also named a thousand) we can exchange one hundred for ten tens provided by another pair of hands, leaving us with one thousand made of nine hundred plus ten tens. Taking together the fingers of these four hands, by folding some fingers and not folding others, we can get two subsets which are complementary and can be read as, say, seven hundred six-ty (-ty instead of ten in this exercise) and two hundred and forty for the complement.

Adding another pair of hands and exchanging this set for a finger in the “tens hands” we have on the six hands (minus two fingers) one thousand expressed as nine hundred nine-ty ten.

We can now read any pair of complements in the set of one thousand. Exercises will give practice.

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In the way we talked about numerals in Chinese in No. 3 above, we can introduce the writing and reading of the numerals by the array — 1 10

2 20

100 200

3 30

4 40

5 50

6 60

7 70

8 80

9 90

300

400

500

600

700

800

900

and form the written forms up to 999. To this, by giving the names to the commas in thousand (1,000) and million (1,000,000) we can read and write up to 999,999,999 having paid only twenty-two ogdens. Practice will take care of all the oddities that exist in English in this field.

At the seminar we went beyond this and everyone was shown that this new beginning frees students from a curriculum developing at a snail’s pace, which they lived through when they learned arithmetic. Indeed, subtraction involving numerals of any length can be treated in all cases by one method (i.e., without borrowing). Addition becomes a much more interesting challenge and leads to all sorts of different solutions. Long division can be attacked before multiplication is introduced.

And all this can be learned simultaneously in all bases of numeration.

When we leave our fingers but retain all we learned with them we can find in the Algebricks the new instrument which gives the means to mathematize what we know as products and fractions in elementary mathematics. At the seminar we engaged the group in exercises which were to show them how an

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increase in speed of computation results from knowing more algebra. Much was learned from “not yet� exercises, so-called because the one who proposes them expects immediate responses. The basis for this expectation is that the poser knows it is possible to do an algebraic transformation and reduce the time of operations. The exercises led most people to recognize in themselves a power of computation they had not developed and did not even suspect was there.

For instance several groups of ninety products yield answers at once because, instead of the question asked we treat a much simpler one. For instance, 47 x 53 is replaced by 5 x 5 and 3 x 3 in that this product is equivalent to 502 - 32 or 2491. And 68 x 62 is replaced by 6 x 7 and 8 x 2, yielding 4216 as the right answer.

These algebraic relationships easily shown with the rods, or Algebricks, can be applied equally well to calculations in other bases of numerations.

Of course, many more extensions exist but only a few of them are studied at the seminar which was not a training work-shop but a place to show how many powers of the mind have been neglected in most educational establishments, including colleges.

8 Since labs (Learning Labs as named in the contract) were the kind of classrooms we were allowed to study at this seminar, we did three things during these weeks. First we looked at the various models of schools known through the world and through

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history, and we discussed in small groups and in the large group the paper I had written on that matter (see Appendix 8).

Second, we took stock of the talents of the teachers so that we could find out who could preside over the various kinds of labs.

Third, we introduced teachers to a new instrument called the open-book. The general theory of the open-book which I formulated in 1938 when I published my first two, is summarized in Appendix 6. Three examples are included there.

An open-book for teachers of reading (Appendix 7) was worked on at the seminar both to show how an open-book can be used for the education of teachers, and to give experience in its uses with students. It also served as an introduction to the problems of reading and to their solutions as these appear in my work for the classroom and for T. V. education.

The open-book on the problem of the lunchroom (Appendix 9) was one of those prepared by the seminar members as an exercise for homework. My own is given here though perhaps those we did not collect from the group could be better examples of what had been achieved in the direction of the production of open-books by newcomers to this field.*

*

The third appended open-book was offered to teachers at the Twin Parks School in October when the shift to the new premise was not accompanied by distribution of materials. It was to serve teachers in finding activities which students could do on their own, using the environment and their wits and leading to new scholastic activities for an experimental school.

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9 Although we spent so many hours doing so many different things necessary to sensitizing teachers to the humanization of education, i.e., taking children into account, the work in depth remained to be done when the teachers met the students. Only on three occasions did we work with youngsters at the seminar. During the second week for two successive afternoon sessions I taught mathematics to five children. In the last week, I worked with my son for one hour.

In the first session, the five children, whose ages ranged from 6 to 11, made themselves at home except for one six-year-old girl who, during the first two exercises, did not respond. The older ones were doing a good job of speaking spontaneous mathematics while looking.

These children whom I had never met, who came because someone knew how to induce them to come, were at home with a teacher who did not do any of the expected things: did not reinforce by saying “good,” or “right,” did not give an answer when none was forthcoming from them and dropped a question when it seemed hard, rather than instruct and so on. But because the children performed so well, using the four operations all at the same time, the participants were ready to accept that I was a teacher and that I knew my job when faced with students, even if they disapproved of much of what I did.

When I worked with the six-year-old girl, there were moments of intense excitement. She let me bring her to awarenesses that no one would have expected of her, particularly because 1) she was Spanish-speaking, 2) she was only six, and 3) she had not

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shown any interest during the first two lessons, 4) there were one hundred people looking at her, 5) some people had already decided she was retarded.

The following day she refused to do anything, for reasons that I did not attempt to know. But the rest worked almost as well as the day before, aware this time that they were being watched, although the first day the cameras and powerful lights of a filming crew did not seem to count for much.

When my son (age 6) visited the seminar he had not yet started school. All he knew he had picked up in games we played at home and I never asked him to memorize any facts. It occurred to me that the seminar people would be helped if I showed them how I let a child make an investigation of a new question far beyond his experience but not totally impossible. I selected the problem “Can you find how many zeros the number noted as — 10 10 10 has?”

That he accepted the challenge was remarkable in itself. He was at once at work, although his answers were tentative. I intervened, asking him whether he could ask the same question for 1010. His argument was 109 is another form for one billion, then 1010 is another name for ten billion. From there it seemed immediate that — 10 10 10 would have ten billion zeros.

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This answer did not end the lesson. I asked him if he had any idea how long it would take to write that number if a zero was put down every second. Again he was prepared to work it out by finding out how many seconds there were in a day, a week, etc. and dividing that number into ten billion.

After an hour of work I stopped the lesson to get some feedback.

What struck the participants most was the total absence of fear and intimidation in this six-year-old child. Many had not understood the question at first and had been taught by him as he expressed his mental processes in English. They realized again that there was no reason why students should be mathematical illiterates as was true of so many. Still a number of them kept their fears for months after that demonstration.

Many were transformed and said so.

10

The following matters were also taken up: •

We studied, reminiscing, what sixth graders in general are naturally interested in, and many of the participants were amazed to find so much of that year still alive in them. It could have helped to produce a lively curriculum stemming from them, but the challenge was thrown back at me, and I refused to take their place;

•

We considered the role of games at various ages and gave as homework the gathering or the invention of as many games as possible that would assist in guiding the outlining of classroom sessions. A number of interesting proposals were

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made the following day. We played some and could feedback at once whether or not they were of help and for whom; •

We studied the role of stories, heard some, criticized them, and left the matter of choice of stories to everyone;

•

We studied the teaching of songs, mainly folksongs;

•

We looked at what is somatic education, as distinguished from physical education, which is mainly games and gymnastics. Somatic education being related to one’s use of one’s will as the arbiter of the muscle tone, we considered what children of elementary school age do with their bodies in their spontaneous games. Since so many active games go on during that period we realized that by cultivating fine uses of one’s soma, rather than competition in adult games like baseball and other ballgames, we could humanize the hours in the gym that some students loathe;

•

We spent many hours considering the social value of school meals and how to use the lunch hour as an opportunity to acquire further knowledge of oneself.

11 When we came, on the last day or two, to the study of biculturalism we found an unexpected hardening of positions.

Until then we had worked on how to help children be on top of all school tasks, and there was no need for anything beyond the humanization of education which everybody favored and wished to have implemented at the new school. But when we considered

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cultural matters, it became clear that some people had already decided who had better be kept out of it.

As a foreigner I assumed I did not have the acceptable preparation for entering into this discussion, but as the leader of this study group I had the duty to draw people’s attention to any inconsistencies I noticed, and there were some. The most important was that if by humanizing education we gave everyone the full use of his or her gifts, young students at a certain age would be confronted by questions which were meaningful only to the adults present, who were attempting to equate their grown-up concerns with those of much younger students on these same matters.

On that day the superintendent of District 12 came to visit the seminar and to tell some things to the teachers of the Twin Parks School which she believed they could hear at the end of the seminar. Of course, having her office only three floors above that on which the seminar was taking place, she had every day opportunities of hearing what was going on down there. But this time, she had first-hand experience of the expression of opinion and she listened to part of the general feedback on the five-week seminar.

What I wish to retain from what Dr. Gaines said is that she had come to the conclusion that the greatest help the Community Schools can give the children is in making them really aware of their powers in contact with the truth in all matters they touch.

That this will serve them better than any militancy for what they

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may not grasp as thoroughly because presented to them from an a priori position.

Coming from a person who has done a great deal to implement the rights of the community it seemed to me to emphasize that the humanity of man includes a respect for his cultural heritages although the converse may not be true. Dr. Gaines’ renewed confidence in the proposal that served as a basis for this summer seminar came at the right moment, the moment when ethnic considerations could divide a staff we had tried to bring to the realization that to serve all the children to the best of their abilities will give them a more abundant life.

12 Still I closed the last feedback session by telling everyone: “No one can give more than he has.�

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The Professorial Seminar

No doubt the work of this group of C.U.N.Y. professors will be much better described in its own report. I would not have taken space for it in this text if I had not had some specific things to say which may not be found in the document that the group will produce.

Readers may already know that millions and millions of dollars of public money have been spent trying to awaken college professors to the needs of schools. Teachers on the whole spend years studying to become teachers, and it sounds right to give institutions of higher education special funds so that the quality of teachers can be substantially improved. Unfortunately, most of the outcomes have disappointed those who evaluated them, to the extent that the various funding sources began to stop supporting college projects.

The TTT program for training the trainers of teachers, before it was discontinued, managed to divert some of its funds to financing this return of professors to schools, as learners rather than leaders. The opportunity that the Experimental School

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offered of fertilizing the education of teachers in the form it takes in colleges was first recognized by Dr. Donald Bigelow and his colleagues at his office in the United States Office of Education and on the TTT program, then by Dean Rosner and his colleagues at the Educational Research office of the City University of New York and finally by a number of those who formed the membership of the professorial seminar. Between CUNY and the USOE a number of usual papers must have been exchanged in order to finalize the funding. Of this I know little and it does not really matter here since the details are already public record. But I can add that I became part of the seminar as a volunteer and must have attended more regularly than some of the participants who registered or were selected by CUNY to become the observers of the Twin Parks School.

My understanding was that these thirty or so people would generate their own rules and regulations for the seminar and that they would use the meetings as a forum to learn from each other what no one could find out by himself since the school was big, crowded, new, in a ghetto, bilingual, linked to Educational Solutions as an advisory agency, to Albany through Title I funds, to the local community through the Community School Board, and to the city, in so far as the Central Board provided equipment, teachers and so on.

I wrote the paper “The Phenomenon of the School� as a voluntary contribution meant to persuade the participants to remain in contact with the complexities of the school, but it was never really studied, or perhaps even read. It was certainly never properly discussed.

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For a while I resisted as strongly as I could the pressure to become the leader of the seminar. I intended to study it as a phenomenon in its own right, since it was a new kind of involvement for me, and because I wanted to avoid the possible accusation that I was attempting to influence observers who were due to report on a school with which I was connected. But because of misconceptions, or for other reasons, the members of the seminar could not see me as one of them. Around April my position became clearer to them, and a number of the participants then wished they had followed my suggestion of the previous October.

Most found the group dynamics of these weekly seminars not quite their cup of tea. For many of them the tension was too painful, or unjustified in their terms, or unacceptable to their images. I saw that it existed only because two totally different human attitudes clashed head on.

My original understanding of the group was that it was composed of professionals who had reached a certain eminence, who were selected by the organizers on criteria — unknown to me, but certainly not to them — that made the group into a bona fide set of reliable observers of phenomena to which they were no strangers. I judged a priori that all of them were as well endowed with professional competence as I was. Until evidence to the contrary appeared I could not presume that I had any quality or experience any of them lacked. I therefore insisted that I be given a chance to get to know the seminar members by listening to their comments and observations of the school they visited.

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Such material as I felt that I needed did not seem to be needed by others. Instead, a number of the professors wanted to hear from me and to know what my ideas were. I insisted that this was irrelevant and that it was what they thought of the school and their way of reaching the evidence that mattered. My stubborn refusal to be trapped in idle discussions of opinions was interpreted as everything but what it was: my way of serving the cause of a research seminar as I took this one to be. We had a phenomenon to look at. Did we have the tools? Did we know which were needed and why?

Whether trivial or erroneous matters were raised I was quick to ask for them to be dropped or put right. Speakers who were too closely identified with their own words were offended by my greater concern for truth and relevance than for people’s vanity or self-image.

It must have been difficult at times for the participants to fathom what made my way of working with them so utterly alien. I knew that it was not important if anyone liked me or shared my views. I also never pursued any personal ends and always worked so that the seminar as a whole became more concerned with the matters it had to report on. Right up to the last day there were a few I did not reach. Nevertheless, some did say at the final meeting I attended that it had been an educational experience of such significance that it changed their ways of relating to their professional tasks. For some of the group the seminar, not the school, was the valuable side of their involvement in the project. For many, the school, which grew on them the more they visited it, made a tremendous impression.

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Among the points on which I gave an exposition to the seminar in response to the members’ requests, let me note the following: •

“The reading problem is solved and I know the solution.” At the seminar the participants learned to read a new script, Amharic, and to read words containing 49 different signs in less than half an hour.

•

“If you know a little, you know a lot.” Questions of arithmetic and word attack were used to illustrate this maxim.

•

“What is the cost of education in terms of learning units?” This “chapter” of the science of education was studied more than once. The notion of an “ogden” as a unit of learning was a recurrent topic after it was introduced.

•

“What is educable in man?” When this study is done seriously it becomes the source of one of the most profound discoveries that affects the totality of one’s life. Awareness of one’s awareness is the corner stone of all the developments of the science of education.

•

“The subordination of teaching to learning” — a principle which assumes that children have mental powers that greatly exceed what it is commonly believed they possess. A study of how children learn to speak makes these powers evident and fills all educators with awe. (At the Twin Parks School a number of teachers managed to become vulnerable to the evidence of children’s powers and learned to look at them completely differently

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from their corresponding numbers in other schools.)

On another occasion, Professor Ogden Lindsley of Kansas. the developer of Precision Teaching and its main instrument, his Behavior Frequency Chart, came to the seminar and addressed them on his work and how it could be used to rejuvenate educational evaluation.

A few of the meetings were held at the premises of Educational Solutions, where films I had made were shown and instruments I had used in some studies of human dynamics displayed. The rest of the meetings were an CUNY Graduate Center on West 42nd Street.

Sometimes at the Twin Parks School some of the professors would sit in my seminars or demonstration lessons. Used as they were to judging teaching performances and knowing that here their role was to observe and find out what could be learned in the circumstances, control of the utterances that rushed to their lips must have been difficult. They were in fact not always repressed! I made a point of ignoring an utterance when it appeared to me to be judgmental, or inviting further comment if it could help those present.

Although it is almost certain that not many of the seminar participants managed to study the school in the way it deserved to be studied, and that most did not learn enough to be able to tell their colleagues in America of the lessons to be obtained from the Experimental School, this unique Office of Education project may well be considered an eye-opener, and schools like 72

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Twin Parks the most valuable kind of lever with which to move education.

Since what went on in the school was much more impressive than any words of mine, I looked forward to the professors coming to the seminar with their valuable crops of facts. At this moment I cannot say that I know who got what. Their reports to the Office of Education will enlighten me, no doubt. What I can say here is that I learned that even a seminar of professors displays features to be found in any college class, and next time I need to be aware of their habits or work and take these into account, rather than expect them to approach research without preconceptions.

I enjoyed each seminar and never personally felt that I was the target of those who found me insufferable; I was never involved at that level. My involvement was being as close as I could be to the inner dynamics in each person so that I could see from week to week who was managing to develop the tools to make the phenomenon of the school more visible and easier to study.

Week after week I saw much that was happening, not that my techniques and ideas became attractive to them! I did not expect that. But I saw the discipline required by the science of education developed here and there by one or two and that steps were being taken by some to reach knowledge where belief had formerly prevailed.

As a human experience the numerous seminars with these thirty people brought to life for me persons that it would be easy to

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lump together as “professors,” or as “seminar members.” Each of them made on me a unique impression that helped me know them beyond the words that they spoke.

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Views Of The Consultants’ Work

This section of the text is devoted to the contributions of four people who worked at the Twin Parks School as Educational Solutions, Inc. consultants.

The contract called for five full-time consultants and Dr. Gattegno, but two of the five who could have made a distinctive contribution changed their minds before the school began. It became necessary to find enough part-time consultants to take the ten days a week we had promised. Katherine Mitchell, Maria Gagliardo, and Enid Friedman were the full-time consultants; Caroline Mirthes, Ian Spence, and Everard Barrett were regular part-time consultants; Zulie Catir, Ghislaine Graf, Rosalyn Bennett, Elenita McDowell, Cecilia Perrault did occasional parttime consulting. The following reports were written by K. Mitchell, E. Friedman, I. Spence and C. Gattegno.

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In September, 1971, the Twin Parks School opened in the Bronx.

For most of us who were to be a part of this experiment in education the preparation began in July at a five-week seminar with Dr. Gattegno arranged for the staff of that school. As one of the team of consultants from Educational Solutions, I was present at that seminar and have been at the Twin Parks School five days a week throughout the year.

Although I had worked with Dr. Gattegno for a few years and had used Words in Color and Gattegno Mathematics in the classroom, the question that he put to us on the first day, “What Is An Experimental School?� was as new to me as it was to the others in the room. But because of this question and others related to it, these first few days of seminar created in some ways the inner tone of my work at the Twin Parks School. I began to see that my responsibility to that school and to myself was to leave behind my past and to try and look afresh at the points we were studying.

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As the days of the seminar passed, what it meant to be part of an experimental school became clearer. I was certainly charged by the thought that the Twin Parks School would be the first school of its kind — that it would be a place where staff, consultants, and children would go to find out; a place where preconceptions would not prevail, but rather, problems would dictate their solutions at the time they presented themselves; a place where mistakes were acceptable and considered opportunities for growing. What was not clear at the time and what my work at the school had to teach me was that it was easy to confuse a “model” school with an “experimental” school. I wrote in my diary on November 13, 1971, the following: “I am more concerned with the progress we should be making than with knowing what is actually going on and how it is all taking shape.” Again, at the meeting of consultants, administrators, and teacher trainers in December, I found myself confused in thinking that the Twin Parks School had to be a “model” school.

Over Christmas vacation, however, when I was able to make the distinction quite clear in my mind, I put aside “model” school and returned in January with new energy to give to the many challenges that the school was presenting.

My assignments at the Twin Parks School varied. In the first weeks when the C.S. 129-234 community was housed in neighboring schools, I was asked to concentrate my work with the teachers and children at C.S. 92. Upon arriving at our school on Mapes Avenue, however, the problems of the school began to arise and the way that I spent my time became more clearly defined. Some of these difficulties were considered emergencies (I think of the three days I spent with a fourth grade teacher who was having difficulty finding even one minute of peace in her 80

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classroom). Other problems were long term and required the cooperation of several consultants and staff members — for instance, the elimination of illiteracy in C.S. 129. Only three hours a week were scheduled: the time that I spent in Mathematics seminars with the teachers and paraprofessionals of grades K-2. For the most part, I was on call to demonstrate how one might introduce multiplication, to have lunch with a teacher who wanted to discuss a particular child, to observe a teacher meeting a new reading group and to assist her in diagnosing difficulties, to work with some of the most difficult reading problems in the school, to assist teachers in the upper grades who were working with remedial readers, to demonstrate how one might use the pop-ups, to observe lessons and to give feedback, to meet with the other consultants, the teacher trainers, and the administration from time to time to assess where we had been, where we were at that time, and where we were going.

Of all of my involvements at the school, my work with the nonreaders has taken most of my time. One of our earliest observations at the Twin Parks School was that many children in the upper grades could not read, and we suspected a large number. This situation emerged as one of the first we should address ourselves to, and in mid-October the administration supported that several consultants and teacher-trainers focus our work on the elimination of illiteracy in grades 3 to 6. Could all of the children who did not read become readers? How long would it take? To what extent would these children become different if they learned how to read? These questions and others were ones we hoped to investigate. As none of us had ever undertaken such an assignment, no one could guess what our 81

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work with the 120 non-readers at C.S. 129 could teach us individually and as a group.

There were three small rooms, originally designed for offices, used by those of us working on the elimination of illiteracy at C.S. 129. With only a few desks and chairs which could either be used or pushed out of the way, these uncluttered rooms provided adequate space for moving about — space for children to be up pointing to charts or writing on the portable chalk board. The large wall space allowed, in two of the rooms, that the Spanish charts and the English charts be displayed at once.

In addition, each room was equipped with a set of pop-up films, the Leo Color films, a projector, and extension cord which could be taken out of the cabinet at any time. This environment of openness, where all of the tools for working were within our reach, where the flexibility allowed maximum possibility for meeting each child where he was, seemed compatible with the demands of the children we were meeting.

Whom we began to work with in the beginning was largely arbitrary. There were two beginning third grade teachers who had between them eighteen non-readers. To relieve these teachers of some of the difficulties of the first months, I concentrated my work with children from these two classes.

Later, when we realized that the children in the sixth grade would be with us for only one year, we shifted our attention to these boys and girls. Although each of us saw different children, our organizational approach was similar. The children who could not read were taken from their classrooms, usually in groups of five or six, to one of our rooms. They were worked with intensively — usually one to two hours and sometimes 82

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more — until they were reading well enough to work with their classmates. As children rejoined their classes, we were able to take on others who needed our help. Because of the large numbers of children who did not read, we were somewhat hesitant in the beginning to work with only one or two children at a time. But all of us had something to learn on this matter. It soon became apparent that for some children, what could be achieved in one hour of intensive work by himself was more than he could do in several hours if he were working with a group where so many things might take him away from his work on reading.

The appearance was that these 120 children might be quite similar, as none of them had ever learned to read. But after meeting a few of them, I knew that their difficulties were as varied as the children themselves. True, many of them were handicapped by their past attempts at learning to read — holding on to the alphabet, clinging to sight words, etc. These useless bits of knowledge, however, were quickly dropped when the children saw that they could be replaced by efficient word attack skills. The real difficulty, rather, was in finding the entry into each of the children, finding which activity would mobilize him and allow him to meet himself as a new person — as someone who could use his intelligence and not only his memory, as someone who could make use of his powers of looking and listening (which he may have abandoned), as someone who could be responsible for his own learning.

My first responsibility, therefore, in meeting these children was to engage them in some activity that would let me know them better. If he were bi-lingual, I might talk with him, trying to 83

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assess among other things, how fluent he was in each language For the most part, I prefer an activity. The “Pop-Ups” or “Leo Color” films were excellent opportunities for me to watch the children relate to what was in front of them. Or, I might ask one to show me the words that he knew on the charts. My job, in each instance, was to be as sensitive as I could to his feedback (in its various manifestations), and to let him tell me what to do next. Naturally, the entries were as different as the children were.

William comes to mind. A 13-year-old boy who was extremely self-conscious and very hesitant to come to work with me, William refused each of my initial invitations to “show a word he knew” or to point to a sentence on the charts that he had read from the pop-up film. Partly by intuition I pointed to “no” on the charts. “I know you know this one,” I said. “I know it, but I’m not going to tell you,” William replied. “All right,” I said, “but can you look and tell me if you can find a word on chart 16 that uses exactly the same two colors as this one you know?” After some seconds (and what seemed like many seconds to me), William solved this problem. And in a short time we were doing sentences such as: “I know no,” “I know you know no,” or “I know my nose.” William had entered!

As the children were finding entries into reading in a number of unique ways, I saw that it didn’t matter where we started as long as our activities yielded criteria for the learner. But no matter what the entry some characteristics were common to my work with all of the children. For instance, I found that what these children brought with them might be used. Therefore, when Kevin showed me on the first day of our work that he knew “zoo” 84

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and “pet”, I started from there. Knowing that Kevin had to first become aware that this word, “pet,” was made up of sounds uttered one after the other, I called upon another power that he brought with him: his use of his will to control his utterances.

“Now, begin the word again and stop before you put the last sound,” I said. With little effort, “pe” came from his mouth as I covered at the same time the “t” at the end of “pet.” “And what would you say for this?” I asked as I pointed to “pe” (in the same colors as he had met in “pet”) in other places on the charts.

Next, thinking that Kevin probably had some consonant sounds from his four years in school, I pointed to “pest” and said: “What do you say for this one?” “I don’t remember that one,” he replied immediately. And I said to Kevin what I said to so many of the non-readers at the Twin Parks School: “You don’t have to remember! Just look and you will know what to say.” And in this particular case, I added: “You already know how it begins.”

Looking again, he said first slowly and hesitantly, “pe-s-t”; then confidently, “pest!”

In a similar way, Kevin read “pen,” and by adding sounds to the front and to the back of it, Kevin read “spent” and “spend.” Up to this point, my work with Kevin had only included six signs or colors (e, p, t, s, n, d), for which he knew how to make the corresponding sounds. But Kevin was saying the right thing for words using these signs that he never suspected he had entry into. Moreover, as soon as Kevin realized that he could change the way that he began to say “pet,” but keep the rest of the sounds, “et,” he was able to read “set,” “met” and “net.” This same awareness made it possible for him to immediately unlock a number of other words on the charts: “test,” “ten,” “tent,” “sent,” etc. What seemed more important for Kevin than these 85

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words, however, was that he was in control — he could say what was pointed to and no one had to tell him. Indeed, within this restricted language of six signs, Kevin was as good as I was. And this way of working in which knowing a little generates knowing a lot was effective with all of the non-readers I met.

In a bi-lingual school, having a place where materials for reading English and Spanish were co-present proved helpful.

First of all, it made it possible to switch from working on one language to working on the other without any fuss. And in the instances where the children were bi-lingual, once they had made sense of reading either English or Spanish, the other language could become theirs in a matter of hours. Moreover, in some cases, having both the English and the Spanish charts displayed at once made it possible to use them jointly when it would help to clear up confusion. I think of Juan, another 13year-old, who, although more fluent in Spanish, had only worked on reading English in his previous six years at school.

Believing that I could use the sight words that he had in English, I began to work in that language first. But in a few days, I switched to Spanish. It seemed that this was required in order to force Juan to see that reading was speech written down. On a number of occasions, however, I was able to use the sight words that he had in the English charts to help him unlock words on the Spanish charts.

In eight months of working on the elimination of illiteracy at C.S. 192, I met about 50 children. And together, five of us worked for varying lengths of time with about 120 non-readers.

The following are some of our findings:

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1 That for most of the children, remedial learning to read was a matter of hours. What was first 120 names on a sheet of paper soon became the names of children known to one or all of us working on the elimination of illiteracy at C.S. 129. These children, each one with his particular difficulty, began to sort themselves according to what they required of us. Among this group were those who had a beginning, those who showed a great amount of good will, and those who worked easily with other children. In five to ten hours of intensive work with one of us, many of these children were back in their classrooms, where they could gain the practice to make them stronger. At the same time, it took more time to know some children and to understand what their difficulties were. Even so, the most difficult case that I met took only 50 hours before he could read and write both English and Spanish.

2 That some of the teachers found it easier to incorporate the returning readers into their classes than others. From some teachers I would have reports such as: “Look at the poem Sammy wrote,” or “Patricia is really doing well,” or “Maribel is another person.” Other teachers complained, however, that there wasn’t enough time in the day to cater to those who were well on their way to being independent readers but who still needed strengthening. This led the teachers in grades 3 to 6 to organize themselves in April, 1972, so that the children who needed concentrated practice could be grouped together for a certain time each day. Most of these teachers, however, left in June feeling that there was a lot to learn about how to work with these children once they were together.

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3 That the list of non-readers needed constant revision. At the beginning of the school year, we would often have children sent to us for remedial work who were already reading. Then the job was to help the classroom teacher find a way of working with him. On the other hand, the original list of non-readers was constantly being added to as the children who did not read transferred to C.S. 129 from other schools or as teachers discovered additional non-readers in their classrooms.

Moreover, some children who did not read were discovered very late in the year. This was often true in classrooms of new teachers who joined the staff later in the year and did not know that there was someone working specially with non-readers.

4 That a team effort was valuable in a number of ways.

There were altogether five of us working on the elimination of illiteracy at C.S. 129 — two consultants, two teacher trainers, and Dr. Gattegno, some of us having more time to give to the project than others. And on a number of occasions, we needed to call on each other to work with certain children. Often we asked Maria to work with a particular child first in Spanish. On other occasions, we called upon each other when one of us felt unable to pinpoint the obstacles in the way of the learner.

5 That a teacher’s fluency in a particular language was secondary to her understanding the requirements of reading and to her knowing precisely the obstacles standing in the way of the learners. Those of us whose mother tongue was English met children whom we felt should learn to read Spanish first. And in some cases, rather than send these children to Maria, I knew that my growing understanding of that child would more than compensate for my limited facility in Spanish. And indeed, my 88

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restricted functioning in Spanish was adequate for me to do my part in helping him make sense of reading a language that he was better acquainted with than I. 6 That the Pop-Up and Leo Color films were invaluable in the elimination of illiteracy at C.S. 129. They were used particularly in diagnosing difficulties and in providing entries for the most demanding children.

7 That we can name the children who are not yet readers: Isidro, Thomas, Bernard, Tyrone, Jose, and Juliet. Of these six children, only Juliet was on the original list of non-readers. In fact, Tyrone was not discovered until late April when he went to another fourth grade teacher for reading; and Jose was spotted

by Mrs. Hercules in June as he sat quietly at the back of his classroom. On the other hand, Isidro, Thomas, and Bernard came to us in late winter and early Spring. Each of them was causing terrific discipline problems to his teacher and spending most of the day roaming the halls. Our time with them was not sufficient for understanding the mystery that each of them is and for interesting them in learning to read.

8 That there are a number of children in grades 3 to 6 who have made sense of reading but who still need appropriate exercises and practice to make them into independent readers.

In addition to my concentrated work with the non-readers at C.S. 129, the Twin Parks School offered me continued contact with about 20 teachers from the kindergarten, first and second grades. As the teachers in these grades felt that they needed

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assistance in meeting the demands of teaching math in their classrooms, I was asked in early October to offer weekly 45minute seminars to each of the three grade levels. Moreover, although I was giving most of my time to eliminating illiteracy in the upper school, I was requested to spend any available time in the classrooms of the lower school giving demonstration lessons in mathematics and watching teachers teach math to their children.

This continued contact with the teachers of the lower school generated a number of questions in my mind. Would the 45minute periods for seminar (usually only 35 minutes of working time) be sufficient to study any question? Would there be enough topics to study every week? Could we make progress in our mathematics? Could this progress be verified by the children’s learning in the classrooms? Could we notice the impact of observations, demonstrations, and seminars on our teaching mathematics?

The weekly seminars were happy occasions. Teachers were free to come or to use this preparation period for any other purpose.

After leaving their children in labs, the teachers entered one or two at a time, taking their places around a table. All of the materials were close at hand: chalk, pencils, Algebricks, product charts, prisms and cubes; but usually the table was empty — indicative, I think now, of our wish to start anew. And, indeed, in a matter of minutes most of us had recuperated from the tasks of the morning and were ready to take up the questions that came.

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The topics that we studies in seminars came in a variety of ways.

Sometimes, based on my observations in the classrooms or on what had happened the previous week in seminar, I would propose an exercise for all of us. For instance, wanting to shed some light on how the language of mathematics is acquired, one Monday I worked in Spanish with the teachers on doubling and halving. Reflecting on what had happened to them in this exercise, the teachers were able to articulate more or less how they had used their perception to derive meanings from actions.

Moreover, they could comment on the extent to which they had acquired the language in Spanish to accompany this set of meanings. On another occasion I asked the question: “Would anyone say it is possible to do long division before one does multiplication?” By now these teachers knew me well enough to refrain from saying “no” straight away, even though they couldn’t imagine it possible. After enough examples to prove to ourselves that it was possible, I asked: “What does it mean for us?”

My preparing exercises for our meetings was only one way of generating topics for our study. On some occasions I might begin by saying: “You start us off, Sylvia.” And if Sylvia didn’t have a question, someone else did. Everyone had something to contribute to one teacher’s question: “Is it really possible to learn products if you don’t memorize?” This question, in addition, mobilized us to find an activity that could shed some light on the matter. In this case we watched ourselves acquiring the multiples of 17. At other times the teachers would propose certain exercises without being requested to do so, as Pat did when she insisted that we do some work in another base because she had found it so helpful at another seminar. And there were 91

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the special sessions when I began by asking: “Has anyone learned anything during the last weeks?”

In late February a box of prisms and cubes arrived at the school, and their appearance brought an idea for a new kind of seminar.

The next Monday, before the teachers gathered around the table, I opened the chest of prisms and cubes and scattered the colorful pieces around the table. Once these first grade teachers were seated, I began in the following way: “I have never used this material so I can’t tell you what to do with it. But let’s open our eyes and see if these pieces of wood suggest any questions to us.” The first question that came hardly seemed related to mathematics, but it had so much to teach us: “How many white rods do you think are in this bag?” asked one of the teachers.

And the responses came from around the table: “100,” “250,” “500,” “300,” “1000,” “350.” “How is it,” we asked ourselves “that our responses varied so much?” We moved to a similar question where the way of solving the problem was less tedious, “How many pink cubes will we need to build this brown cube?”

“Four,” “Eight,” came the replies. And in building it, we were amazed that our sight had not been educated in these matters.

For all of us these 35 minutes had served to show that there was a world to explore in the prisms and cubes. One teacher was especially startled, however, and said: “These are fantastic. I can’t believe my sight is so impoverished. I want to work on this with my children.” With no further introduction, Wanda took the prisms and cubes to her classroom.

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What happened to this teacher while she worked with her children with the prisms and cubes was delightful to witness. A teacher who had been despondent about her work had a new enthusiasm. Someone who had not yet seen what her children were capable of doing started saying to me and to her colleagues: “It’s just amazing what they are doing!” Some of the things we had worked on in previous seminars (for instance, the richness of equivalent expressions) began to show itself in her work. “What is another name for 53? and another name? and another? etc.” I would hear her ask her students. Moreover, much of her tension left as she accepted being a learner with her students. One day a man watched Wanda working with these first graders on finding the difference between successive cubes.

Somewhat overcome by what he had seen, this gentleman exclaimed: “What will you do next?” And Wanda quite easily replied: “To tell you the truth, I don’t know. I only stay one step ahead of the children.”

So far, I have talked about the four weekly seminars as a whole.

But although the form of our meetings were similar, these groups challenged me differently. My job with the kindergarten teachers, for instance, was to offer them the chance to see that the activities we worked on in seminar were for their children.

Most of them, in their previous work with five-year-olds, had not thought of teaching mathematics and reading. My work with the paraprofessionals, however, required that I provide an opportunity for them to see themselves as mathematicians — as having the power to be very swift calculators or to answer what appeared to be very difficult questions. The second grade teachers were most demanding of me as their difficulties were at least twofold: some were very frightened of mathematics and 93

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many were less able to give time to mathematics because classroom management was more of a priority. We made some progress with the first, but I was not in their classrooms enough to provide assistance in the other.

In spite of the differences in each of these seminar groups, all of us were served to some extent by the weekly chance of coming together. Most important, perhaps, we got to know each other better. In the beginning, our acquaintance was vague, but it was supportive to these teachers to hear that their colleagues were engaged, like themselves, in finding their way in the classroom.

As the year went on, we came to know ourselves and our colleagues as having our own particular weaknesses, but also, as having something unique to offer to these meetings. It was warming to me to observe that in our seminars, the teachers who were swiftest at grasping a problem gave their colleagues who were slower plenty of time to sort out their difficulties. In fact, the swiftest ones realized that those who were struggling could enlighten us all about the possible obstacles of a certain question. With this growing acquaintance, teachers became less worried about making mistakes in front of their colleagues. This was demonstrated so clearly in the paraprofessionals’ seminar as they more and more threw themselves into an exercise without thinking of what their friends might think. Certainly, these weekly meetings helped the teachers to see how they could use me as well as how they could learn from each other. By springtime, some of the teachers were voluntarily visiting each other’s classes. These seminars also contributed, I think, to the friendliness that was so apparent at C.S. 234. It is from this contact with 20 teachers and 15 paraprofessionals that I make the following observations: 94

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1 That my way of working with these teachers changed over the months. In the beginning there was so much to make sense of: new materials, new children, consultants, frequent observations, etc. Moreover, there were so many new points of consideration about ways of working: that learning could be a series of games, that there was no need to say “very good,” that children did not need to memorize, that to tell an answer only proved that the teacher knew it, etc. All of this created a short period of uneasiness with many of the teachers. Their questions reflected that they wanted recipes: “How does one do multiplication with the rods?” or “Show me another way to do subtraction. I tried what you said, and it didn’t work.” I felt one teacher trying to come to terms with all of this that was new when I visited her classroom in October. “But I want you to know it. Don’t you know it?” she sighed to her children. One child obviously moved by her good intention responded: “Don’t worry, teacher, us children don’t know it, but you know it all!”

Aside from being asked to give recipes, I was requested to give demonstration lessons whenever I visited classrooms. In January, however, when teachers were better acquainted with me, with the materials, and with their children, our seminars took a turn. One first grade teacher expressed it so clearly for all of us at this time: “We try to do what you do or what you say do, but it doesn’t work. Now I know that first I have to really understand it for myself before I can work with the children.”

This awareness prompted teachers to bring new kinds of questions to seminar: for instance, “How would one know that equivalence is really understood by the children?” At the same time, I had more requests to observe teachers work and not only to give demonstration lessons.

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2 That most of these teachers became more relaxed as the year went on. I think of a first grade teacher who said in September to one of her students: “No, don’t say what comes next. We aren’t up to that.” So often when I visited her class in the Spring I would hear a relaxed voice saying to her student: “How did you get that, Rodney?” And after hearing his description, answered: “I never would have thought of that!” Or, I think of a second grade teacher who objected to my offer to do some work with her class when I visited in September. “It is as if you want to prove me incompetent if you take over my lesson,” she explained. By springtime, however, she invited me frequently to visit her class and would often stop in the middle of her work to ask me to work on this or that with her class.

3 That creating an atmosphere where we learn by doing and where mistakes are accepted as ways of knowing freed some. I think of a kindergarten teacher who, when looking at her year, said: “Just think how much easier the job of the first grade teachers will be next year when they get our children. And just think how much better we will do our job next year because we’ve learned this year!” Another teacher talked over lunch with a visitor from Canada who had seen her work that morning.

“Tell me,” he said, “how did you learn to do all of these things with your children?” “Well, I just learned by working in the classroom, and especially from the times I made mistakes and it didn’t go well,” she replied. There were a few teachers, however, who did not respond so readily to this invitation to learn by doing. One second grade teacher while working consistently with her children expressed at every meeting how dissatisfied she was with her teaching of Mathematics. Another second grade teacher felt that she could only manage to work with a few 96

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children at a time. And she talked much more about those she never got to than about what was happening to those she was meeting.

4 That some of us could improve our understanding of mathematics. A paraprofessional opened our seminar one day with a question about prime factors, a term she was struggling with in a math book she was studying. After a few minutes’ work she said: “Oh, I see, ‘prime factor’ is just a fancy name for something I already know.” Another paraprofessional exclaimed one Monday after our seminar: “I never thought I could learn to do long division!” And everyone seemed startled by their growing ease at working in other bases of numeration.

5 That these teachers moved from finding fault with the children to looking more carefully at what they were doing and to observing obstacles that they might be putting in the children’s way. In September, one first grade teacher exclaimed after her first lesson using Words In Color: “They just can’t get it if I do not point more than once!” And a fifth grade teacher commented after her first week in the classroom: “These children are accustomed to being told. They don’t know what it means to correct themselves.” These statements, however, were replaced more and more by ones such as: “I know he can do it, but I just don’t know what I’m doing wrong.” or one first grade teacher exclaimed after a seminar in using all bases of numeration: “And to think I never understood why 5 + 7 = 12 (X) was not obvious to the children!”

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6 That there are about five teachers that I hardly know.

Because these teachers only attended seminars from time to time and because I tended to work with those who requested me, I do not really know what happened to these teachers nor what goes on in their classrooms.

7 That more and more of the teachers began to share among themselves. They brought their difficulties to seminars and were more vocal as the year went on about what had worked or failed in their classroom. They made attempts to observe each other, and they talked more among themselves about life in their classrooms.

8 That everyone, though feeling themselves very clumsy in the classroom, saw that their children were far more powerful than they had ever expected. Most first and second grade teachers found it possible to work with their children simultaneously on addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and fractions. The children’s mastery of these operations varied, depending upon who their teacher was and who the children, themselves, were. One kindergarten teacher said of the children in her class: “They know more here at Christmas time than my first graders knew at the end of last year!” A first grade teacher commented after seeing her children work with ease on squaring and making square roots: “I never would have thought of doing square roots with first graders!”

9 That most of the teachers in these three grades felt in June that they were just beginning to find their way. One first grade teacher expressed herself at the final feedback session in

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June: “My only criterion for what to do in the classroom was what you did in seminar. This was great for me. I understand the mathematics so much better. I am quite comfortable with the materials too. I even know that many of the mistakes I made last year won’t happen next year. But now I see that this wasn’t best for the children (although they learned a lot in spite of me). If I can be more with the children, I know we will make more progress.” The other teachers in the group listened intently and most nodded their heads in agreement at the end of her statement. I left them then, as they were saying that, yes, this, and a little more help from the consultants in their classrooms, as well as more cooperation among themselves, say, in grouping, would allow them and their children to make greater strides.

Katherine Mitchell

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The Twin Parks School was to be a place where new approaches to educational problems would be tried and studied. It was to be a place where one would respond to the needs of the situation, rather than impose strategies which had been previously successful. We can learn a lot if we look honestly at what happened this year. What is the school like after one year? Is it different from most schools? What problems were investigated?

Which ones solved and which are left to be worked on next year?

And through all of this where was I? As a consultant with special skills, what did I do, and what could I have done to be more effective?

Although school did not begin until mid-September, for all intents and purposes the project began in July with the advent of a five-week, 175-hour seminar. It would be presumptuous of me to try to describe Dr. Gattegno’s intention, so I can only share my perception of the purpose and impression of the consequences. Most of the time was directed toward getting the staff to think about children and education in a different way — to recognize all that children bring with them, and to realize that

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a teacher’s role is to help a child become aware of his abilities.

The concepts were difficult, and it was never very clear just how much was understood. Teachers left confused, anxious, and stripped of the educational philosophies they had strongly advocated five weeks earlier. No matter how much or how little of Dr. Gattegno’s ideas had been understood, it was clear that most of the staff had been changed by that experience. They apparently wanted to make this school different from other schools. There was a desire to make classrooms different from classrooms in other places. But even more, there was a strong interest in making the school a psychologically healthy place with an emphasis on close relationships among all staff members, administrators included.

The administrators, more than anything else, were very much aware of what was going on in their schools. They seemed to have made a tremendous effort to keep informed of any problems. Part of their success stems from sheer accessibility.

Rather than sitting in their offices, they were quite visible in the school — often found in a classroom, hallway or in the middle of a group discussion — always ready to hear the problems of teacher, parent or child.

The teachers were clearly comfortable and secure in this atmosphere. There was neither a fear of evaluation, nor a dread when the principal or any other observer entered the classroom.

Teachers were quite free to discover for themselves how they could work best with their children. They were very interested in children in other classes and advice was freely offered about how to handle a specific problem. The extent to which they

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shared ideas and experiences with one another was most impressive.

Thus far this report has dealt with some of the similar aspects of the upper and lower schools; however, there are important differences between the two schools which should be examined.

On a superficial level there were no major differences in the make-up of the staffs. Both schools had their share of young, inexperienced teachers struggling with all aspects of their personal and professional development. There was an even distribution of veterans who brought with them experiences, as well as prejudices from their past. The initial excitement, enthusiasm, and commitment to a new way of working was as much a part of one school as of the other. But after the first few months it became clear that the upper and lower schools were very different places. The staff’s attitudes, the problems to be faced and the strategies for solving the problems were unique to each school.

The lower school was faced with a clear challenge, unaffected by extraneous factors. There were approximately 800 children, all needing to learn to read, and for the most part eager to proceed.

The entire school was earnestly committed to this goal. From 9:00 to 10:30 everyone was scheduled for reading. Every teacher and every paraprofessional had a reading group. The results speak for themselves. The children did learn to read, and only a handful ended the year without this skill. I don’t mean to imply that reading was the only task taken on by the lower school. But it was the only one in which the whole school participated with all of its energy. Even though in isolated classrooms exciting work was done in getting to know oneself, creative writing and 103

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mathematics, the staff was well aware that more could have been done in every classroom; and now that they know how to handle the problem of reading they are ready to think about ways of ensuring that every classroom will be a place for other experiences as well.

In the upper school things were not so simple. From the first few weeks it was apparent that while most of these children also needed to learn to read, many could not readily overcome their past failures. Each class had a few children who did not find school challenging and exciting, but rather restricting and frustrating, fraught with memories of failure. A few classrooms immediately became scenes of chaos while teachers tried desperately to proceed with their lessons. It was not an easy situation to resolve — should they concentrate only on those interested in working and let the others join when they were ready, or should they follow the traditional techniques of classroom management? How to handle these children and how to organize one’s classroom so that all children could be served was a major concern for many teachers in the upper school. The administrators at first offered no assistance, only criticism of those who were unable to maintain order in the classroom. I wasn’t long before the teachers responded defensively and began criticizing the administrators for not exercising their authoritative power. It was clear that the staff had difficulty working together to solve this major problem facing the school.

By January a gradual change had made the school look different.

The teachers fell back on their own strengths and began to assume responsibility for what happened. Classrooms which had been considered “disaster areas” reached a level at which work 104

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could now go on. But the effects of the first six months never wore off. Despite the reality, some onlookers tended not to notice the changes. The upper school had developed a reputation — it was the place with all the problems. Recognition was not given to those teachers who had pulled their classrooms together. The staff itself did not seem to recover psychologically — the feeling of discouragement lingered and affected the work during the rest of the year.

Unlike the lower school, the upper school staff was not able to mobilize itself to tackle the problem of reading. The teachers were not ready to commit themselves to this problem. Some refused to attend seminars, others came but were unaffected by what was presented to them, still others refused to take part in the reading program at all. I emphasize the reading program, not because I believe it was the only important activity, but because it was one of the most blatant problems for the school to work on this first year. If the staff was unable to assume a total commitment to this significant area of work, what could be expected of the other classroom programs? Let me not ignore the fact that in a few classrooms discoveries were made in creative writing and mathematics, but for the most part growth in the classroom seemed minimal. Perhaps one major reason has to do with the staff’s disinterest in working hard enough. For example, at one point the teachers organized a club period for the fourth graders, but after one week the program was disbanded. The students had been enthusiastic, but the staff openly admitted it was too much work to continue. The plans for next year call for a possible re-organization of the school with units of four or five teachers working together and in this way, perhaps working harder.

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My work as a psychological consultant for the most part centered around discussions with staff members about any problem with which they were concerned. Sometimes I just listened, providing an opportunity to share something which was upsetting. Often the only indication I had that anything positive had happened during the discussion was a statement from the teacher herself about something which she might do to alter the situation. At this point my role became minimal because the teacher was ready to work on things by herself.

Perhaps one of the most significant things I learned this year has to do with knowing when to provide help as a consultant and when the teacher can learn more from being left alone.

When a child is referred for diagnosis I use it as an opportunity to have the teacher learn more about herself and the way she interacts with her students. It was not only important for her to learn about the individual child she had referred but also that she learn something to help her in the future. Observations and feedback seem the most effective way to help a teacher understand how her behavior affects all the children in her classrooms. Some teachers could not work this way and were disappointed because I hadn’t provided a miracle cure. But those who benefited demonstrated at other times during the year that they were able to use what they had learned.

The overriding assumption in my way of handling situations was that if working relationships were improved, if people could be more optimistic about the problems they were facing, and if a teacher could see that there was something she could do to change a situation, then things might be different in the classroom. Some things did change during the year — 106

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improvements were made in staff relationships and general morale, and the atmosphere of the school did seem different from other places. It might take another year before the classrooms become truly different from those of other schools.

Enid Friedman, Ph. D.

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How do I know that I am progressing at school? Maria provided one answer by counting. She joined 21 other students in Miss Cresmer’s Grade V class in counting the number of mathematics problems she answered correctly in a five-minute quiz. Each day, she plotted the frequency of the total counts on the daily chart shown in Figure 1. She quickly learned that on some days she might not produce as high a frequency as the day before, but on other days, the frequency would bounce up. By drawing a line through the middle of the frequencies, she was able to show her average gain or acceleration, and by extending that line across toward the right of the chart, she could project how many problems of the same difficulty she would be able to do in the next weeks, if she kept progressing at the same speed.

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Noemi, a student in the same class, was also excited by her chart, but for a different reason. As her chart shows (Figure 2), when she began plotting her frequencies, she was among the slowest in the class. As the days passed, her increase in skill was such that when she drew a celeration line through the dots, her acceleration was one of the steepest in the class. Thus, she showed herself that she was making the greatest progress.

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On the other hand, Dwayne looked for progress in another area of his life. His mother had come to the school a few times to share with his teacher, Mr. Rogers, the concern that Dwayne was too often hitting or menacing other students. Mr. Rogers had kept track of the number of incidents per day, and found that even though they were decelerating slowly, there were some highs of over 10 per day, and that was too many.

Dwayne decided to count too, and succeeded in halving his urges in the first two days, but then gave up counting for the

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next week-and-one-half. When he tried again, the counts bounced widely, but there were four days that he had no desire chart does not give us an indication whether it was Dwayne’s will-power, his mother’s concern, or the picture of his behavior that brought down the urges, but according to Dwayne, it doesn’t matter; the important fact is that the urges are less frequent.

The idea of students charting to show progress is not new. And in the Twin Parks Schools, it is no longer a novelty to consider

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the student as a person who knows as much about what interests him as does anybody else, so it seems natural that we would ask him what pinpoint he would choose to measure his own progress. What is unique is that a method exists which allows each student to pick his own pinpoint, and count and picture it using the same conventions on the same chart.

The versatile Daily Behavior Chart, and the methods used to count behaviors, are two basic components of a system called Precision Teaching. The methods and chart were originally developed by O. R. Lindsley and his associates (1967) as the first step in a pragmatic approach to solving the widely diverse problems brought up by teachers in Special Education. As a starting point, Lindsley made use of B. F. Skinner’s (1953) observation that behavior is a universal phenomenon, and has at least one uniform property in that it must occur at some frequency.

With a little rearrangement of words, but not meaning, Lindsley found that teachers’ descriptions of classroom situations could be converted to descriptions of behaviors, with the crucial factor most often being their frequency of occurrence, rather than their intensity. It was then a simple matter to ask each teacher to pinpoint which behavior was the most important to study, count it, and establish a record of its frequency. They could then try change procedures such as new curriculum, rewards, scoldings, etc., and see if the behavior changed in frequency when they did so.

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The purpose of describing a behavior is to give the listener a picture which he can connect to his own memory of past experiences. Lindsley found that a picture, or a graph of the frequency of a behavior was also more descriptive than a series of numbers representing daily counts. However, as is the case with the transformation of spoken speech to written speech, it was useful to agree upon a series of conventions so that the student of behavior could learn one code, and practice it each time he looked at a chart of anyone’s behavior, rather than relearn a different set of conventions each time.* To go from a count of the number of times the behavior occurred to a graphic picture of the behavior requires the acquisition of six conventions. One of these is necessary. Since the behaviors occur in time, the jump to a picture can only be accomplished by finding a spatial system that is isomorphic to time. As with writing, the straight line was chosen.

The five other conventions are listed in the following paragraphs. They are described in relation to the Daily Behavior Chart which appears below in a reduced size.

*

My understanding of the problem of portraying behavior graphically was clarified by the analysis of the parallel problem of picturing the spoken word, shared by Dr. C. Gattegno in What We Owe Children. (New York: Outerbridge and Dienstfrey, 1970, p. 18.)

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The straight line representing the passage of time was drawn across the bottom of the chart.

That line was drawn from left to right, so that as one moves a pencil to the right from any point on the line, its path becomes a progression into the future.

The straight line (representing the passage of time) is divided into 141 equal parts, representing days. As a result, each up and down line represents a day. The first and every seventh line

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thereafter are drawn in heavy relief to denote the passage of a week. They are Sunday lines.

The scale used up the left denotes the frequency of the behavior.

Frequency is defined as the number of times the movement occurs in one minute. Thus, the denominator for the day’s count is the number of minutes the behavior was observed.

The scale used up the left is a ratio scale (logarithmic), or “multiply-divide.” As you go up the scale by equal distances, you multiply the numbers by equal amounts or factors. If you come down by equal jumps, you are dividing by equal amounts at each jump. This scale is used to make it possible to include almost all of the frequencies of human behavior from one per day (or one in 1000 waking minutes; behaviors such as shaving, dusting a room), to 1000 in one minute (speed reading, drum-roll).

Over the past six years, as teachers and students in many schools have counted, charted, and discussed the results of their charts, Precision Teachers have learned that the student is the most efficient and reliable counter of his own behavior; he almost always chooses the most effective change procedure; and the pinpoint he chooses to count is the one on which he effects the most change. Thus, the charts have proven what teachers who subordinate teaching to learning have long been aware of; that the student brings a lot to the learning situation, or when put in terms of decisions about counting and charting, “the student knows best.”

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Precision Teaching was one of the innovations introduced by Educational Solutions at the Twin Schools. I was a part-time consultant, and with Sue Ratick, a student assistant, spread the word in C.S. 129, while Lou Banks took it on as one of the main messages to be delivered out of his Math Lab in C.S. 234. A majority of the students were introduced to the idea of counting a behavior, and almost all of them picked pinpoints and tried tallying their counts for a few days.

One Grade V teacher, John Rogers, had learned Precision Teaching in a University course, so he introduced counting and charting to his own class, and many of his students became involved in a wide range of individual and group projects.

How Precision Teaching Was Carried Out At The Twin Schools: When left to make their own choice, students usually thought of counting behaviors involving the teacher, or her approval.

Popular pinpoints included “How many times the teacher talks to me”; or on the less positive side, “How many times the teacher shouts at us.” Students’ behaviors included, “How many times ‘X’ talks to me,” and “How many times I leave my seat without permission.” A few boys counted how many times they punched someone, and Andrew counted his urges to hit. At home, mothers’ and sisters’ shouts were the most popular pinpoints.

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A few students found counting a way to look at how they were advancing in schoolwork. “How many times I answer the teacher’s question”; and “How many times I do homework”; were popular pinpoints. A few students in the senior bilingual class counted “How many times I say something in English.”

The counts were usually recorded by tallying on a piece of paper with a pencil each time the behavior happened. In ten classrooms, the students made leather wrist counters with beads arranged on a wire so that one bead could be slid to the other end of the wire for each count. For a while before Christmas, making wrist counters was far more popular than counting with them.

Academic targets such as Elizabeth’s and Reggie’s mathematics problems were usually suggested as a special class project by the teacher, and counted by most of the class. The chief product of the projects was the individual charts shown in Figures 1 and 2.

As a useful byproduct, the teacher was able to take the celeration lines from each student’s chart, and make a composite summary, showing the average of each student’s progress, as well as the progress of the group. Miss Cresmer’s Grade V class was summarized in two ways. Figure 5 shows how 13 girls advanced across four sets of exercises in which the operations demanded were the same, but the

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lowest common multiples were changed. At a glance, the teacher is able to tell the average level of proficiency of each student at the start of each set, and how quickly each gained skill. The composite chart also shows that some students decelerated after obtaining average frequencies on the first exercise of each set. It is possible that a student might tire of one kind of exercise, and

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not try as hard after the novelty wears off, but each time he sees a new challenge, achieves a higher frequency than on previous sets. Figure 5 does not show whether each student gradually increased his skill across sets. To find out this information, the teacher has simply to draw one celeration line across all of the data for one student, as has been done in Figure 6.

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Mr. Pompeo’s fourth grade class participated in a “pick-ityourself” math quiz in which the pupils were given the kind of problem they were to do, and inserted their own numbers.

Figure 7 shows Mildred’s work on one such quiz, in which she has followed Mr. Pompeo’s direction to show each operation. In Figure 8, the chart of Mildred’s operations completed correctly indicates she is increasing facility in the first two kinds of problem. A combined chart (Figure 9) for thirteen of the students on the same problems shows that all of them accelerated in the first kind of problem, and the second problem brought mixed results, but none of the pupils dropped to earlier levels. The slowest pupil tripled his performance across the curricula.

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Figure 7: Mildred’s work on a “Pick-It-Yourself” Quiz, in which the students were given the kind of problem they were to do, as shown in the left margin. The students were instructed to insert their own numbers, and show each operation.

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Katherine Mitchell, in her work with selected students who were still wrestling with the problem of reading, had each student point and read as many words as he could recognize in one minute from the Words in Color Chart that he was working on.

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In Figure 10, Patricia is increasing her speed of recognition of words from each chart, and at the same time decreasing in errors. Even more impressive is her increase of skill in acquiring new words each time a new chart is presented, as indicated by the increasing steepness of the weekly celeration lines.

Patricia was one of a group of four students working with Katherine. The summary in Figure 11 shows that on Charts 2, 3,

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and 4, all of the students had patterns of increased speed of recognition of words similar to Patricia.

On the other hand, progress of children in saying words from the Charts was not always so impressive. Mrs. Febrece, a paraprofessional working in Mr. Bank’s room with Grade 2 students, played the same one-minute game on Words in Color Chart 2 for three months. Figure 12 shows that the students’ increase in speed of recognition of the words was much slower, and that two of the students with the steepest celeration stopped increasing their speed after a couple of months of the same game. Possibly the students tired of the game, or Mrs. Febrece controlled the pace. In February, Sue Ratick suggested that she change the game, and provided her with flash cards that contained the words, in color, from Chart 2. The fact that the students all dropped in frequency makes it evident that they had begun to memorize the words in some regular order. In this case, the daily frequencies that Mrs. Febrece had saved were not charted until mid-February. With daily charting, the need to try a change of game would have been obvious much sooner.

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Looking at a different facet of the reading question, John Rogers’ Grade V class tackled the thorny question of use of vocabulary in a neat group project. After using charades to introduce new vocabulary words to each other, several students elected to count how many times they used the words in the course of natural conversation each day. Figure 13 shows that Patricia found many more uses for the new words as she played the game over five weeks. When she counted again one week after the termination of the charades games, she still found herself using the new words, but not quite so frequently.

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The most recent use of the counting and charting was made by a dozen Grade VI students from Miss Holmes’ class. They elected to take out time each week to work with younger students in Grades K through 2 on reading skills with Words in Color. Using a kit (Hively, 1972) which checks on progress, the older students played word identification games with the younger students, and plotted their daily scores on Behavior Charts so that each player could see his acceleration.

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Figure 14 shows Jorge’s scores on the three games in Kit B. In two of the games, he was able to point out or say the words or syllables at around four each minute, but there is insufficient data to tell whether he was accelerating in these skills. He also began by having more incorrect answers, but reduced these by the second time he played each game.

In Figures 15 to 17, Juan progressed so well in Kit B that Sharlene, his student manager, decided that he could advance to a more difficult kit, in which he dropped to a lower frequency of accurate word recognition.

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Teachers who use Words in Color are often asked whether the color code becomes a crutch for students, slowing their ability to decode words written with black ink on white paper. The Game kit has revealed that for the eight Grade I and II students who played on three or more occasions with their managers, skill in recognizing the black and white sign combinations (syllables) had become the faster one, even at the stage at which they were only using the seven most common signs.

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In Game 1, the student watches his manager point to the colored signs, then says the syllable or word. In Game 3, the student takes the shuffled cards on which the sign combinations are printed in black and white, and says the syllable or word. A card is left on the desk for the student with the signs in color, so that he may match the shape of the black signs to the colored signs if he wishes, but this would slow his speed of recognition.

If a student were dependent on the color code, he would be more proficient in playing Game 1, and on Game 3 he would work more slowly because of having to continually refer to the color sign card. The results for the eight students shown in Figure 18 indicate what the managers already know. The students never look at the color sign card, but confidently read the words or syllables from the black and white cards at twice the speed, and for most, this skill increases.

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Using Counts In Observation: There were several times during the year that I had the opportunity to visit and observe classes while the students and teachers were involved in reading or mathematics lessons. At such times, I found it helpful to tally one or two-minute sample counts on a few pinpoints, which changed depending on the criteria that the teacher seemed to be using in conducting the lesson.

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The most difficult classes to count were those in which I could feel the excitement of learning, because so much was happening at once. Usually the teacher or paraprofessional was busy with three to twelve students who were intermittently intent on their study of the charts or rods. The rest of the students were active at other assignments, crafts of their own choosing, games, or just gossip. On some of the pinpoints that I counted when a “Words in Color” session was taking place, there was a discernable difference between the “learning groups” who were absorbed in what they were doing, and “pre-occupied groups” in which I, at least, felt hum-drum about what the teacher was saying.

As Figure 19 shows, responses elicited from the students in “learning” groups maintained a higher average, from around 30 to 50 per minute, rather than from one every two minutes to about 7 per minute.

The pre-occupied groups were often punctuated by teacher directions to the class. The learning groups had no directions other than the implicit rules of the game that teacher and students were playing.

Half of the pre-occupied groups were punctuated by student disruptions. There were no major disruptions in the learning groups, and minor wandering activities of other students were ignored.

In the pre-occupied groups, the students often checked their answer by making it sound like a question and studying the

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teacher to see what her reaction would be. Even in those situations in which the teacher had learned not to praise, the students were quick to pick up the cue that if the teacher went on to the next task, she thought the answer was correct. In the learning groups, looking at the teacher sometimes occurred, but the answers were emphatic, rarely sounding like a question was intended.

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In one of the learning groups of about a dozen Grade I students, I admired a phenomenon which stood out because of the size of the group, even though it is a continuous occurrence in the groups of three or four students who feel the challenge of something new, and stay with the teacher while the others wander. The situation was one in which the teacher had asked a girl to say a word she was pointing to on the chart. The girl was unable to, and the teacher suddenly realized aloud that she had been absent when the other students had worked on the criteria needed to utter the new signs. The girl had tried to say as much as she knew of the word anyway, and was ready to try again. My first thought was that the teacher would attempt to give the girl the missing parts at another time. Instead, she respected the girl’s readiness, and took her step by step from her earlier level of awareness up to the words that had stumped her. The process took about two minutes, with no answers given by the teacher, and an occasional new convention supplied by one of the other students. Throughout this time, the other students sat patiently waiting for the game to resume. To me their patience and silence was eloquent endorsement of the teacher’s decision to work with one of their fellows when she was ready.

One pinpoint that I count during all classes is “natural opportunities to let a student read.” But sometimes, even in a reading class, this is not the most important happening. One day, in Suzanne’s reading class, I found her doing all the reading, while 14 avid Grade I students listened to a plot line which created excitement about making up original definitions for common everyday words. After she read, Suzanne asked some questions. Specific “where” questions elicited no answers, and “what” questions received unimaginative replies. But when 136

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she asked the children to use their own imaginations, and wrote down their replies on slips of paper for them, they were suddenly full of divergent ideas, coming up with 30 original sayings as fast as Suzanne could write them down.

Afterwards, while the students were excitedly drawing and coloring pictures on which they could paste their new definitions, Suzanne and I looked at the tallies. While she had missed 8 opportunities to allow a student to read aloud, she had created a situation in which every student participated in creating 30 original uses for everyday things, and from the start to the finish of the lesson, the children were so absorbed in their creating that Suzanne had only to give 3 directions about where to sit, where materials were, and when to clean up.

A few teachers demanded that the whole class be involved in the one activity of the moment. Such was Mr. Kaplicer’s Grade 6 class, in which I had the opportunity to observe several sessions in the verbal solution of written mathematics problems. Mr. Kaplicer’s method involved having at least two students read aloud the problem as written on the board, then have a third say what was given, a fourth suggest what mathematical operations to use to solve the problem, then have others assist in the computation. Incorrect suggestions for solution offered learning opportunities through testing the answers against reality. As Figure 20 shows, Mr. Kaplicer’s style involved providing prompts or questions for the students to answer at a rate of 3 per minute, and involving at least 20 class members for answers during each problem. The result was that in a ten-minute session, only two or three student answers would indicate that they were not following the conversation, and class attention 137

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was only requested by the teacher twice. Academic progress was indicated by an increase in the number of times that students indicated the correct way to work out the problems presented.

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Where To From Here?

During this experimental year, my colleagues and I chose to make Precision Teaching available to the whole school, rather than concentrate on working with a select group of students, or on some comprehensive aspect of research. As a result, the charts which have been shared by students and teachers in this review represent small vignettes which suggest, but do not prove, the overall growth of the school.

One further vignette is provided by a count that I kept throughout the year of the number of wanderers in the halls.

The number fluctuated a great deal each day, and decreased slightly until June. On the other hand, the looks on the faces of the wanderers changed dramatically. In the autumn, there were frowns, mischievous grins, or looks of fear and anguish. Toward May, these looks were largely replaced with smiles, or the businesslike look of concentration on an errand.

The charts suggest some interesting areas for further exploration. The individual and composite charts of progress in schoolwork and behavior lend themselves to use as “Space Age Report Cards,� in which the key components are student involvement, daily feedback, and celeration as the main indicator. Such reports would be the property of the student, filled out by him daily, and available to the teacher, parents, and school board, as they need to refer to them. The charts in the report would not only show the student’s level of proficiency, but also the extent to which he was accelerating in his progress each week.

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Further refinement of the observation of teaching styles may reveal what styles “work” for some teachers to the end that they may maintain their focus on the needs of each learner and selectively ignore other happenings in the room.

The Words in Color Counting Kits, besides answering some research questions, provide a key to one of the most exciting areas for schools to tap in the future; new sources of helperpower. Help is always needed in schools, but help in the form of students, volunteers, or parents, has always been a nasty twoedged sword. On the hurting side of the sword, the help has sometimes obstructed students’ progress, through poor teaching, taking pressure off by baby-sitting, or taking more of the teacher’s time than the help was worth. With games such as the Words in Color Count Kit, in which measurement of progress is an integral part, the volunteer has a clear task to perform with the student each day, and ends up with a meaningful report card about the student’s progress.

If it is to grow into something useful, helper-power requires a school which is open to new people and new ideas, and which has patience with early fumbling of the new helpers. My report bears witness that the Twin Parks School is such a place. I was welcomed almost everywhere. Teachers and children always shared their learning with me, both by letting me watch their successes and their mistakes. And when the time came for me to share what I had seen, we both looked upon the discussion as adding to a learning opportunity. The Twin Parks School is truly becoming a place where learning is treated with respect.

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Ian Spence

Footnotes 1

A report submitted to Twin Parks School, and Educational Solutions, Inc. The author was parttime consultant in counting and charting at the school. This research was supported by Educational Solutions, Inc.

2 I am indebted to Mrs. Dolores Hercules, her administrative and teaching staffs at the Twin Parks Schools, and especially to the students, who made this report possible by sharing their charts.

Bibliography Gattegno, C. Teaching Reading with Words in Color. New York, Xerox Corp., 1968.

Gattegno, C. What We Owe Children. New York, Outer-bridge and Dienstfrey, 1970.

Hively, W. A domain referenced kit for counting responses to games in Words in Color. Unpublished MS., 1971.

Lindsley, O. R. An experiment with parents handling behavior at home. Johnstone Bulletin, 1966, 9, 27-36.

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Skinner, B. F. Science and Human Behavior. New York: Macmillan, 1953.

Technical Note: The charts in this paper were reduced to slightly more than half size through use of a Xerox 7000 copy reduction unit.

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Between September 1971 and June 1972 I gave thirty-nine days of consultancy at Twin Parks and one day at our headquarters to a majority of the staff. During my visits I did what seemed to be needed at the moment. After attending meetings with the administrators or some groups of teachers, or without such meetings, I always worked in the classrooms or with students who needed to be taken over the hump in reading English or Spanish.

The most remarkable and consistent observation I made during the first three months was that no one really knew how to learn from what went on. Instead, many were certain that we were attempting to produce a showcase for my approaches to reading and math and were working towards a model school, in spite of my repeated denials. Fortunately, the very traditional teachers who were left alone to do their thing in their way were sufficiently numerous to prove that I did not take the helm and only wanted to see what happened in a living community in the

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process of being made or not being made aware of an education that served the students.

Whenever I sat at a table with Mrs. Hercules, the project director (who had worked with me for three years at C.S. 133M), Mr. Edge and Mr. Negroni, the principals of C.S. 129 and C.S. 234, and their assistants, I was not the one who initiated discussion of any point. My interest in the Experimental School was best served by listening carefully, understanding the situation, attending to its components and offering whatever conclusions came to me on the matter only when I was asked to comment.

The members of the Professorial Seminar were entitled to sit in on any meeting anywhere in the school and I wanted them, too, to know my meaning of an experiment in education. Whenever they attended they could see that I did not wish to interfere in the working of the school. But, of course, they could also see that because it was my definition of an Experimental School that was being tested, I would not leave an important challenge raised by anyone in the school without endeavoring to mobilize action to deal with it. I did write occasional papers to advise the staff, but I stopped there. * It was for the school to solve its problems.

On a number of occasions I saw that people working at the school expected me to do much more than I thought was proper.

Some wanted me to implement some of the suggestions made at

*

These papers are reproduced as Appendices to this book.

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the summer seminar that attracted them. Some wanted to see me impose my vision of some solutions on everyone. In fact, so long as I was seen around frequently in the school, the belief was maintained that it was one of “my” schools, so-called “Gattegno Schools.” (Of these there are not many, and, of course, none is mine in any sense except through the good will of the people who name them that way.)

After January 1972, I was present in the school so seldom that a number of the new staff never saw me. So, slowly, more people began to feel and eventually to know that I was only the chief consultant (in the administrative sense) and the author of some of the materials used in the school.

My contract demanded that I spend 36 days at the school. My work was done both during and between visits. A number of meetings with our consultant staff at Educational Solutions headquarters were devoted to matters that any of us brought up.

Sometimes these meetings, rather than those with the school staff, would prompt me to submit a way of handling the challenge. Not all proposals worked, not all were taken up, but they kept us thinking of the school realistically and creatively, and feeling that we were involved in it together in spite of the different fields we were individually engaged in.

As an outsider working with the school as a whole, I can say that a number of my hunches were proved right.

•

Mrs. Hercules was my first choice when I was asked in March 1971 to suggest someone for the

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task of project director, and she proved to be the right person for such a sensitive post. She says she has learned a great deal and is readier today than a year ago to lead “inner city” schools towards a freer and more responsible public education.

•

Mr. Edge and Mr. Negroni found that one school year is sufficient to become the new kind of principal they now are: sensitive to all the components of responsible leadership in a community school, in a school which learns from mistakes made by anyone. They showed that it is possible to put aside the garments of authority and take up the position that it is the privilege of leaders to serve.

Their new school developed new methods of running a public school which involved everyone on the staff and let responsibility be linked to decision making. They worked hard and found that it was possible to work together to humanize education by taking the steps dictated by the situation rather than by habits and preconception.

•

Assisted as these principals were by five dedicated persons, there seemed to be someone at once at any trouble spot, in spite of the size of the school.

Without that dedication, readiness to work hard, compassion and a capacity to listen, it would have been very difficult to cope with the many changes that humanizing education required in a public school. The smallest sign that it was working fed in a tremendous upsurge of energy and helped everyone to take a leap forward.

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remain optimistic in spite of the difficulties, to make further plans to increase the chance next year of producing clearer proof that public schooling is not doomed.

•

Ordinary teachers, once in contact with their own selves and their inner dynamics, once aware that awareness is the reality they are concerned with in education, can in a few months become incomparably more competent and point the way to the fundamental changes required for a smooth working of public education in the future.

Many observations made while teachers were engaged with their classes (in work of the kind in elementary schools) were proof that the summer seminar was slowly producing its fruits. Some teachers changed beyond recognition. Some could even convince friends and colleagues that they were on to something that must be looked at, seriously and immediately.

•

Paraprofessionals, treated as persons with a contribution to make, responded much better than they thought they might when they first joined the Experimental School as aides to the teachers. They had seminars — some regularly through the year — and gained as many insights as anyone else working at the school. In a document — appended to this book — ways to use the competences they brought to the school were suggested; these found widespread favor. Innovations in the regular use of the paraprofessionals at the school made sense both in terms of the manpower available for effective use, and in terms of their unique contribution as bilingual parents au fait with the culture of their community.

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•

Children made, so often in hours, progress that remedied years of educational neglect that they knew there could be nothing wrong with them, and that they could pursue their own education to whatever level they wished. These children were the particular concern of the administrators and the consultants for they represent the main challenge at all levels beyond grade 3 in public education, and so many minds are prejudiced to believe that they cannot learn.

There have been many areas that remained untouched during this first year at the Twin Parks School. This is no surprise, nor is it a blemish on an experimental school which does not aim to be a model school. Only the problem that the group of educators working at the school could tackle were tackled. No effort was made to be so all-inclusive that any visitor wanting to find one of his pet ideas taken up would be delighted. On the contrary, the teaching staff remained clumsy in their attempts to subordinate teaching to learning in two or three areas particularly valued by the parents: reading and mathematics first, language second.

All teachers did not gain equally. Naturally! How could they all benefit equally in such varied circumstances, coming to their jobs so different from each other? Since there was no pressure exercised on anyone to do any differently from what he wanted to, no two classrooms were comparable. Since each one’s ideology remained operative, all we did was to look at how it affected the actual work with the children in the school. Some excited young teachers wanted to make this, their first year, a terrific experience, and we could watch the role of enthusiasm as a lever and as a hindrance.

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It was possible to watch the growth in wisdom, as well as in know-how and awareness, of these beginner teachers, some of whom kept at it in spite of the blows their pride or their confidence received. The year ended with the Twin Parks Schools having a seasoned group of teachers not afraid to be observed, to make mistakes, to meet parents, to present their ideas to colleagues and administrators, and to feel they were serving more than the students in their classroom.

Possibly some people learned nothing. But it seems inconceivable that this is so, for there were many occasions when even the most traditional of these teachers was struck by some statement that they have never heard in faculty or lunchrooms before. Most lunchtime conversation was about children and where they were going. Since no counselor was at hand, and the administration was decisively on the side of the students, teachers took a serious look at what they were doing and must have changed, however invisibly to the untrained eye.

If some teachers played cards at each lunch hour, they also attended seminars and worked with consultant and visiting professors in their classes.

Although the people at the school knew it was an experimental school it was not really treated as such by the Superintendent’s office and the School Board. They could have taken more pride in having the first public experimental school in the United States and maybe in the world, and made it a point to ensure that all the personnel of District 12 saw how easy and inexpensive it was to eradicate illiteracy by a determined effort.

They could have noted that the new building had drawbacks, that the school year of the experimental school did not start 149

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until October but had achieved so much by Christmas and so much more by June, in spite of very large classes, late deliveries of materials and equipment, and so on.

The policy of equal treatment for all schools in the district was an additional drawback that had to be taken in the school’s stride. The specific condition leading to the involvement of Educational Solutions in the Twin Parks Schools was that it would function as a school where errors would be corrected. On some occasions this could have meant that some preferential treatment should be given it by the Community Board. For example, the idea of placing the most demanding students in a special group called the “Mini-school” was in its realization hampered by having an inexperienced teacher sent by the personnel officer to be its head. True, the experiment coped with the situation and did its best with it, training the new teacher and accepting far less for the students than they could have received. But we could have learned much more than we did if it had depended only on us.

On the whole, the first year of the Experimental School has generated enough material for study and reflection to please any academic institution. It has shown alternative ways of running a school without ideologies that anyone can object to. The method of subordinating teaching to learning is a technical matter that never creates opponents. It may not be understood or properly used, but it is universally attractive. At the Twin Parks Schools it has been supported by all concerned, even in cases where it was only lip service. Nobody has wanted to fight it. Parents wished it could be reduced to a set of recipes — which it cannot; at least I cannot do it.

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On behalf of Educational Solutions, Inc., I can say that we brought to a public elementary school solutions that teachers and administrators can utilize, that make them into better servants of children while feeling happier and less depressed.

My observation of the “Phenomenon of the School� over nine months leaves me as optimistic as I could hope for since much of significance has already happened there and more will happen in the future. In as much as everyone involved changed in ways that could be noted by outsiders the experiment showed that it is possible to study the phenomena of education and reach conclusions as successfully as by experiments in the exact sciences.

Caleb Gattegno

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Appendix 1 Experimental Schools *

In this paper I shall try to look into experiments in education which will display the attributes of experiments in any field of science.

Until now, in education, research meant testing the truth of some opinion and the method was almost always statistical. The fact that so much “research” had so little impact justifies the attempt of this paper.

People have tried to influence education mainly through “bright ideas,” the project method, the Dalton plan, the Winnetka scheme, the colored chalkboard, the basal reader, the inquiry method, the ungraded school, team teaching, floor carpeting, teacher’s aides, community control, new math, bussing, higher

*

Submitted to Dr. Robert Binswanger, Director, “Experimental Schools,” United States Office of Education, Washington, D. C., in Jan. 1971.

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salaries, visual and audio equipment, microteaching, precision teaching, overhead projectors, television and computers in the classroom, the open classroom, guidance counseling, preschooling and many more known to one or other of the readers.

Bright ideas are needed everywhere and are welcomed by many.

They indeed provide hope for improvements in places where stuffy air in confined spaces is the rule.

Bright ideas, generous visions, attempts at correcting inequities though desperately needed have not affected education in a manner which we can see displayed in, say, aviation where the appearance of the jet engine has altered the face of things and led to definite improvements, for example: in the reduction of travel accidents, among other things.

The jet engine, one item of aviation, has not changed the laws of aerodynamics nor the concept of a cabin being carried through the atmosphere, being lifted and landed, because the angles of wings and the speeds of craft make these possible. But once the jet engine was invented it was recognized as a much more effective user of fuels and hence capable of returning to the act of flying much of the energy it develops. The technological qualities of this type of engine gave aviation an indefinitely extendable range of speeds if other components could stand them.

There is in education an analogue of the jet engine for aviation, this is the incorporation of students in their own learning. Once they are given this job, the face of things changes indeed.

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In contrast to all the bright ideas mentioned above that were ad hoc improvements (comparable to adding meals on flights or scheduling departures and arrivals) this idea permits the foundation of the science of education and the pursuit of continual and general adjustment of all the variables present in the situation.

All the new technologies that the adoption of the jet engine in aviation generated served aviation and subsidiarily other areas where they could find an application. Research in metal fatigue, in anti-heat materials, in weather forecasts, in tracking stations, in air-conditioning, in airport architecture and maintenance, etc., all followed the irreversible adoption of the more efficient engine.

Research in education instead of being capricious, piecemeal, often trivial can become systematic, interrelated to the point and leading to findings having consequences for all. Schools can become what the various fields are for the various sciences which study them, the source of valid knowledge useable by anyone who needs it at once.

Experimental Schools instead of being the place where students pay for the errors of innovators, become the places where people who offer unpredictable traits in so many circumstances, meet day after day for the aim of taking themselves where neither the home nor the street can take them and do this consciously all the time.

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Schools historically had the purpose of providing the time, the methods, the equipment for taking the young generation to the threshold of the services asked for by the prevailing society.

To serve the unknown future throws us back to those who need to be educated for it, who will be confronting it and to have developed what makes it possible to act on it, i.e., know it at once. It cannot be a matter of passing on codified knowledge accumulated in the past.

Schools to achieve this task of preparing for the future must have a built-in constant renewal. This means that schools that perform their function of educating the young are experimental schools in the sense industrial laboratories keep up with the vagaries of the modern market. Sometimes they change the equipment or the building or the personnel’s preparation but always for the good reason that the existing one is not functional and hence inadequate to keep up with new situation. This means that the changes in the appearance of schools follow the finding that the present ones cannot do a certain job which requires a definite alteration.

Since we do not yet have schools that could claim to be Experimental Schools we cannot begin by asking for any particular attribute to be part of a new school without risking to find it a waste.

What we have, and in large quantities, are schools of the past with students and teachers in them. Can we change some of them into Experimental Schools by merely changing some of the

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stresses we place today on some components of the situation?

My answer is yes and the reason is that each of us has been the best teacher we have had all through life; that self-education is the only true education and that before going to school each of us has practiced it systematically, continuously and with remarkable results.

Because awareness is the only educable aspect of man, teaching must subordinate itself to learning and schools will be able to claim for themselves the title of Experimental only if they attempt to gather the data which follows from the shift from learning subordinated to teaching to the other way around.

Since not many teachers at this moment know how to subordinate teaching to learning, there may be only some schools today that we might see become Experimental at once.

People are unique, moody, variable, hence each school will have to adapt findings made in the first few ones, thus increasing the number of Experimental Schools and providing findings differing from the earlier ones, findings which will have to be integrated to the previous ones to make us all know more about education (as it is already done in all fields of knowledge called science).

Education as a science will be able to develop what schools can teach us about the very many items that are found in them and give us always a renewed vision of that reality. From its findings may follow structural and other changes which one will not have to sell the public if it is proved to be of benefit to the communities.

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Appendix 1 Experimental Schools *

At the beginning the main problem is the transformation of the teachers of any school from intermediaries between knowledge developed historically and their students, to people who understand how they learn, what is asked of students confronted with the unknown in order to assimilate it if it is known to others, and in order to find an entry into it when no one knows it.

But once one school becomes Experimental and the public sees that it is working well for the students while it produces valid knowledge of education for all, there will be new developments.

Colleges of education may want to become promoters of the best preparation of teachers for their job. This will make Colleges join schools in the study of “education in the making� and provide Colleges with a chance to become Experimental Schools themselves.

Experiments in science are the thoughtful consideration of the components in a situation in order to learn something about that situation. Experimental Schools will know about themselves first and will make available their findings to other schools that will start working from where the first have left off.

The value of the findings is in their saving of effort for others as it is in all fields of science.

A systematic advance in the study of educational problems will soon become possible if the first Experimental Schools can provide a sufficient crop to impress others. This can only happen if —

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Appendix 1 Experimental Schools *

1

we can tap sources of spectacular changes at once and at a reasonable cost,

2 we can use people who are “ordinary” in many ways, 3 we can eliminate the stamp of “singular” from the situations, by taking for example a sample to work with that goes, say, from preschoolers to professors, 4 we can show daily transformation of the situation and have it recorded and analyzed by evaluators.

To sum up, in this paper we express that any school can become an Experimental School and that by making it we make clear that we shall learn what matters most in research in education, i.e., how to produce valuable changes by acting on the consciousness of students through that of the teachers.

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Appendix 2 What Is An Educational Experiment? *

If we call a scientist any one who sees the reality behind appearances and is capable of making others see it as well, we may be allowed to be called the scientists of education when we set up the procedures that permit us to know how any growth in awareness actually takes place in any one of the fields comprising education.

Because the world has been investigated by so many minds who looked at it in so many different ways, we have the many sciences codifying knowledge and how to reach it.

*

Submitted to Dr. Robert Binswanger, Director, “Experimental Schools”, United States Office of Education, Washington, D. C., in Jan. 1971.

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Education traditionally has come at the tail end of all these endeavors and has been concerned with saving time in making those who are not the investigators integrate in their experience what was found by these. Education as transmission of knowledge is not reducible to verbal information only for laboratories have been added to auditoriums to let students learn to ask questions whose answers were at the end of a procedure. But all education centered on passing on experience more or less effectively.

Because of this, little research could find favor with the leaders if it concerned itself with learning about education. Still this is what permits advances to take place, for only when we examine how we do anything can we see its limitations and try to mend our ways.

Schools are the most conspicuous places where education can be studied but most of the time they escape scrutiny from the point of view of what goes on in them in terms of their functionings.

Criticism has been voiced and generous proposals made, but none which would be accepted by readers as they would in many other fields of human activity, mainly in the natural sciences.

But this does not preclude that such studies are possible and that education can be one day counted among the sciences because its participants are aware of what they are doing and that their actions can be accounted for in terms of awareness of the situation they function in.

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Appendix 2 What Is An Educational Experiment? *

An Experimental School can be defined as a school in which the participants contribute to knowing what actually goes on in there and a school where the knowledge is used to affect the process in order to eliminate what prevents its functioning.

An Experimental School can be any school provided the people in it are prepared for the study of what goes on in it and are equipped for the continuous alteration of the factors found either to function improperly or to be countering their proper functioning.

If it is found that some children are sleepy in their early hours because they cannot find at home a place to sleep until late, in an Experimental School space will be reserved for these children to sleep the necessary time before being invited to do school work. No resignation to the idea that homes are beyond teachers’ reach will ever be suggested in such a school; instead, there the problem will be met with the appropriate answer, if as simple as the one above. In an Experimental School no idealistic or Utopian proposal such as “Let us make parents aware of what their way of life is doing to their children� would be entertained, because the only problems that belong to the Experiment are those which the staff can work on. To provide a space may be difficult but it is not impossible. To change society at large is not the job for which teachers get contracts from the community.

In addition, the provision of space for the children who did not sleep enough to recuperate is a scientific hypothesis which can be confirmed or disaffirmed after a certain time. While what

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causes that state of sleepiness requires repeated inquiries of a detective nature.

The example of sleepiness of some children is not necessarily answered by the remedy above, nor will it necessarily be a major one to work on in any school, but it serves its purpose here of showing that in an Experimental School the attitude is empirical and not missionary. Changes have to be dictated by the conditions and by the availabilities of what is akin to the challenge. Thus, we meet sleepiness with sleep.

What we know at present of schools may lead us to defining what we want to do with one or more schools so as to eliminate what we consider to be a defect. For example, if we note the isolation of teachers in their classroom and feel it to be a major reason for the failure of schools we design a school without walls on the inside and adopt teaching by a number of teachers in the same area. If we note that the noise level in any class acts as a restriction in students’ attention, carpeting can reduce the noise level, and so on.

A number of such changes have been offered and have been adopted. They are empirical and thus akin to the factor noted.

But they do not change a school into an Experimental School.

Only into one conforming to a new set of requirements. Indeed, in such schools the old problems are still being encountered.

Old math has been replaced by New math but still most students do not cherish their mathematics lessons.

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Appendix 2 What Is An Educational Experiment? *

New curricula have been suggested for Science, the Social Sciences, huge amounts of money have been spent in equipping schools for audio-visual materials, and still far too many youngsters leave school ill-equipped to enter the job market and they must accept whatever they find.

Experimental Schools could be the places where the appropriate studies could be carried out so that day after day the information required is ipso facto being sought after, looked at, used for some action and its effects monitored.

The traditional research in education cannot provide this data, first because of its design aimed at one single factor and a single effector on it; second, because it was a priori and could not be altered in its course; thirdly, it was academic in that action was not its concern then and there; fourthly, it never was decisive and took years to establish anything, mostly unimportant results; fifthly, it was not carried out by the practitioner but by academics for academic rewards.

If we want the datum and we badly need it now, we must change all this. We must change the practitioner into an investigator, the day-to-day operations in the classrooms into the field of study; the examination of the total situation into a technique; we must continuously interfere with the data, and reach a process of finding how to correct what appears as a hindrance, a fault, a want, etc.

Education serves people and is only valid if it corrects the defects that are met by people on their way to awareness. Hence,

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as a science it suffers, like nuclear physics, from the inevitability of the interference of the observer upon the observed. This does not take away from nuclear physics the status of a science.

Experimental Schools will be those schools where observation of what goes on all the time will be the rule. Observation of actions of people, statements from people, intercourse between peers and grown-up people and their immediate environment. This comprises people and ideas as well as things.

Teachers will not any more relate separately to the curriculum through what they know and what they prepared and separately to the memories of their students whose function is above all to receive this prepared knowledge. Teachers will watch students involved in their studies in the various ways demanded by each study. They will have been prepared to work with students and to learn to detect what requires their intervention in a form adequate so as to permit the reaching of a station comfortable enough for a new departure and so on. They will have been prepared to note and to reflect on their notes and to abstain from reflex-action when they do not understand. Not understanding is only uncomfortable when one has an image of oneself that does not permit living with the truth of oneself. In this case, the truth that everyone of us has vast areas of the universe not yet open for one to walk on with ease. Growth as a teacher will be experiences when fewer and fewer of the happenings in our school days baffle us and more and more can be handled. That quite a number will still be asking from us an effort after years of study is both true and peace-producing. To be prepared as a teacher is not synonymous with never meeting puzzlements and difficulties but it will mean that one does not 168

Appendix 2 What Is An Educational Experiment? *

find oneself equally incompetent in handling the problems facing one as when one started. Indeed, to be prepared also means learning from others what is helpful to oneself.

For such teachers the richness of classroom life will provide endless opportunities for growth and self-knowing while preparing them to do a better job because they are closer to the problems they encounter. Through this increased awareness and greater readiness to learn what is needed in the specialized climates of their classrooms, they will provide for others the data which can help a joint attack on the problems of education.

Experimental Schools, rather than being the places where readymade ideas are tried out, often at the cost of children’s welfare, become places where one is guided by reality to take the steps which have the highest likelihood of being of assistance to students facing their school tasks. Experimental Schools will be the safest places, pedagogically speaking, simply because people in them are learning all the time and correcting their course continually.

Experimental Schools will not provide all answers at once nor meet all possible school challenges in one place in any one year.

But a few of them in one year could accumulate enough valuable material and indicate enough important lessons to deeply affect the education of the population around them and provide data needed by later starters in other places.

Experimental Schools have always been needed. Their being started so late results from ignorance today acknowledged as

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such and regretted. The absence of Experimental Schools was permitted in the days when education was less the acknowledged lever of human evolution.

Among the first challenges to meet we place above all that of taking learners into account. Very scant knowledge is available on this most important issue.

Today either schools do not take students’ experience into account or start with someone’s theory and mold the curriculum and methods on the proposals consistent with that theory.

Students have made sense of so much before they entered school that it seems incredible that no one has been guided by their spontaneous ways of working until recently. Lip service can be paid to young children’s capacity for learning as is the case when the open classroom is instituted and the choice of the activities is left to each student.

A much more responsible attitude can be offered when we actually acquire a sense of what children are doing with themselves every hour of the day at the various ages and when we attempt to enter their world as a real challenge so as to extend it rather than replace it by an a priori structured program.

This responsibility is a necessary component of any school which wants to be experimental rather than an environment that acts as a nursery. The environment has to be created while the lessons are learned so as to take them into account. No pre170

Appendix 2 What Is An Educational Experiment? *

conceived idea of what education should be can be compatible with learning the true daily lessons at the school which are there to be learned, simply because the law of the land forces into one place children of differing ages and a group of grown-ups called their teachers and school administrators.

The constraints resulting from the prevailing conditions are to be accepted as the framework within which the experiments are to be carried out. These conditions are to be worked on after it becomes visible that it is possible to do so and thus affect results that serve the education of the students.

Unless an Experimental School is started from scratch, it must be part of the experiment concerned that we start with the prevailing conditions of the plant, the staff, the administration and what is considered part of that particular school (such as grade levels, urban or rural, bilingual, etc.) and work at the elimination of the hindering factors and their replacement by favorable ones. While it is impossible to change the wheels of a running train, it might be possible to change them swiftly one by one at each successive station and arrive at the destination with a much more smoothly running machine. Preparation for the changes still must be done in advance and the repair people must be ready to undertake at once their allotted tasks at their allotted stations. This preparation itself must not be so costly and so difficult that it puts in danger the whole experiment.

That is why for an Experimental School to function with any chance of success all the personnel must know exactly that the changes required of them are life-giving, valuable to them per

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se, the opposite of a threat and possibly of professional significance for them.

An experiment must be designed in human terms and be carried out as a humanizing set of exercises not subservient to the evaluative tools created for very different purposes. The engineering language which dominates today the scene of education (for example, in the area of accountability), though easier to handle than a humanistic language may not be the proper tool for the correct presentation of what the science of education demands and can deliver.

Objectives are easy to express if one knows what one wants to achieve; but in a true-experiment the end is uncertain. What is certain is that one wants to know as much as is needed in order to perform (to the greater satisfaction of those involved in it) a complex human task in which several variables are only predictable to a certain degree. The ultimate judges must be the participants in the experiment. They can add to their numerous tasks that of creating the instruments for the continuous evaluation of what goes on.

If, in contrast to the ultimate goal of producing a school where some functions are certainly working better than in similar places everywhere else, it is possible to have instruments which inform on all that can be done in specific situations and can be of use to other teachers, these should be preferred to the wholesale national standardized tests which have taught so little. Traditional testing can be applied in addition if so desired mainly in order to learn one more thing about the tests; for

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Appendix 2 What Is An Educational Experiment? *

instance, how they compare in the case of specific important items to the instruments devised in that school.

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Appendix 3 * The Experimental School Of The Bronx, C.S. 129

Though one can conceive of many experimental schools doing each part of the big job of knowing all it is possible about education, we shall now concentrate on one example to specify in details the design we see as possible.

The Twin Parks School will be an example of an elementary experimental school K-6 in an urban, bilingual environment.

The plant exists already but is rigid, the milieu poor, the community unclear on many issues and having all sorts of problems, economic, social and cultural. Can one provide a project which can serve its population at least as well as the

*

This paper was part of the preceding appendix and both were submitted to Dr. Binswanger, in January 1971 and to Dr. Gaines in March 1971, inserting a few changes to meet the needs of the district.

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other schools in the district and permit significant lessons to be learned quickly?

The guidelines for such a project can be found in the opportunity of treating this school administratively as one would any other but treating the human elements which can be influenced so as to prepare for the jobs ahead before the school receives its population.

The first constraint would make the project repeatable since there will be no request for changes in the structure of thousands of schools which would otherwise be prohibitively costly. This same guideline would make every educator in the country capable of taking in at once the proposed situation equipped with his usual imagery and terms of reference, hence making the project understandable.

The second guideline signifies that we consider the least costly of all changes, an inner change which will also be the most permanent and adequate transformation of the school towards an improved education.

On the adjoining table the grown-up population of the school will be sketched. The functions of the individuals can be defined on paper but their functioning will be in the premises and will be dependent on who is appointed for the various jobs. Since the market is restricted to who wishes to apply for these job openings even if after a selection is made, the appointed individuals for this school would be comparable to those who

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Appendix 3 * The Experimental School Of The Bronx, C.S. 129

would be available for any other school and the experiment will be more repeatable from this point of view.

Since there are teachers, parent, administrators in all schools the only distinctive features of the proposed plan are the body of consultants and the body of observers. As to the second, since there are vast numbers of graduate students seeking topics for their dissertations, there will be no problem in finding the observers, the problem of financing their stay at and near the school is the only hurdle.

The consultants will be needed in the first few years when the proposal is still not quite on its own. Clearly the teachers in the Experimental School who manage to distinguish themselves would want to play a role that uses them more fully and thus to become the resource persons on the spot. Some others forced to move to other areas may judge that their apprenticeship is over and play the part of a consultant in their new district.

One important point concerns the Head Teacher here conceived as the inspiration of all that the school may stand for a priori and during the life of the experiment. We would want to select the best available person for that job and also free him or her from many time-consuming duties which are not vital to the experiment by allocating them to assistants, leaving the Head to remain in continuous contact with the totality of the experiment.

There would be three Assistant Heads, because the usual two can take care of what an ordinary school demands, the third being selected for the jobs resulting from the school being experimental. Since consultants, parents, volunteers, observers,

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visitors will be additional people to be looked after once in the school and since collection evaluation, dissemination of data will be required, a new full-time top job will exist in such schools.

The head teacher and his assistants and whoever they choose from the other bodies may form the Board running the school and meeting everyday if possible, relating to the School Board (or Governing Board) in a way both Boards find fitting.

The head teacher’s main function is to maintain the spirit of an Experimental School in that school. He can stimulate his colleagues by asking questions; by conducting a questioner who goes to him in the presence of another teacher who is on the way to finding an answer, or in designing a situation that would provide a beginning of an answer; by taking part in as many meetings of those who are actively engaged in examining the situations which arise in the school and are susceptible of teaching something significant; by letting anyone who believes he is on a valuable track have an opportunity to explore it and be assisted in that exploration; by studying the requests for materials or outings or invitation of people, etc. for their merit to the experiment and take advantage on behalf of the school of any opportunity that spills beyond the initial request. Many more functions will be added to the above as time goes on and the experiment finds its unique physiognomy. That is why assistants are appointed from the start.

The assistant-heads though more specialized than the head, are to be as creative in their work as he is in his.

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Appendix 3 * The Experimental School Of The Bronx, C.S. 129

Since the Experimental School we are talking about is run by people for people, a welcome to the building is a must. It would be everyone’s responsibility to see that the school is clean and attractive, that the attendance taking is as little time-consuming and class disrupting as possible, that the visits to the nurse and the dentist do not take precedence over engrossing activities, that the discipline comes from within and results from being absorbed in meaningful work. The rules of the school can make sense to children and be presented to them as part of their welfare and made understandable through examples, rather than enforced. In particular, taking one’s meals can become a ritual rather than a race to a refueling station. If the whole staff of the school, including the kitchen staff, want it, this daily visit to the dining room can add much to the relaxed atmosphere of the school. It can also be part of the studies in biology, in economics, in home economics, in art. It can be an item to underscore in the Experiment and its impact specially recorded by one or two of the observers.

Integrating into the total effect of the school on people: their meals, their time at the gymnasium and the playground, may give a much more accurate picture of what that school does to and for children in their overall education. If it is possible to consider the care of the body as one of education’s objectives then the school grown-ups can become aware that the totality of each individual is all the time present and must be seen as capable of being affected by anything and everything that goes on in the school. If students shift from the care of some adults to others, the students remain the same even when adults are different.

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This constancy of presence of the same learners in all their learnings and activities in the school is no theory; it is a fact which when taken fully into account by itself changes any school into an Experimental School. Though life outside school is no longer the province of the school staff, no one must forget that it affects in many significant ways what goes on at school. One way of alerting school people to this is by having the staff see their work in relation to all that happens to the student body in the continuum space — time. Sleep, feeding habits, the games selected by various age groups all are part of one’s education and need to be taken into account when grown-ups ask for children’s cooperation in some studies, at the dining room and in the playground or the gym.

Sleep is not only for rest. The sleeping hours are sifting hours for the mind bombarded by a multitude of impressions during the waking hours. During sleep the mind of each of us continues its life but now under the rules of one’s self and not those of the environment which may not be understood or accepted. It is not so many hours of sleep that count but whether the job of sleep is completed before one faces again another day of bombardment.

It is not sufficient either to give calories to the machine of our body in order to make it work. Man does not live by bread alone.

Man has made a ritual of feeding simply by eating at definite hours, by making himself mildly hungry several times a day and using less energy in digestion so as to be able to continue his activities when he is awake. This biological ritual became in all cultures a social ritual and added its educational impact while eating, through conversation and because the ritual can involve people in the art of cooking, the arts of presenting food, of 180

Appendix 3 * The Experimental School Of The Bronx, C.S. 129

receiving food, of serving one’s table companions, of becoming aware of chewing the various stuffs that are edible and by relating to the vaster world during seasons and because of the local agriculture.

At the gymnasium is the opportunity of knowing oneself as a functioning system where bones and muscles carry the orders of the will, we have new opportunities of helping the integrating self by doing something special for each of the students. Not only can games be learned and practiced under the guidance of an expert but each student can be given a chance to reduce his fears of the physical unknown, to enter cautiously into the exercises that truly challenge and are a measure of one’s progress in the mastery of particular functionings. The exercises that increase awareness of one’s somatic system will differ with the age of the students, since age is often synonymous with the extent of one’s exploration of one’s universe. The life in the gym can be easily integrated to that in the street but in the gym one will be more selective, more consistent and if one wants, more far reaching. Indeed as soon as grown-ups at the school know what each student is engaged in conquering in his body, through his body, they can provide a variety of exercises gleaned from the long history of care of the body in various civilizations and offer them as alternatives to the single sequences which kill the joy of being at the gym for those who do not find themselves at once in harmony with the proposed cultural games.

While one assistant-head is especially concerned with the welfare of students he is not isolated from the rest of the staff.

While he or she has special meetings with the people of the kitchen and of the gymnasium, with the nurse and the dentist, 181

Part IV

he is, through the Board, contributing to everyone’s information and being informed of what goes on in other specialized groups.

But the main link remains the children as a group who, from his services, take to their other functions happier selves, more conscious of what they are doing with themselves.

The classroom teachers and their aides are concerned with the education of the awareness of the world of relationships.

Relationships with each other, with the past, with the habitat, with the findings of investigators in all fields, with the various languages of men. Because all schools do provide the same options, the Experimental Schools will be providing evidence that schools which do certain things in certain ways represent a source of valuable information for all. In the traditionally accepted curriculum of subject matters this Experimental School will study the impact of the subordination of teaching to learning, or taking learners into account.

This means that the areas of mathematics, the native language, a second language, reading, writing, spelling in both languages, a study of phonetics and grammar in the two languages, the study of the immediate natural and social environments and of the natural environment at large, will be done beginning with what children take to school rather than with a total ignorance of the subject matter or with what is left in one’s memory from previous lessons.

Each of these areas of school study has been thoroughly investigated from this point of view and proven techniques exist which will save time for learners, create a joyful atmosphere in

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Appendix 3 * The Experimental School Of The Bronx, C.S. 129

the school, involve students and grown-ups in constantly renewed conditions of work. This Experimental School will concentrate on the study of what happens to all children when the teachers not only agree to subordinate their teaching to the students’ learning but also consider the study of all subject matter as undertaken by the same children of whom the school has the full care.

Hence, we shall learn two important things besides a large number of significant things. First we shall see the change in yield in all classrooms in all subjects because the learners have been taken into account and, second, how the atmosphere of a school changes because all grown-ups relate to the totality of each child all the time.

Among the other lessons we could learn if we developed the proper techniques of recording and evaluation would be — •

a proper basis for curriculum development

•

a study of the true incentives for one’s education

•

the foundation of school discipline

•

what follows from the integration of school life within total learning through living

•

which techniques circumstances

•

which equipment does not need to be developed because the success of learning follows from special techniques not requiring equipment

work

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better

in

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•

how costs per child in that school relate to some educational goals

•

whether absenteeism relates to what goes on in schools

•

whether children pursue spontaneously out of school jobs started at school

•

whether their school life influences their concepts of civic behavior, of care for the environment, care for the needy, etc.

•

whether one year in the sixth grade for some children provides a lasting gain or only six years at such a school; and the intermediary stages for populations staying two or more years

•

whether involvement of the staff in a meaningful pursuit makes them more creative . . . . .

Scores of other topics could be easily listed each forming a very valid basis for a specialized investigation (leading, for instance, to a doctorate).

In particular in this school an adaptation of Dr. Ogden Lindsley’s method of recording and evaluating (known as Precision Teaching, promoted by Behavior Research Co., Kansas City, Kansas) could provide investigators with numerical data more easily interpreted than special testing sessions.

To carry out this project the following jobs must be started at once.

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Appendix 3 * The Experimental School Of The Bronx, C.S. 129

•

Study the possible sources of personnel and call some for interviews.

•

Plan the prior-to-school opening seminars to prepare that personnel.

•

Phase the intake of students so that the operation gets a chance of starting smoothly.

•

Consider the equipment needed as a staggered operation so that the allocation of same follows a conscious design for definite purposes.

•

Approach Universities and Colleges to obtain the observers and consider their roles and their training (as well as the financing of this side of the evaluation).

•

Select the consultants and send them to work as soon as possible.

Since we include a corps of observers as part of this proposal a word must be added about it.

A perennial difficulty in the reporting of educational experiments has been that the authors of projects want to defend their ideas and that standardized tests do not fairly display what happens in any experiment.

One way out is to invite a number of trained people to report on each grade and consider their reports as objective evidence of what went on during the school year in a multitude of dimensions, capable of being accepted as a doctoral dissertation by demanding universities.

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The graduate student will not be a teacher at the school, will not have any allegiance to anything but to his task of reporting accurately and professionally on his observations using any and all the instruments available which will guarantee that outsiders will have the facts. They will work full time as investigators and be paid by an independent agency.

Adult Population Of School And Their Functions: Head Teacher

-

Coordinator of the life of the school.

Assistant Head

-

Director of Primary School

Assistant Director Assistant Head

Director of Intermediate School

Assistant Director Teachers

-

Paraprofessionals

-

(all bilingual or made bilingual) in the ratio 1:20 to students (all bilingual or made bilingual) one for each teacher

Office staff, kitchen staff, janitorial staff, nurse

- as for other schools in the district

Parents’ Council

to assist Head Teacher and his assistants in providing the two-way traffic between the school and the community.

-

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Appendix 3 * The Experimental School Of The Bronx, C.S. 129 Consultants

-

five from Educational Solutions, one for twenty teachers in the first year, to be replaced in three years by members of the staff of the school: two during the second year; two during the third year and the last, if possible, the following year.

These consultants will serve teachers at their job during the full year, providing demonstrations, opportunity for group or individual consultation and seminars and further training on the job in the most effective techniques available.

Body of Observers

-

made up of four people for each grade, sent by universities to write their doctoral theses on what takes place in the classrooms. These outsiders will be able to inform the outside world of the lessons learned day in and day out.

This body of observers would best serve the cause of dissemination of the valid attainments, since they are not a party involved in the planning of the research, but represent the universities.

Before their selection by the few universities involved, a presentation to the body of doctoral students at each university of what will be attempted at the Experimental School will permit those most attracted by the function of observers on behalf of the public at large, to make a choice and apply for the post.

Four observers per grade seem required if we think of the multitude of elements on which work at school can have an influence. To outline briefly a few —

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•

We need to have children followed closely over the year, 5 or 6 will clearly already be a heavy load for one observer.

•

The work of every teacher and paraprofessional will offer many noteworthy elements particularly if they make things happen as it is hoped.

•

The areas of growth of moral and social awarenesses, playing, feeding, dancing, relating to other students in all circumstances.

•

The area of growth of intellectual awareness.

•

In the study of languages and their uses.

•

In the study of space relations and other mathematical structures.

•

In the study of the environment.

•

The area of growth of artistic awareness, music, acting, dancing, etc.

All this will be too much to note accurately unless we have enough observers capable of doing their job inconspicuously and sensitively.

This aspect of the experiment may one day be found to have been a valuable innovation.

New York City January, 1971

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Appendix 4 The Professorial Seminar Of The Experimental School C.S. 129 *

A unique opportunity opens up for people who wish to influence education profoundly by participating in a year-long research seminar associated with an experimental school to open next September.

The concept of experimental school used here is one in which we learn all the time what happens when conscious teachers relate to students as people involved in living and making sense of those aspects of life that move them. In this school, as in any true experiments, the phenomena will guide and define the studies.

*

Submitted to the United States Office of Education to explain the concept of a Professorial Seminar, in May 1971.

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When a group of 1,800 children of grades K-6 and 100 adults who surround them — with the assumption that these will take care of their somatical, mental and spiritual life — come together for 9 or 10 months very many things will happen. The body of teachers will have had five weeks of intensive seminars with Dr. Caleb Gattegno and will have studied how to reach those powers of children that have made them such good learners on their own; how to subordinate teaching to learning in all areas; to work together in ways required by the various situations contemplated. (Five of Dr. Gattegno’s associates will be in the school on a full-time basis as support to the teachers who may be still unsure of how to handle particular problems.)

During the five-week seminar many of the aspects of the experiment will be looked into for the possible actions they suggest, needs for re-equipment, materials, plans.

The reasons for having a professorial seminar attached to this experiment are the following: 1 A scientific experiment which is not monitored either is not an experiment and runs by itself or does not concern itself with a number of significant variables. We need to monitor as many aspects of the experiment as possible and perhaps four investigators per grade may be able to take care of what may happen to about 130 children and 10 adults working consciously every hour every school day.

2 A great deal of valuable material which will emerge would be forever lost unless noted and explained. The seminar will

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produce the first true picture of an innovative school at work, observed from as many angles as there are competences in the group.

3 Because it is known in advance that dramatic changes in the yield per year (or even month, week and day) will occur which will cause a number of other changes, the professionals forming the seminar will have unusual opportunities to study how discipline is generated and maintained without coercion; how students become responsible for their various school behaviors; how long it really takes to become a fluent reader, a good speller, a swift and accurate calculator; how long it takes to master a number of skills of the body or of the mind; how the school and the community can be linked ; what one can offer the other through the education of the children and what one can receive from it; how it is possible to reduce the impact of unfavorable socio-economic factors and generate human criteria for evaluating the impact of intensive and free involvement in everyone’s work at school; how a school that is a part of a large city school system can be changed because the adults who work in it are more aware of what there is to do; and many more aspects that the true intercourse of such a massive body of people will generate.

4 As watchdogs for the educational community at large, the reports of the seminar to the nation can make available at an early date whatever the seminar believes is of vital significance and thus can produce an impact on the schools of the nation through the universities in a far shorter period of time than is needed today.

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5.

Because of the close study that a permanent seminar of skilled professionals can make, of what takes place in this experimental school, there will develop in each of them a vast number of new ideas and new ways of working in schools with teachers and students. Once taken to their usual base, they will provide seeds for a revitalization of research in and around education.

6 This will lead to changes in the education of teachers at universities and in-service, and will be of particular significance in the preparation of teachers in which the learners are estimated objectively for what they bring with them rather than what they lack. This will make a decisive difference in how the schools of the nation will be run in the future.

It is hoped that the seminar is truly dedicated to the many tasks of observing, assessing, noting and understanding of all that can be reached in the life of a school. The members of the seminar will find their place so as not to affect the experiment but to report carefully and fairly on it. This will allow many to learn what can be used immediately to the benefit of school children.

Once the seminar is formed (with Dr. Gattegno as its convener and occasional chairman) it will decide what to study and how and in what way to report during the year and after. Since the seminar is not a part of the experiment, its participants will be involved in the creation of the instruments which will permit a renovation of evaluation of educational functions and functionings. These new instruments will permit the exact and detailed study, on behalf of the public, of what the teachers who

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know what they are doing can achieve in one school year in ordinary surroundings, within the ordinary restrictions of New York City public schools (financial, architectural, etc.) in the case of children remaining there one year to end their elementary education or embarking in a seven-year adventure.

In addition, this bilingual, bi-cultural school will produce exciting variances upon what is more common in American cities.

May 1971

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A new elementary public school in the Bronx, the TWIN PARKS SCHOOL (C.S. 129, 3rd-6th; C.S. 234 K-2nd) will open this fall in District 12 as the first experimental school. This has been agreed by the Community School Board at a private Board meeting in March and was passed at its open meeting in May. The City School Board accepted the project as it voted the funds for the training of the staff at a summer five-week intensive workshop.

The U.S. Office of Education agreed to fund a City Univerisity of New York professorial seminar that would observe a number of important aspects of the starting of this school and report on them for the benefit of all. The following notes are intended to

*

Sent to Dr. Max Weiner, to assist in the recruiting of the members of the Professorial Seminar, in June 1971.

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assist investigators in deciding on whether to become a part of this seminar.

For the first time in the history of education a school is opening for the purpose of reaching answers to many questions posed by most schools. As a public school it will receive students from the neighborhood, age 5-12, who either come from their homes (K1), or from other schools that were overcrowded. In terms of its architecture, equipment, funding, hours and days of attendance, this school will therefore be like any other one in the district, in the city or even the nation. The same tests which are administered to all the students in the city will be taken by those selected to be tested in this school.

The staff of the school was selected from those who applied in response to an advertisement in the New York Times last April announcing the opening of the school next fall. These are teachers who had either worked in the city schools or intended to enter one as their first job. All hold one of the city teacher’s licenses.

All this characterizes the Twin Parks Schools as one of a vast number of other public schools and permits easy comparisons with all of them.

But the Twin Parks Schools will differ from other schools in many respects. First, it is conceived as an Experimental School, i.e., one in which it will be possible to learn from observation of what actually goes on and where no preconception will prevail.

The 1800 neighborhood children and several scores of adults

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will be engaged in a human phenomenon that will extend in space over the grounds of the schools and wherever these people take themselves, and in time during and after school hours and school days.

Each of the individuals in that group will be considered as a person, that is, as someone endowed with a will, a sense of truth, ways of knowing, integrity, talents and powers which make each person unique and capable of expressing in the many forms mankind has tried out, what one is and what one is making sense of.

Each of the individuals in that group not only can work on what he or she is, but can also affect the totality of the school as an organism sensitive to its parts. This influence of each on the whole will be made possible precisely by seeing to it that everyone is sensitive to everyone else and recognizing what matters most to each.

The phenomenon of the school will incorporate the lives of all the individuals who are there, in this unique environment which does not replicate the homes or the streets and where all will want to become opportunities for all in order to gain what the gifts of all make possible. To learn will be to acquire the awareness that one knows what one has gained because one is different in some way from what one was. To grow is to see learning as meaningful and as continuous in one’s own life and according to one’s own criteria. To teach will be to learn to relate to the persons one is with and to find out what can be done with

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them here and now so that they recognize that what is being done is leading to growth.

With the talents that these two thousand people bring with themselves every day to the restricted space of the school many things can be done! The phenomenon will be the display of the numerous ways in which the enormous mental and physical energy which is available can be used. Since no one will want to waste it in the thousand already known ways, but to the contrary everybody will want to use it in the ways some men and women have shown as possible.

The phenomenon will be at the scale of the school — and even larger — if one takes a space-time referential, but also at the scale of many groups: teams, classes, tables and game groups, dance and music clubs, and at the scale of each individual.

To catch the phenomenon we need to be observers at all these scales even if we do not manage to encompass the whole.

Perhaps together we can observe the essential of what deserves to be noted and only lose what is inevitably lost.

To give the seminar chances to really capture what is the greatest value to the world at large, each member will choose five children to watch more closely throughout the school year.

Four professors will be assigned to one age group so that they can together get a more diverse and complete idea of what goes on among these 230 children and the 20 or so adults who are their teachers and teacher-aides; each will look at a manageable number of components so that we can follow the growth in the

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many areas of functioning of human beings: linguistic, artistic, scientific, social, civic, cultural, human, spiritual.

To remain in contact with the phenomenon many tools will be necessary. Some exist, some will be invented. The staff of the school will provide some since they too will want to remain in contact with those aspects of the phenomenon that are closest to them. The only way to subordinate teaching to learning is to have a continuous feedback mechanism that makes obvious what each student is doing or has done with himself when involved in certain tasks.

The school as a whole as distinct from the professorial seminar will want to know a number of things for which no one has an answer at this moment: •

How long will these children take to master the techniques of reading?

•

How early can reading be meaningful for the kindergarten children? And how quickly can they make sense of it?

•

Is algebra easier than arithmetic for all children?

Can all children become swift and accurate calculators, and in what period of time, if we start with algebra rather than arithmetic?

•

Can we make good spellers of all students through the appropriate techniques? Which are these techniques?

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•

In order to have good writers we need to see that students have something to say, find that they wish to say it, have the words to say it and can then put these down in a manner that they and others find satisfying.

•

What impact upon one’s mathematics functioning has an awareness of good language functioning?

•

More generally, each student being one person, how do experiences in any field affect the capabilities in other fields?

•

What role do awarenesses of one’s somatic functionings play in one’s mental or spiritual functionings? And conversely?

•

What forms does awareness take in the dialogues with the various universes of experience students encounter?

•

Can we be as precise as in, say, physics, when we relate to educational phenomena?

•

Can teachers increase the yield of every hour students spend at school?

•

What forms does the transformation of time into experience take in the many activities offered by the school?

•

Is it possible to estimate the “educational cost” of experiencing and to relate this to the “economic cost” of schooling?

•

Which are the criteria for a “good” public education?

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•

Which should be the rhythm of individual study and group study in order to permit assimilation of awareness of a certain field and to permit the contrast generated by the styles of individual learning?

•

How can favored activities spontaneously motivating, serve motivation for other activities?

•

To what extent do we need to reach awareness of the details of the learning processes in order to ensure growth in the dialogues which involve those processes? Can we manage to study this awareness in the school while engaged in teaching?

•

What is the meaning of social awareness at various ages?

•

How much responsibility can students take in the various activities in which they are involved? And which kinds of responsibilities?

•

Is it possible to extend students’ awareness of the natural world, the social world, the man-made world at the same time while they are mastering a number of techniques, skills, know-hows in a variety of school activities?

•

Are there special requirements upon the curriculum that result from the bilingual, bicultural commitment of the school? Or can everyone take in one’s stride the demands of this commitment?

•

Of the techniques brought into the school by the Gattegno team which are effective? Why? How?

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What alterations have they needed to adjust to this school population?

•

Is it true that teachers work more intensively but are more relaxed and less tired than in other schools? What causes such change if it is found that indeed it takes place?

•

Is it possible to serve the community by serving its offsprings? Or is it necessary to also serve the relatives of the students per se in order to generate goodwill towards the school as an extension of the care for the community provided by the society at large?

•

Is there an optimal use of the school plant during school day hours? And over the week or the year, extending to the community some of the facilities of the school?

•

Which links between school people and community (including the students’ parents) should be cultivated to serve the legitimate aspirations of the community?

Of course, these are only samples of the questions which will be raised within the school. There are others not mentioned (such as, which books are best for the various children?) but which will be raised from the start and which will need consideration.

It is hoped that all these questions will be entertained by the staff as a whole and action taken only when criteria are found to enlighten this action.

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The professorial seminar will have among its targets the study of how any or all these questions are being tackled and perhaps solved. The phenomenon of the school will become better defined as all involved become more acquainted with its many varied aspects of which the list above gives only a brief summary.

These notes will be distributed among the school staff to help them understand why a professorial seminar was added to the experimental school in addition to sending them to the members of the seminar in order to give them an idea of what the school intends to engage in.

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Appendix 6 Notes On Open Books *

I prepared my first open books in 1937 and published two of them in 1938. While in Ethiopia I produced the manuscripts of three open books: for the study of the rural environment; of the urban environment and of climate and relief.

Reviving interest for the open books at the Summer Seminars of 1971, I produced outlines of open books for the training of teachers of reading and for the meeting of problems by educators working on school problems.

Recently I produced a three-page open book for C.S. 129 in the Bronx on — Looking at Our School.

*

Submitted at the Summer Seminar for the re-orientation of the Twin Parks School teachers, in July 1971.

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To accompany the two dozen open books I designed for science and social science the following notes may be sufficient.

What Is An Open Book?

Every textbook has a Table of Contents which very broadly tells what the various chapters are about. A writer of a text may give himself a much more detailed list of headings to guide the extent of his writing or his research.

If we add the indication of the instruments of the research such an analytic list of headings will constitute what I call an Open Book.

In fact, an open book is a research instrument which permits students to find answers on their own and without imposing the order of study nor its extent. Hence, an open book is a flexible instrument of self-education in particular fields and to any level of sophistication. It makes users into independent investigators.

What Can Be Studied With An Open Book?

Someone who knows how to design open books can study all sorts of subjects. There is no limit to the choice of the field of study so long as the writer knows —

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1

how to structure the approach to the field.

2 which instruments lead to the finding of answers.

3 how to avoid a linear development.

4 how to present his questions so that people with different resources and means can still use the instrument.

5 how to let unique individuals find something to gather on the subject that serves several individuals or a group.

The most important feature is to present challenges at the same time as the method or methods which meet them.

How Does One Fill An Open Book?

Since no one can foresee what a unique individual will want to accept as his answer to any question, the following arrangement of an open book provides a considerable flexibility.

Each sheet of the open book is gummed on a piece of stiff board or cover-board 1- Ë? larger than the sheet on all four sides. This arrangement will provide space on which to stick with scotch tape bags, envelopes, folded sheets, photographs, etc. which contain elements of the answers. These elements in whichever form they are can be folded so as to cover the page of the open book with adequate references to the question they answer or relate to.

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The various supports of the pages of the open book can be stuck together from the start or after they have been used to direct the investigations. When all are placed together they can be unfolded on a plane surface (wall or table) with the elements of the answers stretched out. The open book is then a reference book with, as author, the owner of those sheets.

In a class of 50 all 50 books may be very different and a class book could be made out of the answers judged by the authors to be the most comprehensive or elegant or imaginative, etc. This book could be “bequeathed� to the school library for example, for use by students of the following years.

Because open books are so different and the subject matter they handle so varied, filled open books do not, like usual books, look alike. The printing press uniformizes what in fact contains elements which appeal to all senses. Open books take us back to the real, concrete materials that books reduce to words or pictures or diagrams.

What Makes A Good Open Book?

So long as an open book satisfies the following criteria it will be qualified as good: 1

It is short and still understandable.

2 It can be used by people of very different talent, age, resourcefulness and still stimulate them all.

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3 It does not require that questions be answered in order; rather, it can be entered from many places and make sense from any beginning.

4 No question can be answered by a mere guess, each question is related to ways of getting an answer.

5 Questions are not all answerable by copying from books, dictionaries, or encyclopedias. Many require observation, perception, judgment, etc.

6 When answering questions, users know they progressed by so doing and can assess their growth.

7 Individual and collective work are possible and lead to accommodation to each and benefit for all.

8 When answers are found, further study of the same questions appear possible because of one’s growth.

There may be more criteria for judging whether an open book is good. Let it be said that rather than asking for all the above criteria to be satisfied at the same time, one can find that because of a few of them a given open book is good or even very good.

The pragmatic criterion is that students like to work with it and do not abandon it soon after it is given to them.

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How To Proceed When Inviting Students To Use An Open Book?

It is not recommended that teachers hand to their students the sheets of an open book without some prior introduction. A beginning which may produce results can be the following. If the teacher is somewhat acquainted with his class and the open book, he selects one question which can be answered with ease by the students though all answers may be different. For example: Write down your weight if you know it; if you do not know it, how could you find what it is?

This question could be in parts of an open book that contain questions such as: “Let me know myself” or on “How do we define physical measures?”

Once students see that questions can be answered and other questions put on these answers, they are ready to select among the pages of an open book, which they want to work on. A sheet is then stuck to a bristol and handed to each student to be worked on.

If a teacher has worked on a sheet of an open book (which could be the one the class is receiving) he can show his way of presenting his own answers rather than tell the students what to do with theirs.

It is recommended that teachers do work on an open book either of their own or their choice so as to become acquainted with the variety of techniques available.

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Appendix 6 Notes On Open Books *

If an open book is well made it will not require a guide. The previous notes may be sufficient for most users.

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Appendix 7 The Open Book For Teachers Of Reading *

Page Listening to your voice producing English words — find out how you produce “vowels” — which are they?

— list them.

Can you understand why some have been called “long vowels?”

Are they truly vowels?

*

Used to train teachers of the Twin Parks School during the summer seminar, August 1971.

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— which are?

— what would you call the others?

Shift now to so-called “consonants.” Do you know why they were given this name?

Can you produce a consonant as purely as a vowel?

— if yes, which?

—if no, why not?

Which are, therefore, the “bricks” of speech in English?

Page 1 Make a table of all the vowel sounds of English and also of all the consonants.

— what do you find?

How many “independent sounds” does English contain?

How does it compare with the so-called English alphabet?

Can you produce examples of sentences which make sense and contain words in which a given letter of the alphabet is used as many times in the sentences as it represents in the language?

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—of sentences which make sense and contain words which use one sound but as many forms or spellings as the language has adopted?

Page 2 Because consonants “sound with” or are sounded with, silence must be the answer to the sound proper for a consonant.

— Can you conceive of a way of showing a link between a consonant and a vowel?

— Use it to show someone who does not know how to sound English words.

Think up a long sentence making sense and while engaged in uttering it stop and ask yourself is the sense already conveyed?

— Or do I need the following word or words?

— Do this also after each word of a written sentence selected at random. This for example.

Look at your watch, at the second hand, and talk. Does it make sense to say that speech is in time?

— Can you as easily make sense of “speech is in space?”

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— Answer these with more than yes or no. Use evidence to support your conviction.

Page 2 Do you have any idea of how your flow of words comes to you?

Do you remember your native language?

— How do you know this?

Listen to people speaking different languages.

—Do they all stress words in the same way?

—Do they use the same way of linking words one to the next?

Could you find examples that tell that not only words form what one calls a language, what else besides words do you perceive in people’s speech?

Page 3 Watch yourself in a conversation and answer the following questions: Do you retain the words used by the other people?

— Or by yourself?

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Can you relate this observation to the questions forming the last group in page 2?

What does speech want to do?

— Convey words? Or meanings? How do you know this?

Is there something to learn in this matter because — You can tell lies?

— You can use metaphors?

— Use synonyms?

— You can replace statements by equivalent terms?

— Make summaries?

Page 3 List a number of components of speech you and others use to convey meanings.

— What is the place of words in all this?

What is the relationship of listening to speaking?

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What is the difference between listening and hearing?

Are there similar pairs of verbs for other senses?

— which?

Is it possible to speak without knowing what to do to utter the exact words in a required order?

Are there other requirements for one’s will in speaking?

— which?

When do people learn to use these controlling systems?

Do they come to school with them? Or learn them there?

Page 4 For the first attempts at giving speech a form in space, which were the indispensable observations required?

Do you think there is evidence that from the start in all written languages the first problems had to be solved first and have been?

Get a sample of and look at — hieroglyphics Chinese ideograms

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Russian or Greek or Bulgarian or Serbo-Croation Arabic, Hebrew Burmese, Thai, etc.

What do they have in common in spite of their differences?

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Appendix 8 Models For Our School *

1

One teacher per thirty one grade students. We all know this model.

2 The above model plus special rooms for special studies, so-called learning laboratories where children go to meet specialists. This is already known to us when the laboratories are for science, foreign languages, gym, cooking, sewing, etc.

3 It is not quite so well known if the laboratories are for ethnographic musea, workshops for producing what the school needs, rooms equipped for individuals to obtain what they seem to lack, e.g., language taught by cassettes, or folkloric activities.

4 A model similar to a Leicestershire (England) Plan, i.e., each classroom is still a place for learning “adopted and accepted subjects,” but

*

Submitted to the teachers at the summer seminar as a basis for discussion, August 1971.

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informally. It is being tried widely in various forms.

5 Decroly schools (Belgium, France, Switzerland, Latin America) organized around centers of interests, with no formal teaching except at certain moments. The environment is conceived of as a growing community consisting of the school, the immediate neighborhood, the district, the city, the greater city, the county, the state, the country, the various continents, the Earth, and the Cosmos. All school subjects are integrated in the successive projects which use new terms of references such as measurements of all kinds (to integrate physics and math), social techniques (to know about industry, geology, commerce, history, etc.), and all students work in various groupings according to tasks.

6 The Dalton Plan. The school is organized so as to let students cover the adopted curriculum in a sequence of assignments. This takes care of the pace of learning and provides time for extracurricular activities for those who “beat the clock.�

7 The Winnetka Schools Plan. As with the preceding two models, it is concerned with ways of making the acquisition of knowledge a more attractive activity. Winnetka Public Schools did improve the rate of learning of mandated curricula because the organization was less rigid (now called flexible scheduling), the work was not all verbal, the content of the curriculum was reduced in some areas by pruning obsolete matter and irrelevant sections and letting students dig out of the environment all it brought that still belonged to the studies in question.

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8 The Project Plan. Students of all ages work on one large project and find for themselves in libraries and the living environment as much as they can that belongs to it. Projects could be anything but because of convenience, parental pressures, laws on insurance, etc., the projects that were chosen generally linked reading, math, geography, history, science. Teachers capable of directing such projects were rarely found. Team teaching, an obvious answer, was not a solution as the areas studied usually went beyond teachers’ competencies or their desire to acquire the specialty. For example, if Ancient Egypt, or even only The Pyramids, was the theme of the project, no one would want to learn to decipher hieroglyphics. Less ambitious projects were less exciting, and the extent of learning did not compare favorably, in general, to even rote learning when evaluated by official tests. Projects still remain the best way we know to replace analytic programming by a synthetic one.

9 The A. S. Neill school model has only been tried by pioneers with a small number of students in communities ready to follow a leader. Such schools are very much in the image of their creator.

10 The Sudbury Valley School in Massachusetts, using A. S. Neill principles, does not force classroom attendance, uses projects selected by students, and accepts responsibility for one’s time and social preparation through government of the school by students and faculty. This model wishes to serve Americans by permeating school organization with the principles of the American constitution and democracy. The model seems attractive to parents who are perturbed by the 223

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dangers to the American Dream resulting from a society unaware of its duties. To become dedicated to a form of government one must know its merits and the aspects which need to be amended.

Subject matter in the classic sense is irrelevant to that end. Character formation is not. Hence, the curriculum is individualized so as to permit each student to work it out with his tutor, when the former is ready and willing to spend the time on such studies.

11 The ungraded school model has had many forms and has mainly laid the way to the dropping of walls and to the open classroom. Not one of the forms proposed has met all the requirements of learning, of teaching as known to teachers, of the ambitions of parents, and the demands of transfer to other schools (higher or not so ungraded).

12 A variety of mixtures of such models produce models called “eclectic.� In fact, each of them suits tastes rather than true needs. But such mixtures exist as models.

New Possibilities The aim is to educate awareness. This means to make each child in the school know that he knows, how he knows, and put him in control of his knowing so that: 1

He maintains the powers he spontaneously uses at an enhanced level of functioning.

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2 He extends the uses of his powers by entertaining challenges linked to his functioning instruments.

3 He enters new universes of experience well equipped and ready to mold new instruments required by the tasks.

There will be, therefore, three kinds of activities in the school going on simultaneously and for all children: At one level, each child will perceive at once how he can integrate in his existing, functioning knowledge what he is offered by his teacher, or by the environment, or what is offered in the contrived laboratories.

At another level, each child is invited to use himself more and more than he spontaneously would in the somatic, linguistic, intellectual, social, vocational, etc. universe.

At yet another level, each child has the option to participate in activities open to all so that they take themselves beyond the universes they spontaneously entertain, and have a glimpse of their own future.

The first demands that the school be a rich environment or make a richer and richer environment the extension of the school content.

The second demands that instruments and techniques be devised and made available so that what matters in the growth

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of each child is seen by him as present in the environment and reachable if he decides to dedicate himself to it.

The third demands that the activities of elders be open to the younger without a request of participation, but with an option to participate to the extent one wishes; that deliberate offerings be made to present what one does not seem to seek for oneself but which exists beyond one’s comprehension in universes not explored.

Teachers in this school will, therefore, be three things at once: 1

Purveyors of an environment that is dynamic and extendable.

2 Accelerators of learning, offering masteries at costs always going down while quality increases.

3 Channels for the encounter of one’s future in the form of universes explored by those living it intensely but not yet meaningful to oneself.

To satisfy the simultaneous demands of this model, teachers must stop having: 1

Lessons to teach

2 Tests to administer 3 Curricula to cover 4 Definite expectations

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5 Uniform approaches to anything or a unique answer to all questions To meet the demands of growth in awareness of more than 1700 children we must: 1

Have places where students can find people who can contribute to their quests, and people who are prepared and equipped to serve adequately and on the spot.

2 Have places where self-service is possible, not crowded beyond allowing each to serve himself in a reasonable time.

3 Have information about the whole school available to all, all the time.

4 Have means of knowing who is doing what and when so as to organize the flow of people and evaluate growth steadily.

5 Have continuous feedback from the learners of what is happening to them or what they are doing with themselves and to themselves.

AWARENESS IS NOT INTROSPECTION, though the opposite is true. Awareness is living consciously with oneself without verbalization but with a possibility of verbalization, and a feeling that one is with it, or distracted or confused, etc. Awareness is the birthright of all. Different awarenesses can be occasioned by the environment, chance encounters, accident. Not all teachers will know all the time how best to serve, and how to serve best.

So access to many staff members is a partial remedy of this

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inevitable shortcoming. Access to all staff members may be a principle of the school though difficult to realize.

Each staff member can say, “I am a teacher at that school” and no longer, “I am a fifth grade teacher” or “a gym teacher”. Since there are real differences between children at five who have not lived certain universes and children at eleven who may have, there is no obstacle in the separation of these children in two buildings. But between the seven and eight-year-olds such separation may be arbitrary and hence damaging. Children of the kindergarten and first grade could feel more at home in C.S. 234. Children of the second and third grades may feel that their home is on the other side and no obstacle to move from one to the other must be in their way. Neither should there be between third and fourth, fourth and fifth, or fifth and sixth for those who find themselves more at ease with older ones or younger ones.

This rule of age or any age rule must be known to the children.

The easiest way is to incorporate it in the organization. For children and teachers to know each other, social intercourse or facility to move and meet must be part of the running of the school. The open doors are not sufficient.

Perhaps at the beginning of every day a grade group meeting with their class teacher would be concerned, among other things, with letting the class know what the opportunities of the day will be. Or in the case of trips requiring preparation, when a given trip will be arranged and who could (in numbers, age, resistance . . . liabilities) take part.

228

Appendix 8 Models For Our School *

The first meeting of every day could be explored for what it can offer in terms of knowing: 1

Of grave events in some student’s life

2 Of the moods of students 3 Of some involvements, etc.

These meetings can also be explored in terms of what new techniques for preventing trouble and for referral to counselors or administrators will present themselves. They could last as long as they can be useful and welcome.

229

Appendix 9 An Open Book On The Luncheon Period At C.S. 129-234 *

Collect data on — Lunchroom space sitting capacity mode of sitting Kitchen fixture number of meals it can prepare

*

Submitted orally to the summer seminar to start discussion, in August 1971.

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number of people working in it How are they organized?

What do they consider a day’s work?

How flexible are they?

How do they related to the children?

Could they be persuaded to adopt a system developed for this school?

Collect data on — Facilities for shifting meals from kitchen to any other place Cost of additional trailers, warm and cold compartments For a musical loudspeaker system for mealtime Arrangements for preparation of varied meals, instead of a unique menu for all Cost of plastic tablecloths, napkins, table service instead of trays, flower vases and flowers Flexibility of the budget for school meals Other sources of funding an experiment on feeding school children Consider alternatives — 1

A trailer (similar to airplane’s) to keep food warm for eating at any time chosen by students of any group (class, grade, etc.).

2 A staggered feeding arrangement in lunchroom acceptable to kitchen staff 232

Appendix 9 An Open Book On The Luncheon Period At C.S. 129-234 *

open to people signing up for definite times each day (up to capacity) 3 Arrangements for tidying up for washing up for consultation of students with kitchen staff re-arrangement of rooms re-menus re-responsibility for consequences Which parts of one’s education can use the lunchtime as part of one’s conclusions or as laboratory for some study to be defined?

Can we conceive that the day at school — Is such that eating is every day a source of new experiences Is such that eating is part of the program involving — the social sciences biology and chemistry civic and courtesy education international understanding Do we treat first graders as we treat fifth and sixth graders?

Which are the differences?

233

Appendix 10 An Open Book: Looking At Our School *

Find a map or a plan of the Bronx and locate our school.

Find the various ways one can reach the school from places some distance away: subways buses by car Make a plan of the school, studying it: From inside:

*

Submitted to teachers in October 1971

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your classroom your level corridor and other rooms the various levels mark the places you go to From outside: shape of the estate immediate neighboring buildings and lots What are the places of interest in our school: The library: make a plan why are these pieces of furniture there?

The various labs: Describe them, name their function.

What do you do when you are there?

The various offices The auditorium:

describe it what would you like to do in it?

The multi-purpose room:

describe it can you use that space profitably?

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Appendix 10 An Open Book: Looking At Our School *

The people in our school: Who looks after the premises?

The custodian His staff How can you cooperate with them

Who looks after our health, safety and well-being?

The nurse The catering staff The administration The P.T.A. The Community Board The City Government Who looks after our education?

Our parents and relatives Our friends The school staff The Principal and his assistants Classroom teachers and lab teachers The aides The visiting staff

Who looks after the study of improving our education?

The project director The teacher advisors

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The consultants The professors The visitors What do we do for ourselves: We are learning To read better To write To spell correctly A second language Mathematics

how what how which To think of numbers and space To calculate fast and accurately

To use our body

how how how how

Describe what you are doing

Music Art To think of our people

around us in the places we come from

To know ourselves and our roots To look at the world of nature at energy and technology at materials and their uses

238

Appendix 10 An Open Book: Looking At Our School *

at instruments and apparatus at the societies we can find

239

Appendix 11 A Community Educational Program For C.S. 129 *

It is proposed: 1

That the premises of C.S. 129 be open every school day until 10:30 p.m. and during Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 8 p. m. and during holidays to serve the needs of the bi-cultural education of the relatives of the day students.

2 That a small section of the premises be permanently allotted to the parents’ group so as to give them — 1

a location for small meetings during the day and

*

Submitted in August 1971, but never discussed.

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2 space for an ethnographic museum to keep alive the elements of the cultures of the minorities.

3 That the community be offered special opportunities to develop its folklore and maintain its traditions as well as a small number of courses, in particular, to improve its knowledge of the languages of the minorities.

4 That the cost of this operation be taken over for the first two years by a foundation or agency and after that by the proceeds of the activities of the group which will be open to the public.

In calculating the cost of the operation during the first year the following have been included: 1

janitorial expenses (overtime)

2 non-recurrent expenses for shelving, etc.

3 renumeration of language teachers (140 days, 2 teachers) 4 equipment needed for plays, art classes, etc.

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Appendix 12 A Note To Solutions’ Staff Members Working At C.S. 234 And C.S. 129

From: Dr. Caleb Gattegno October 27, 1971 As the coordinator of the project at the Bronx, I wish to put to you a number of remarks which will, I hope, evoke some response from each and help me incorporate your gifts in our joint contribution.

1

We were selected to give the Twin Parks School an orientation which would help to make it into a bilingual bi-cultural school where teaching is subordinated to learning.

2 We obtained that the City University of New York accept a grant from the U.S. Office of Education to

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accelerate the use of anything of value to education we are able to bring about through our efforts.

3 After looking at the situation for five weeks and obtaining from the two Principals and the Project Director that the direction we were suggesting presented some hope, we moved on the elimination of bad reading which can by itself show something the whole country will value.

4 We also knew that the task is too great for us to move in all at once and I proposed to make two impacts through one action, remove from a number of classes the students who need another way of working than traditional teaching provides, thus easing the task of some teachers in trouble and group these students as a school within the school.

For these students to function within the regulations of the City we need to have them under one teacher on the school staff if they number up to 32. Assuming this number, we could perhaps count on having John Rogers as the teacher of that group.

All students of this group could be told that they have been selected for the mini-school because of their wider interests beyond those of their grade curriculum but that at any time they could return to their class and become a regular member of that group like all others. That they will cooperate in making a special program, designed for them, giving them the returns they expect of themselves.

Such a program will be designed by Carolyn, Elenita, Ian and myself so that — 244

Appendix 12 A Note To Solutions’ Staff Members Working At C.S. 234 And C.S. 129

1

they discover that they can express themselves and reach some of their real powers not always mobilized at school;

2 they can engage in a study of an ever-changing world demanding of them that they watch, analyze, assess, cooperate with it to their own advantage, etc.

3 they put their energies at the service of more than themselves. In particular, in getting some of the labs going.

After finding who the students for such a class are, we need to organize its launching. This must be precise and concerned with a project that can last from a few weeks to a few months.

A meeting of the teacher or teachers, paraprofessionals, or parents involved, with the four named above could take charge of this organization for which the following outline is submitted.

IN THE SCHOOL these students can be in charge of: a printing press to produce their magazine or the school paper, the equipment in some labs, particularly those they help set up, the drama club, i.e., stage work, scenery, loud speakers, lighting, etc., the gym equipment,

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helping younger students in some of their activities to decorate the corridors, and on those formal occasions requiring strong hands, devising procedures which will enhance everyone’s contribution (e.g., how to move towards self-government at various levels; to group children and give them opportunities to consider how they can widen their horizons). building the shelving, storage space, tool cabinets, repair shop of different kinds to be used by all, keeping records and regular inventories, finding parts and classifying them for quick reference, serving as lab assistants in science, technology, chemistry, music, dance, etc.

OUT OF SCHOOL, they could regularly spend one day a week in an outing which would charge them so that they would wish to write about or paint, or tell, or dramatize what they felt was meaningful to them.

These 25 or so excursions could cover some of the many attractive places that New York City can offer youngsters of their age. A TV studio, an automated printing works, a newspaper plant, a university campus, a number of musea, a subway repair

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Appendix 12 A Note To Solutions’ Staff Members Working At C.S. 234 And C.S. 129

shop, a Seventh Avenue garment manufacturer, a telephone exchange, etc.

Every day these students after reporting for registry could be formed into groups taking on one or another of the activities they selected at a weekly meeting prior to the following Monday.

They could be trusted to be responsible for themselves and to report to their teacher or supervisor if they chose to. A must for these students is trust which can be developed by all.

Open books could be prepared for them. Others they could print after composing the text given them for use by other students.

247

Appendix 13 A Graphical Model

Thinking in October 1971, of a graph to display the simultaneous changes in several fields in which Educational Solutions’ staff and the administration of the Twin Parks School were engaged, the three-dimensional drawing on the opposite page was submitted for discussion first to Educational Solutions staff and then to Mrs. Hercules and her colleagues.

In October, one can see that most teachers were still using traditional methods, that bilingualism was not involving more than a few people, that paraprofessionals were still being recruited, that teachers needed a lot of help, that parents were barely visible, that the mini-school within the school was being started as well as the Labs.

The evolution as seen over the following eight weeks is portrayed in the second level of the chart. An ideal projection of events beyond December is portrayed in the upper two levels.

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In June, it looks in the model like the school that was planned by the authorities: a bilingual, bicultural community school using labs extensively with almost no traditional teaching left.

Various shadings of spaces on these sections suggest reduction or expansion of what we were working on.

250

Appendix 13 A Graphical Model

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Appendix 14 A Letter To The C.S. 129-234 Staff

December, 21, 1971 You may have already developed the habit of looking back on some occasions like birthdays or ends of years, and ask yourself, “What have I done with my time?�

Let me share with you this retrospection of a little more than three months since the Twin Parks School opened. My conclusions may differ considerably from some of yours. The reason may also be that I lose the trees looking at the forest and you look at some trees and miss the forest. So our visions will be different because complementary.

We have all (more or less) lived through the summer seminar, a preparation which although technically insufficient was invaluable. Our meetings in the corridors or the lunchroom were 253

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of people acquainted with each other, of people who shared experiences they valued, of people who knew that there was much in store which was not yet actualized, and would be actualized as soon as the most urgent challenges that accompany the opening of a new school were met.

In some aspects the last three months have been heroic. We have seen groups of children (more numerous than expected) occupy empty classrooms, and teachers and children facing each other with nothing to do except what could not and did not work: talk and ask for silence. But we have seen these same teachers realize that they had to use their wits and the little help offered by the administration and the consultants. More than half the teachers were soon steering their boat to a safe harbor, and by the end of this 1971 calendar year only very few of the teachers need help to survive.

“Nobody can really grow who has not known suffering,” said a Romantic poet. Since there was some suffering there must have been growth. Each of us will know better which it has been in his or her case.

There are many aspects of the school which have not received attention mainly because those that have took all the energies, and the time. We all feel: •

that active children are not given the room to exercise;

•

that the lunch hour is still almost totally unacceptable; 254

Appendix 14 A Letter To The C.S. 129-234 Staff

•

that we do not have a bilingual and bicultural school;

•

that the level of noise in some corridors is far too high;

•

that teachers’ talents are still very little used for the benefit of all;

•

that cleanliness leaves much to be desired;

•

that the labs are a shadow of what they could be;

•

that collective thinking, planning, and implementing is rarely done or not done properly;

•

that the immersion of the school in the community and the environment of New York City has barely been touched upon;

•

that creative activities are like mirages for many, seen but never actualized;

•

that only here and there do we get a glimpse of the subordination of teaching to learning.

There may be many and more important aspects showing our shortcomings, but the list above does not fill me with dismay because in our balance sheet we have much to write on the credit side: •

We have taken in our stride the results of the City cuts while we were facing moving from temporary quarters to barren quarters;

•

We have agreed to so many changes of direction that told us to be an experimental school is not 255

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glamour but rather a terrible thing which may entangle us; •

We have seen so many of the features of traditional and therefore supposedly bad things imposed, that we have on occasion been discouraged; still only the incurably idealists among us have left. The rest have seen that every day brought a new day and therefore something to cope with and went along looking at what was done and how it affected their work;

•

Indeed every day brought a step forward. We received materials, even if they looked frightening and too uniform.

•

We saw some of the children go to colleagues or newly opened classes; the breakage of window panes stop; some trips being arranged; demonstration lessons given by some of those who were more expert in the techniques used; lunch room discussions; weekend reunions concerned with the school and how to take care of its problems; the influx of paraprofessionals; the opening of bilingual classes; the opportunity of attending seminars at the school or offered to the school; the parents being more involved; illiteracy being attacked seriously and intensively;

•

We have noticed that the members of the Professorial Seminar are looking at so many aspects of the phenomenon of the school and we may hear that they find their visits to the Twin Parks School valuable. Some even say “eyeopening.”

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Appendix 14 A Letter To The C.S. 129-234 Staff

An experimental school is too precious to be tampered with. I personally look at it as an organism which displays its own forms of life and I do not wish to do more than watch it and let it suggest what can be done which is compatible with its strengths and weaknesses. Some of its strengths fill me with hope, its weaknesses fill me with the resolution to work on them so that they are replaced by strengths. One thing is certain and this is that I do not wish to interfere with its own shaping of itself towards what it can be when we are more aware of what the opportunities in front of us are.

My suggestions, I believe, are common sense and would come to anyone who cares for it. Since I am one of them and my readers are the others, I shall put it briefly and without adornment: •

We need to know that there are some of us who have learned during this term to subordinate teaching to learning and therefore that it can be learned and implemented by each of us during this year. We need to visit and watch these colleagues and not allow any excuse to make us dismiss what we see.

•

We know for certain that if we take some steps we can change situations which look desperate into bearable or even good situations.

•

We can eradicate illiteracy. But this is only a beginning.

•

We can provide opportunities for many of our children to be creative even within the boxclassroom.

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•

We can learn to speak Spanish and use this language to generate a feeling that we are prepared to take initiatives that fill the gap with the community.

•

We can give ourselves to becoming larger persons, unafraid of mathematics or of anything we do not know so that we can go back to our charges with more to give them, replacing the ceiling of our limitations by a higher ceiling.

Let us consider the first six months of 1972 as a period of real growth as teachers, growth which can be felt within, and which can be visible to others because our classroom will be a place where children’s gifts are used by them to become better students in the academic subjects as well as more responsible inhabitants of this space. We can have a cleaner school, a less noisy school, a school where happiness results from respect for each other and the use of our time in meaningful experiences.

Six months is not too short a period.

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Appendix 15 The Twin Parks School As A Bilingual School *

In the ad calling for applications for this twin school it was mentioned that it would be a bilingual school. Nevertheless, the applicants were on the whole not able to offer working knowledge of Spanish and English. So the school started with one teacher and two consultants being bilingual. The trend towards bilingualism had to be entered slowly.

The situation today is in a number of ways very different.

1

The Spanish classes at the summer seminar gave the feeling that learning Spanish could be made joyful and could be a task which would not require

*

Submitted to the Administrators, in January 1972.

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too much time. At least a feel of the language could be given to all and a good feeling it was.

2 More teachers who can function as easily in the two languages of the school are now on the school roll, three in the upper school and three in the lower school. One more bilingual consultant had been made available by Educational Solutions. A number of competent paraprofessionals who are at ease in both languages and are native Spanish speakers are now in the classrooms.

3 Most of the very urgent problems of the school have been dealt with. As a result of this the staff feels that new tasks can be taken on and studies undertaken of how the use of Spanish will ease the way further.

Let us now examine a concept of bilingualism which is true to the situation and may help bring about the desired change soon enough, so that by June ‘72 we have almost a real bilingual school.

1

Except for adults in the school we already have a large number of people who are not acutely conscious of the fact that Spanish and English are so different that they require radically different uses of oneself. Many children pass from one language to the other and use them together as easily as I do. This is what I call being bilingual: no effort in using both languages separately or together.

In such a concept there is no danger in knowing two languages. No confusion is possible because the mental mechanism that triggers words is 260

Appendix 15 The Twin Parks School As A Bilingual School *

endowed with a device that discriminates one language from the other though it can only produce what has been stored and oftentimes gives one language vocabulary from the other. (This is what writers have done in all literature when using in italics words from another language if more apt.)

I teach reading of English while speaking Spanish with the students whose English is still insufficient. I would likewise teach Spanish reading to non-reading Spanish speaking students using a mixture of Spanish and English.

Purism is out of place in such situations and I do not let it guide me.

Now, I know that I want to speak Spanish to Casilda when I meet her and only English to Walter when I meet him. The mere appearance of their person in the field of my perception both locks the other language and triggers the one we shall use. (In my case a number of languages are not allowed to come to the fore at the Twin Parks School. Greek is at once available when I see Mr. Lazarides and Italian when I see Paul.)

Because I study what happens to me I can say that we shall all be better off if we look at bilingualism not as knowledge in two languages but as functioning in two languages.

2 To make everybody bilingual in this school we need to start with those who are and do not need to become other than what they are. Only they know whether they wish to move around recognized as bilingual and to generate in the 261

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school a sound-environment that is conducive to a number of subconscious attitudes soon after they have been allowed to be noticed, i.e., that in this school there is no hierarchy between the languages, both are dignified, adequate and one as useful as the other for learning and for social intercourse.

Only they can eliminate the feeling of artificiality that goes with a foreign language learned as foreign and kept as foreign or second. Only they can eliminate the feeling that English is a “better” language for Spanish speaking people because it may make it easier some years later to get a “better” job.

Only they can show the numerous opportunities for the non-Spanish speaking people to acquire Spanish — as a spoken and living language — while in this environment.

3 The people not yet bilingual can be sub-divided into those who have some acquaintance with Spanish and the others. (Perhaps there are some Spanish speaking adults who are not yet at ease with English, this also is to be taken care of, so that they too feel bilingual.) For the first group an intensive course of twenty or so hours as we have them at Educational Solutions may be the send-off forever and should be recommended and tested.

For the second an introduction should be given to generate the feeling that to learn Spanish is fun and not too demanding a task, something one can do while doing other things as well.

4 Having looked at the adults in the school we could also extend our attention to the parents and their 262

Appendix 15 The Twin Parks School As A Bilingual School *

needs so that the school meets them on the grounds where they are more at ease, i.e., when they use a language they learned as children.

Maybe among the parents there are already people who can assist their children at home if they know that both languages are equally acceptable for concept formation, for explanations, for social intercourse. If language classes are offered to parents, there should be no insistence that only English classes for Spanish speaking people are offered. At the same time Spanish classes can be suggested so that the community of the parents looks at the school as being at its service as community, with increasing understanding among its members, in a two-way traffic.

5 Looking at the children we must see the spectrum of possibilities they offer and remove all patronizing tone in the handling of their problems.

The bilingual classes are not there to cope with difficulties which only exist if teachers are unwilling to use Spanish and/or believe that English is the language to use. The teachers’ convenience is no criterion for what the school wants to do for the students. Students should know that if they are now in a bilingual class and others are not, it is only because these classes will be open in time and theirs are the first ones to have been opened.

If all classes are to become bilingual in due time the following steps must be taken: 1

Those who learn what reading is in their native tongue can be shown that they can read as easily a 263

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number of sentences in the other language ipso facto, particularly if the color code is used. So acquiring one skill in one language (the one in which it was easiest to acquire) leads to saving effort for obtaining use of that skill in the other language.

2 Comparative study of the Fidels in English and Spanish would show everyone the extent to which what one already knows reduces what one has to learn and the extent of what one has to master in the field of phonetics and spelling.

3 Work with numerals and numbers only requires a very small time expenditure to make mathematics available in the two languages. In particular, these mathematics lessons may prove the decisive argument in convincing students that the second language is as good as their own and not too hard to be mastered when studied in context.

4 Bilingual classes can be enlivened by sketches acted first by children who use their native language and opting to include children whose language is the other one as these opportunities develop, leading to groups not distinguished by their native language. Monolingual classes can choose to move towards bilingualism through such activities from time to time.

5 In monolingual classes teachers can increase their awareness of how to use children who are native speakers of the other language to take part in teaching which will reduce the cultural barriers, help children to appreciate their openness, provide recognition that both languages are equally functional and enhance that appreciation among 264

Appendix 15 The Twin Parks School As A Bilingual School *

the natives and the others. Languages at that stage are mainly tools but can already be seen as capable of arousing curiosity for their features and attributes.

An appreciative attitude towards both languages by everyone in the school will tend to generate a fond approach to each and eliminate emotional resistances when confronted with their use in every aspect of life.

6 A pride at being bilingual if fostered may serve the cause of teaching children in either language or in both languages. In fact, pride at using one’s dialect as a language will be required if many children and parents are to be made free to express themselves as they want.

7 A new use of the paraprofessionals, so far as they are bilingual, emerges here. They are not translating what the teacher, unable to convey a meaning, needs, but they become judges of what needs to be done, so that what children require to go over a hump can and does take place. They are free agents, true teachers, and assist through their initiative, not subservience.

Hence, they become, at least in the present state of affairs, the backbone of the changeover from an English speaking school to a bilingual school.

Therefore, the proposal that follows gives them an enhanced role and requires an adaptation of ideas from all concerned.

Proposal — During a period which is to be calculated and placed where it will be possible to use it unhampered, Spanish speaking

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paraprofessionals are trained in (a) teaching the reading of Spanish, (b) teaching elementary math in Spanish.

Once they are doing that teaching, the monolingual (English) teachers can sometimes watch them at work and thus become teacher trainers or go occasionally to Spanish language classes given by the two or three teachers and consultants who know how to teach Spanish quickly and well, or go sometimes to give classes to parents in the English language.

Monolingual Teachers

Bilingual Teachers

Bilingual Paraprofess ionals 1. Go to 1. Teach, 1. Take a Educational using the two course on Solutions languages. teaching intensive Spanish weekend classes reading.

Monolingual Paraprofessi onals 1. Take classes in Spanish offered by Educational Solutions and bilingual teachers.

Children

1. Have reading classes in the other, whatever their level of knowledge of the spoken & written languages.

2. Go to classes 2. Develop 2. Take a 2. Continue to 2. Learn at Twin Parks activities course on help as are now math in School for which will teaching math until able to both further practice. fortify uses of in Spanish. work as languages. the two bilingual paras. languages.

3. Watch paras. 3. Give 3. Give classes 3. Help parents 3. Use both teaching in Spanish in their establish languages Spanish lessons to assigned post themselves in as they (reading & monolingual in reading and the parents’ think fit. math). teachers & math in activities of the paras.

Spanish. school.

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Appendix 15 The Twin Parks School As A Bilingual School * 4. Teach parents English.

5. Develop bilingual activities for their students.

4. Discuss with class teacher lessons given.

5. Watch new lessons to learn to meet teaching challenges.

5. Develop bilingual activities for their students.

5. Watch new lessons to learn to meet teaching challenges.

267

Appendix 16 Published Progress Reports On The Twin Parks School *

Voices Of The Children From The Bronx (Via Katherine) We have reached what might be called “the first milestone” in our work at C.S. 129 and C.S. 234 in the Bronx — Thanksgiving Holidays. This short vacation gives me some time to share with you some of my work of these past three months. To make a report on our experimental school seems too big a task for my first article. So let me write instead about some aspects of my work with a group of non-readers at C.S. 129.

*

Published during the school year in Educational Solutions Newsletter.

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On October 11, 1971 Educational Solutions consultants to the experimental school in the Bronx met with Dr. Gattegno to discuss the ways of using our energies in working on some of the problems that the school presented. What emerged from this gathering was that we should eliminate illiteracy in the school first and leave for a later date other challenges such as creating a truly bilingual school, establishing learning laboratories, etc.

Feeling that this direction was promising, the administration advised us to take it. We started by obtaining a list of the nonreaders in grades 3-6. We joined our efforts and did diagnostic work during the next three days with a number of children of whom 120 were not readers yet. I have been working with about 30 of these children during the past six weeks.

One of the most interesting aspects of this work has been my study of how to adapt my work with Words in Color to the various dialects and to the range of experience with English of the children I am meeting. It is not surprising that I find this fascinating as I myself am the one who says quite naturally, “Tin min sat in a tint.”

The stories I have to share are as varied as the children I’ve met.

But all seem to have their own charm and to comment in some way on my growing awareness of how to make these children recognize their speech in the sentences we made from the charts.

Beverly is one of the most difficult third graders with whom I’m working, but her story is also one of the most touching. The first day I met her she insisted on saying the letter names each time

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Appendix 16 Published Progress Reports On The Twin Parks School *

she looked at a word. One of her comments upon meeting the shwa (a) on chart 3 was: “I don’t care what color it is, it’s still a (pronounced ).” The next day I met her, however, there was a different tone in her voice: “Why is everybody in this school trying to make me say ‘a’ (ә)? I don’t understand it. In my other school, they taught me to say ‘a’ ( )!” I replied that I didn’t want to force her to say anything but I asked if she had listened to her voice when she talks. “I’ve listened,” she answered, “and I know I say . This is ә funny school!” Waiting for this opportunity I answered: “Say what you’ve just said and listen carefully,” I said. She continued “this is ә funny . . .” She stopped and looked up at me, having heard what she had said. “You see,” she replied, “this school has already got me to saying ә!”

One of the new happenings in my teaching reading this year has been that I’ve tried occasionally to speak Spanish to the Spanish speakers while teaching them to read English. I saw the significance of this one day when Dr. Gattegno visited the school and worked with Spanish speaking children on reading English.

All the time that they worked on the English sentences from the charts, Dr. Gattegno gave instructions in Spanish. Moreover, the dialogue was in Spanish except for the sentences in English from the charts. One day in October I was working with Franciso, Angelo and Santos. After unlocking several of the words on chart 4, I made this sentence: “Dad is fifty and I am not ten yet.”

Although they decoded the sentence their expression suggested that they had not understood. I pointed to “yet” and asked: “Sabe esta palabra?” Santos answered convincingly: “Si, si — es un avion! “

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I am delighted by the varied responses that come when I inquire about the meaning of a word we’ve met on the charts. I am reminded each time of how silly it is to assume that one knows what the other is thinking. Having decoded “slit” and having made a sentence which brought puzzled faces, I asked Maribe, Patricia and Kathy if they knew this word, Patricia being the boldest of the three responded: “Yes, like you slid down the hill.”

Maribe followed with: “No, it’s like you slip on a banana peel.”

And Kathy added: “Or like you wear a slip.” And so often seeming confusion has presented opportunities for rich exchanges.

Obviously one of the best ways for letting these children see that the printed word is speech written down is to have them create their own sentences and stories from the charts. More and more I am seeing the importance of this, and I’ve created a number of situations which have allowed the children to enter the world of writing with ease.

Of the 30 children with whom I’ve worked, six returned to their classrooms after three to four hours of intensive work. They already had a beginning and needed very little to make sense of it all. The other twenty-four were beginners; and of these, five have left me and are working happily with their classes. Sammy is one of them. On November 22, Sammy’s teacher offered him and his classmates a chance to write down their thoughts about the first snowfall. Moved because it came from a child who read only a few words five weeks before, his teacher shared it with me. I include it for the same reason but also because it is so definitely Sammy’s speech and Sammy speaking:

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I like to play with snow I like to play with the snowballs I like to be in the snow I like to play in the snow I like to play snow fight It is snowing outside I like wen it snow outside I like to hit with the snowball I like to hit people with the snowball I like to make snowman outside.

Of the 30 children with whom I started working on October 21, nineteen are still with me for about an hour or more each day.

Ronda is among them. One day last week we studied chart 12 intensively. I was making a number of sentences using the new words. The next day Ronda brought a story she had written about her family. What is warming here for me is that Ronda has found inspiration in this chart for her words and her thoughts. Naturally, it would not have occurred to me to make any of these sentences myself.

I HAVE A FAMILY My father goes to work He goes to work every day And he gets paid every two weeks My father comes home at 12:00 p.m.

He likes to come home at 12:00 p.m.

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Now he is very happy two day Katherine Mitchell

Elimination Of Illiteracy At C.S. 129 * I. Since mid -October, 1971, I have been one of several teachers, consultants, teacher-trainers, at the Twin Parks School in the Bronx, focusing my work on the elimination of illiteracy in grades 3-6. As none of us had ever undertaken such a project, we had no plan of procedure — only the certainty that the 120 children who were not reading could become readers — and could perhaps be reading in a matter of days or weeks or months. Agreeing that the elimination of illiteracy was a priority at C.S. 129, the administration supported that four of us (Joel, Annette, Maria and I) give the major part of our time to this undertaking.

As I look back on my first months of working, I see that the large numbers of non-readers particularly concerned me and directed my work in some ways. I quickly found that some of the children, although not functioning as readers, already had a beginning. I worked with several groups of these children, and in five to 10 hours, many were back with their classes, gaining the practice to make them stronger. On the other hand, I worked

*

Published in Educational Solutions Newsletter, May 1972.

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with a number of beginning groups; and after several weeks, these children were working with their classmates. This decision to work first with those who had a beginning, those who showed a great amount of goodwill, and those who worked easily with other children had its sense. By Christmas vacation I had returned 30 children to their classrooms. And when I compared notes with the three others working specially on the elimination of illiteracy, we found that of the 120 non-readers with whom we started, only 40 were not reading.

Starting in January, my work with the non-readers changed considerably. I began to meet children whose difficulties demanded that I work in a different way. I met William, a 13year-old who agreed to come work with me only if his friend Bernard (who was already a reader) came with him. And in my first meetings with William and Bernard each of my invitations to William to “show a word he knew,” or “give us a sentence,” or “to point to the sentence he had just read,” was followed by: “I know it, but I’m not going to show you.” I met Alberto, who after making what seemed to me tremendous progress in our first two hours together, told me that he would not come again. I met Juliette, who since September had managed not to say a word in her classroom, and I wondered what could happen between us to allow her to open herself to me.

It was clear that these children, and others whom I have not mentioned would take more time — NOT because it was more difficult for them to learn to read but because I needed the time to know them better and to understand what their difficulties were. I found myself working with one or two children at a time

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and using the pop-ups more and more. For the next three months, my contact was restricted to about 15 children.

In late January, I was fortunate to meet Juan among these most puzzling children. A 13-year-old who had a limited functional vocabulary in Spanish as well as English, Juan taught me more than anyone else what I needed to do to be helpful to the children with whom I was currently working. The lessons he taught me are many, but two were particularly eye-opening. The first involved my decision, after working for two weeks in English with Juan, to teach him first to read Spanish, I somehow knew that I was coming to understand Juan and that this would more than compensate for my limited facility with Spanish. This has certainly been true. The second insight came when I watched Dr. Gattegno work with Juan. Immediately Dr. Gattegno spotted one or two of the difficulties still standing in Juan’s way. For me, what was most striking in this was the awareness that my affection for Juan and my delight that he was reading (when he gave proof of it) had distracted me from working on the obstacles still hampering him. Juan has spent more time with me than any other child — perhaps 50 hours.

But he has moved from non-reader to reading and writing English and Spanish. After Spring vacation he showed me more than 100 sentences he had written at home — half of them in English, the other half in Spanish.

As more children returned to their classes with strong beginnings but with need of concentrated practice, the teachers of grades 3 to 6 decided to create classes for them as well as for those who had not yet begun to read. In March one teacher from grade 3 and another from the fourth grade began to work with 276

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these beginners for an hour each day. Already these classes have had surprises. For instance, I saw four third-graders, who had made slow progress while working with me, move very quickly in this new situation. I saw Yvette, with whom Maria had painstakingly worked for months in Spanish, make sense of English in a few days.

The creation of these classes has served in other ways the elimination of illiteracy at C.S. 129. By having these children together, we can see who is moving well. On the other hand, we can pinpoint those few who have not yet made sense of reading.

I think of Tyrone, for instance. As all of us working on the elimination of illiteracy had our hands full, no one had worked specially with Tyrone. He sat the first week in a third grade beginning class appearing not to participate at all. And yet when I met with him for the first time, he showed that he had taken in a great deal. After one hour his face, as well as his work, indicated that he understood everything; and after another hour, he returned to his beginning class to work as actively and knowingly as anyone. There are other examples like Tyrone, particularly among the new admissions.

What I learned from this work with the non-readers is invaluable. Of particular importance for me are the following: that when I make myself sensitive to each one, he will tell me what to do with him, and these entries will be as different as the children are; that the pop-ups and Leo Color offer so many possibilities for entry, particularly with children who in the beginning are easily distracted; that investment and emotions keep me from seeing what there is to do; that I am ignorant when I meet each one of these children, and only each one’s 277

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feedback (in its various manifestations) can tell me if what I am doing is related to his difficulty.

Katherine Mitchell II. Although I had given workshops for teachers lasting one or two days, my work at C.S. 129-234 in the Bronx has offered a new challenge. Given the responsibility of leading one seminar a week with kindergarten teachers, one with first grade teachers, one with second grade teachers, and one with para-professionals (each officially 45 minutes, but usually allowing 35 minutes of working time) I asked myself whether we could make some progress in our teaching of mathematics, and could this progress be verified by the children’s’ learning in the classrooms?

These weekly meetings have changed markedly over the past seven months. Until the Christmas vacation we worked together on reading and writing numerals, the set of fingers, the basic operations using the rods, etc. Although the teachers were feeling more at home with the materials, many were still uneasy about their work with the children. I was feeling mainly the limitations of such brief contact with these teachers and thinking that more time together was the primary requirement for our solving some of our problems.

In January, however, these seminars took a slight turn. The reasons are multiple, but surely the teachers were better acquainted with me, with their children, and with the materials 278

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and I myself knew the teachers and the children better. In addition, however, I had an insight (that seems obviously new) that affected my work with these teachers during the following month One Monday in late January I began the seminar with the first grade teachers in the following way: “What happens when you ask me ‘how does one do multiplication with the rods?’ and I either show you or demonstrate in your classroom how one might work?” The teachers answered almost in unison: “We try to do what you do but it doesn’t work.” Then one teacher added: “Now I know that first I have to really understand it for myself before I can work with the children.”

During the past two months my idea of the value of these short weekly meetings has changed. Several seminars were particularly enlightening to me and to them. One Monday I worked in Spanish on doubling and halving. This proved powerful in illustrating to the teachers how they use their perception to derive meaning from actions. And, moreover, how they acquire the language to accompany this set of meanings. At another meeting a paraprofessional began our seminar by asking a question about “prime factors,” a term she had met while studying for an examination. After some work, it was apparent to her that this was a label for something she already knew. I took this opportunity to explore with her and with the others how one can use what appears to be complicated language as long as one knows what one is talking about. In twenty minutes they were answering questions such as

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with ease.

Or, just last week a first grade teacher began our seminar by saying: “I took a seminar with Marty Hoffman over the weekend where we worked in Base V for two days. It was so helpful and I feel we should do this in our weekly meetings.” I responded to this invitation and in thirty minutes we had in front of us the crosses which appear in the top row of the product charts and were gaining some facility in multiplication, division and fractions in Base V. This was ample time for some of the teachers to notice that the perception was the same whether we worked in Base V or Base X; that the algebra was the same; and that only the names of these crosses had changed by working in Base V. These few minutes were sufficient to bring one teacher to exclaim: “And to think that I get mad when the children don’t seem to know that 7 + 5 ~ 12 (X), something that seems so obvious to me!”

In my continued contact with these teachers, I have seen some changes. For instance, their questions are different. I seldom have requests like: “Show me another way to do subtraction. I tried what you showed last week and it didn’t work.” Rather, there is more evidence of each one pin-pointing her problems

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and bringing them to the seminars. I find that when I understand what there is to understand in a given situation, I have little trouble making these awarenesses accessible to the teachers in front of me — even if we have only a few minutes together. And when I do not understand, it is usually evident, and I take time to clarify my mind. Many of the teachers are also finding this true in their work with the children in their classrooms.

Katherine Mitchell

The Twin Parks School (Progress Report) * February, 1972 No one at this moment could say for certain what is going on in that school. Too much is taking place at all levels and no one is everywhere all the time to note the significant elements showing themselves.

Since we are many interested observers looking at the phenomenon of the school we shall end up having enough data to give the illusion that we know much. In a way it is true because, since in the human sciences we cannot validly isolate a minute detail and report its vicissitudes as typical of the whole, we accept as the best reporting the one which provides a mosaic

*

Published in Educational Solutions Newsletter, March 1972.

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or a map to replace the continuous filming of everything. The school has grown. Even tremendously.

We can see the day soon when it will be a fact that there are no illiterate children among the non-truant school population. We can even see that most children who work with two languages will be able to read both as easily and competently. We may not see as clearly this year that all teachers know how to subordinate teaching to learning, but there will only be a few who have not been affected by the merits of this new attitude. One way of seeing this will be in the general inner state of the teachers who — 1

tire less easily on the job

2 trust more and more that their students can take care of themselves.

The general atmosphere of the school is definitely more relaxed, more confident. As problems emerged, the most urgent ones were worked on with determination and with intention of solving them. Although spirits went up and down now and then, generally speaking only the weakest of the staff appointed from the summer seminar left (in fact, only two) and everybody who wanted to contribute his or her solutions was given a chance to test it. The low ebbs never lasted too long to produce a permanent damage. The experiment included all these vacillations and doubts and hesitations which remove the ambiguity existing in some minds that we were aiming at a model school, an ideal school.

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Because several machineries existed which allowed everyone to air views, grievance, doubts, there was hardly ever accumulation of resentment. The administrations considered as their first job to be wherever they were needed; to invite anyone in trouble to work out his or her difficulty; to offer assistance at once.

Decisions made a priori that proved harmful were reversed or altered to allow room for the grieved. The staff as a whole knew it was a school where something was tried out and that they had the power to make or mar. They knew that they were the foundation on which the children’s education was based.

While rightly exalting the role of the teacher, his or her responsibility was at the same time enhanced. In a few months it is clear that most teachers learned much more than would have been the case in any other way of running the school. Their testimony is available and in the detailed articulation which removes the doubt that their change is profound and fundamental. It took place because of a deeper awareness and for no other reason.

Whatever happens to the school in the future most teachers in it this year will have taken away an invaluable education that will serve their charges in any classroom where they work.

The experiment has already taught us that our promise that change in education can only take place when teachers change is correct in all its senses.

Since this change is the least expensive it is compatible with the cuts in funds governments decide for their own reasons.

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Thus, hope for a better public education for all can not be shattered for such a reason.

The Professorial Seminar * December, 1971 Very few exciting things happen in education, say the journalists. Our adventure in the Bronx is one that could have moved them had they let the news reach them.

Almost a year ago I had contributed to the Experimental Schools department of the Office of Education a paper defining an experiment in education which did not coincide with the current one. Soon after, the Superintendent of District 12 in the Bronx invited me to guide the opening and the first steps of the Twin Parks School. I agreed only under the condition that it be the first true experimental school ever to open. This was granted and officially announced last May. Around that time I submitted an unofficial memo to the chief of the college division of the Bureau of Educational Personnel Development at the Office of Education stating that a unique opportunity arose which would give college professors a chance to watch closely a phenomenon that might influence their teacher preparation.

*

Published in Educational Solutions Newsletter, January 1972.

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Soon after, between the Office of Education and City University of New York a contract was negotiated that created the Professorial Seminar made of twenty-eight professors from the major colleges of CUNY, under the direction of one professor and her three assistants to watch the Twin Parks School.

Meetings which take place on Wednesday evenings attempt to generate some unity out of diversity of the interests and the techniques represented by the members of this seminar.

The professors visit the school and look at what they wish among what happens. Almost two thousand people (of ages 5 12 and their teachers and teachers’ aides, the parents, volunteers, and their seminar colleagues), each doing his or her thing, represent much to look at. There is a need for a kind of pool to save what is worth saving in the observations noted.

Slowly the group is developing a way of coordinating its findings. What I find cheering is that the phenomenon of the school is taking more place in the observers’ mind than the techniques they have used in their other field work. Hence, theories are being replaced by empiricism in keeping with an experiment. Therefore, the seminar is changing its character as the weeks go by; it is letting itself be educated by what it is working on. Some of the members found it feasible to transfer to their education courses what they are learning and they are being moved towards seeing a science of education in the making where even a theory of instruction looked unlikely to them before.

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The important points for us are these. We now see that a group of outsiders — whose loyalty cannot be to us but rather to the educational community at large — takes a hard look at what we are attempting to do in schools and are finding that it is not easy to reduce this to a hollow proposal. Since the phenomenon of the school is what we are working on and being influenced by, the successive visits of the members of the seminar are providing data which appear everyday as more capable of influencing change in education. Our approach to change in education through a deeper awareness of the role of the teachers and their change into subordinators of teaching to learning, is already making more sense to all.

The elimination of idealistic attitudes and of the immediate expectation of spectacular results, is bringing observers to the point where they can note small changes in the scene they are looking at, changes which together reach a scale that makes them meaningful.

Since the school is alive because people are in it and not because someone is breathing an inspiration into it, there are movements stemming from everywhere and everyone and blossoming in unexpected manners. Thus, a fascinating aspect of an experiment in education fills me with hope. Having asked for the generation of complex instruments to study complex happenings I am seeing a serious beginning for this generation in the work of the Professorial Seminar living upon the phenomenon of the Twin Parks School in the Bronx.

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The Professorial Seminar (Progress Report) * February, 1972 We are now a happy group. I do not know in detail what every member of the seminar thinks on all the matters that were raised in our meetings, but I know that quite a number are enjoying studying some aspect of the phenomenon of the school and participating in various exercises at our meetings.

In the December notes I alluded to the fact that one or two of the professors found it already possible to apply some of the ideas we discussed at the seminar in their own teacher education classes. There are now more of them who find their experience, in their capacity as members of this seminar, useful in their own regular job.

What is more exciting for me is that most of them, trying to adjust to the challenges defined by their job of objective reporters on the school, have come up with a deeper perception of what opportunities public education offers today to daring innovators who know what they are doing. No longer do they report the uniformity of the appearances in the classrooms as they did in the beginning and are now sensitive to how each per son, teacher or learner, affects what they see at work in the numerous classes of the Twin Parks School. Slowly but surely the reality behind the appearances is being apprehended. And

*

Published in Educational Solutions Newsletter, March 1972.

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its description is generating many thoughts and attitudes which can influence change in education in the city where despair is more common than enthusiasm.

It seems certain now that subordinating teaching to learning makes sense even when the only examples witnessed are those of teachers unsure of themselves in a number of ways, using techniques and materials without being taken by the hand.

Video-taped material now available has caused some of the professors to revise their idea of speech in teaching, their idea of praise and of correction and has brought them to drop looking at teaching as complying with some ready-made ideal. Rather, they take in what is visible and ask questions about the invisible which until now was left out as inaccessible.

Among the acquired verities I believe I can count: the great advantage of treating students as people who bring a lot to any learning situation rather than as ignorant of the point to be taught; the stress on how in some matters to know something is equivalent to knowing as much as anybody else; the possibility of exploding what students know into whole chapters in the sciences or arts; the advantage of transforming the data so that they yield more, which is easily handled by the knower.

These acquisitions form a part of a science (epistemology) as it applies to education through teaching. And each specialist can see a future for himself when he will shift from knowledge to knowing. This generates both enthusiasm and themes immediately workable.

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The professorial seminar has moved towards the science of education by making it their own.

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