School of Education Cooperates With Newton, Lexington, Concord To Improve Teaching Techniques

Pupils of the future may learn their spelling by machine, study foreign languages by oral-aural laboratory methods and attend lecture-type courses if experiments and demonstrations conducted by the Graduate School of Education and local suburban schools prove successful. The school systems of Lexington, Concord, and Newton are serving as the proving grounds for an eight-year series of innovations in new methods of elementary and secondary school teaching.

The school systems have arranged with Harvard a joint project called the "School and University Program for Research and Development." The main objectives of this program, better known as "SUPRAD," are to improve the quality of education, to promote greater efficiency in the use of time and space in the schools, and to find a means of attracting and holding highlyqualified persons in both teaching and administrative positions.

In March of 1957 SUPRAD received an initial grant of $200,000 from the Fund for the Advancement of Education, a part of the Ford Foundation. Soon thereafter the educators began planning the series of experiments and demonstrations, most of which are now well under way.

In line with the first objective, that of improving the quality of education, Newton High School established with the GSE during 1958-59 a project known as "contract correcting." This program will determine whether or not it is feasible to have qualified persons, such as housewives with college degrees, work from eight to ten hours a week correcting English themes.

Under present circumstances a typical English teacher in a public high school is likely to have five classes a day with more than thirty students per class. Thus, the assignment of as little as one piece of writing a week demands much time from the teacher--time which could be spent planning lessons and working with individual students.

The use of these "lay readers" is expected to make possible the assignment of a larger number and a greater variety of writing exercises and to enable the teacher to try out new devices of composition instruction.

After correcting the themes the reader holds individual conferences with the students to discuss the deficiences in their writing and means for improvement. For this purpose the reader keeps for each student a running list of the types and frequency of errors.

To obtain capable readers selection is made carefully from a large number of applicants and the readers are given a refresher course including a review of English fundamentals and practice in marking a variety of themes. During the school year readers have about 250 hours of work, 170 of which are spent in reading papers and 80 in conferences with students.

Evaluation of this system follows the same lines that almost all of the projects do. Detailed questionnaires will elicit opinion and comment from teachers, readers, and students. Writing tests will be used to show the progress of students who are enabled by the contract correcting system to have more training in English.

In 1959-60 this project will include other communities near Newton for the purpose of giving a broader test of the system in school situations of a different type.

"Immediate reinforcement of learning" in another common phrase in education today, and it is the principle behind the spelling machines being used at the Franklin School in Lexington. the teacher pronounces a spelling word, and the student writes a reply to it in a space provided in a small rectangular box. Then, by shifting a lever, he exposes the correct answer. He can thus compare his answer promptly with the correct one, and the immediate reinforcement that takes place is reputed to be extremely valuable in the learning process. The spelling machine also has the virtue of allowing children to work at their own rate of progress with material of the degree of difficulty most appropriate for them.

The three problems of medical care, rights and obligations of organized labor, and school desegregation have been selected for the social studies curriculum at the Concord Junior High School. These studies form the subjects for a "case method" technique of instruction, which, it is hoped, will substantially change a junior high school student's approach to contemporary national issues from simple information-giving recitation to "complex patterns of critical evaluation." The SUPRAD investigators hope to accomplish this by the use of special materials and by "probing-questioning Socratic discussion."

An observation booth equipped with one-way glass allows researchers to observe classes for purposes of evaluating the case method. Written tests before and after the experiment compare the progress of students in the "Socratic" classes with those in the control group being taught by traditional recitation methods.

Language Labs Tried

In Concord the SUPRAD experimenters are working with "language laboratories," which involve a master teacher who instructs between 50 and 200 pupils and supervises one to five non-certified native informants.

In operation a language laboratory is held in a partitioned classroom; Magneticons (magnetic disk machines) are installed in the laboratory at the back. During any hour period half the class meets with the teacher in the front of the room, while the other half works in the laboratory under the supervision of the native speaker. Halfway through the hour the two halves of the class switch around.

The advantage hoped for is obvious: greater oral-aural proficiency through more intensive training and the use of a native speaker. The only disadvantages are possible loss of time in a poorly-disciplined transfer of students and the expense of the machines, native informant and partitioning.

Other new procedures in the teaching of language are being worked on by the SUPRAD experimenters at the Newton High School. These involve the use of 36 long-playing records for French I and II containing the vocabulary and idioms of the textbook reworked into short conversations. The pupil will sign out a new record every two lessons, and part of his assignment each day will be a section of the record to do at home.

This project is expected to increase the individual opportunity which the average student fails to receive in a class of thirty, to cut down on repetition in the classroom, and to impart greater conversational skills than can now be done in a classroom four hours a week.

The second principal objective of SUPRAD, that of promoting greater efficiency in the use of time and space in the schools, is the goal of the "Newton Plan." It is thought that the whole classroom set-up of a school may be made much more flexible, thus permitting both lectures to large groups of students and small-group seminars.

Specifically, it was found, in a study of the English Department of Newton High School in the summer of 1956, that 30 percent of the material could be most suitably presented by a single, well-prepared and equipped lecturer speaking to a large group of students.

Accordingly, during the '56-57 school year the English Department offered 35 hours of lectures in English and 22 hours in speech. Groups attending the lectures varied in size from 100 to 450. The problems encountered were that some pupils, lost in the anonymity of a large group, were tempted to pay little attention and the others had gotten the impression that the lectures would be only a simple reveiw and thus came to class with a lazy attitude. To check these problems note taking was required of all students and tests were administered.

The problem of how closely to integrate lectures with classroom work was dealt with by giving each classroom teacher autonomy in his own teaching, but advising him of the lectures well in advance and encouraging him to use them as fully as possible.

Preparation for the Newton Plan lectures was exhaustive. The lecturers undertook a maximum of research and planning and prepared their various audio-visual aids themselves, finding that commercial slides and other aids were in most cases not exactly suited to their needs. Each lecture was then given a dry run before colleagues and revised on the basis of their suggestions.

In 1957, after a four-week summer "workshop" for planning and the preparation of teaching aids, the Departments of Business, Social Studies, Mathematics, Modern Foreign Languages, Art, and Music joined the program and are employing the Newton Plan methods in a variety of ways.

The basic advantage of the Newton Plan lectures is that a teacher's time can be used more effectively, for if a teacher has several classes that are required to attend lectures, he is freed from the necessity of preparing an alternative class or even from attending the lecture once its constant has been determined. The time thus saved can be used by teachers for research, conference remedial work with individuals, and for teaching small discussion seminars.

SUPRAD is connected with the Newton Plan only by serving as organization for evaluation; Newton High School teachers and administrators originated and are carrying out the Plan.

"Homogeneous" groupings versus "heterogeneous" groupings is one of the major issues in junior and senior high schools today. Homogeneous groups are those which are composed of students of approximately the same academic ability and industry; heterogeneous grouping results from the grouping of students with different social and academic backgrounds in order to achieve a representative cross section in each class.

SUPRAD investigators have proposed a compromise for the Newton Junior High Schools. They have decided to try teaching in academically homogeneous groups, the content of science, mathematics, certain foreign languages, the specialized aspects of art, music, industrial arts and home economics, and the remedial aspects of English.

The proposal also suggests that, "for reasons of human relations and group morale," the subjects of social studies, physical education, the common learnings content of industrial arts, home economics, art, music, and certain aspects of English, are best taught in heterogeneous groups.

The Newton High School system of lectures and seminars has its parallel at the grade school level in the "Team-School in Lexington. This endeavor represents the third SUPRAD objective, finding means of attracting and holding highly qualified persons in both teaching and administrative positions.

The SUPRAD investigators and Lexington teachers believe that many learning activities on the grade school level, such as group singing and listening to a report or program, are such that little, if any, harm would be done if they were conducted en masse. Making class size flexible should also render much easier the institution of homogeneous and heterogenous grouping and individual instruction in the elementary grades.

Differentiation Sought

But there is another very important aspect of this flexibility: it allows for a certain amount of stratification in the teaching profession. The educators connected with the Team-Teaching Project feel that some "differentiation of prestige and function among the teachers" might increase initiative, and thus the efficiency of instruction, while at the same time dignifying the role of the superior teacher.

At the top of this stratification is the "team leader," a teacher of unusual talent, ordinarily possessing ten or more years of experience and a Masters Degree or the equivalent. His duties include the direct responsibility for curriculum planning and development and the supervision of inexperienced teachers and those of modest ability.

The "senior teacher" is an experienced, mature person with above average talent, a prestigeful position comparable with that now held by the well regarded career teacher.

Under the personnel ranking system "teachers" are classified as inexperienced or experienced. The former may have one potential to move upward in the pedagocial hierarchy the latter are usually considered as satisfactory filling their present hole to the best of their "modest, but adequate ability."

The other classification, in the order named, are part-time teacher, professional intern (a person currently being trained for teaching), resource person (adults whose careers are in fields other than teaching, but whose special talents lie in fields where the regular school staff has insufficient strength), and clerical aide (adults with no professional preparation who are able, with a minimum of training to assist in various routine and nontechnical aspects of the team's daily work).

Theory and Practice Joined

On the whole the SUPRAD project is an attempt to bridge the gap which so many educators feel exists today between theoretical research on education in the graduate schools of the nation's universities and practical application of these theories in the elementary and high schools. The SUPRAD organization is performing a new and healthy role in linking the theories of educators to the practice of teaching