Chapter 13 - Planning tomorrow's schools

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Planning tomorrow's schools	447

  Kronish says the change in the school has been dramatic. The key to those changes? "Teacher training would be the first. Our teachers have all had regular training with John Grassi. But we're not talking about lectures. We generally organize five sessions of two hours, spread over two months. In that way, each session is a practical model that can be put into action immediately. So we do one session on ideas in maths, one on social science, one on language arts - and we put them into practice straight away. We experiment."
  And what is the difference? "Teacher excitement. Student excitement. The teachers immediately started to write plays, music, skits. They encouraged identification and personification from the start: the students acting out the role of all people and subjects studied. And the children, they flowered."
  Enter a John Eliot classroom today and you're likely to see fourth-grade students learning grammar by performing a debate as members of a baseball team: some playing the part of nouns, verbs, adverbs and adjectives, and discussing who's most important to the team. Go back the next day and you're likely to see that same group repeating the process in other classrooms.
  "Every student has become a teacher," says Kronish. "The barriers have been broken down. The whole program has changed everyone in the school."
  One of the keys has been the accelerated, integrative learning techniques. And how would Kronish describe them? "First, it's integrative; it integrates music, art, poetry and drama with every other subject. And it integrates critical thinking skills across the board. I think that's a major reason we topped the MEAP* examinations: every child is involved in developing higher-level critical thinking skills. They do this from kindergarten onwards, so by fourth grade it's second nature. We've learned to use all our senses, our bodies, as part of the learning process."
  A typical classroom? "Relaxing, bright, calm, fun-filled. Each class has a tape recorder, and we regularly play relaxing music, baroque music when appropriate, and music for many other purposes."
  And how might the new integrated techniques apply, say, to a science class? "Well, you might see students acting out the role of molecules, or playing the part of some endangered species. It internalizes learning. And it's fun."

* Massachusetts Educational Assessment Program

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