Teachers structured the classroom and activities for individual students and small work groups.
The best of the open classrooms had planned settings where children came in contact with things, books, and one another at “interest centers” and learned at their own pace with the help of the teacher. In both Britain and the United States, open classrooms contained no whole-class lessons, no standardized tests, and no detailed curriculum. Teams of teachers worked with multi-age groups of students and created non-graded elementary schools (see here). Thousands of elementary school classrooms–out of a few million–became home-like settings where young children sitting on rugs, cushions, and chairs moved from one attractive “learning center” for math to others in science, reading, writing, and art. Americans returned to their classrooms, schools, and districts filled with the optimism that accompanies true believers and began instituting open classrooms in big city and suburban districts (see here). Policymakers, academics, practitioners, and student-centered reformers watched teachers teach and listened to headmasters about the child-centeredclassroom that echoed in the ears of U.S.visitors as Deweyan progressivism clothed in 1960s apparel. educators who visited British schools in the late-1960s spread the gospel of “open classrooms” in the Plowden Report (also called “open education” and “informal education”). schools between the late 1960s and early 1970s (see here and here), caused a few waves only to disappear from schools by the end of the decade with nary a ripple since. The “open classroom,” an innovation that swept over U.S. If some readers are curious about particular reforms they experienced and now seem to have disappeared, please send me your thoughts. To describe the innovation, I ask some of the questions that Jane David and I used when we wrote Cutting through the Hype (2010) and added a few that answer: “Whatever happened to ….” But most important of all, is how the birth and disappearance of an innovation affects the present.įor this post, I examine the “Open Classroom” that mushroomed in schools and districts in the late-1960s through most the 1970s. Historians of education are like geologists who inspect strata of rock formations for what flora and fauna existed in earlier times and what accounts for their appearance and seeming disappearance. Such stories are a reminder of the ever-changing topography of U.S. Not only hyped in the media and by word-of-mouth, these innovations spread across thousands of schools in the U.S. From time to time I have published posts that take a look at innovations that policymakers and practitioners hailed as “transforming” or “revolutionary” insofar as altering how districts conduct business, schools work, teachers teach and students learn.
0 kommentar(er)
