Readings for Curriculum Training

Compilation and Comments

Mark Feder

Director of Curriculum and Training

INTERLINK Language Centers

Because teachers new to INTERLINK’s innovative instructional perspectives and methods must become familiar with both the rationale and implementation of curricular activities, INTERLINK President Ahad Shahbaz has asked me to select several readings to provide understanding and direction. The three readings presented below are intended to convey important insights about fundamental curricular elements and objectives.

The phrase “the subordination of teaching to learning,” which encapsulates the spirit of the INTERLINK curriculum, was coined by Caleb Gattegno, the originator of the Silent Way. The first reading describes a demonstration class taught by Mr. Gattegno, illustrating the why and how of subordinating teaching to learning. The class is not an ESL class, and the students are children. Furthermore, the students are developmentally challenged. Nevertheless, the reading is highly relevant to what we are trying to do in our classes and should prove both instructional and inspirational. The selection is from John Holt’s classic book written in the 1960’s, How Children Fail.

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Excerpted from John Holt, How Children Fail ,1964 rev 1882, pp 156-163

October 1,1959

Not long ago Dr. Gattegno taught a demonstration class at Lesley-EllisSchool. I don't believe I will ever forget it. It was one of the most extraordinary and moving spectacles I have seen in all my life.

The subjects chosen for this particular demonstration were a group of severely retarded children. There were about five or six fourteen- or fifteen-year-olds. Some of them, except for unusually expressionless faces, looked quite normal; the one who caught my eye was a boy at the end of the table. He was tall, pale, with black hair. I have rarely seen on a human face such anxiety and tension as showed on his. He kept darting looks around the room like a bird, as if enemies might come from any quarter left unguarded for more than a second. His tongue worked continuously in his mouth, bulging out first one cheek and then the other. Under the table, he scratched—or rather clawed—at his leg with one hand. He was a terrifying and pitiful sight to see.

With no formalities or preliminaries, no icebreaking or jollying up, Gattegno went to work. It will help you see more vividly what was going on if, providing you have rods at hand, you actually do the operations I will describe. First he took two blue (9) rods, and between them put a dark green (6), so that between the two blue rods and above the dark green there was an empty space 3 cm long. He said to the group, "Make one like this." They did. Then he said, "Now find the rod that will just fill up that space." I don't know how the other children worked on the problem; I was watching the dark-haired boy. His movements were spasmodic, feverish. When he had picked a rod out of the pile in the center of the table, he could hardly stuff it in between his blue rods. After several trials, he and the others found that a light green (3) rod would fill the space.

Then Gattegno, holding his blue rods at the upper end, shook them, so that after a bit the dark green rod fell out. Then he turned the rods over, so that now there was a 6-cm space where the dark green rod had formerly been. He asked the class to do the same. They did. Then he asked them to find the rod that would fill that space. Did they pick out of the pile the dark green rod that had just come out of that space? Not one did. Instead, more trial and error. Eventually, they all found that the dark green rod was needed.

Then Gattegno shook his rods so that the light green fell out, leaving the original empty 3-cm space, and turned them again so that the empty space was uppermost. Again he asked the children to fill the space, and again, by trial and error, they found the needed light green rod. As before, it took the dark-haired boy several trials to find the right rod. These trials seemed to be completely haphazard.

Hard as it may be to believe, Gattegno went through this cycle at least four or five times before anyone was able to pick the needed rod without hesitation and without trial and error. As I watched, I thought, "What must it be like to have so little idea of the way the world works, so little feeling for the regularity, the orderliness, the sensibleness of things?" It takes a great effort of the imagination to push oneself back, back, back to the place where we knew as little as these children. It is not just a matter of not knowing this fact or that fact; it is a matter of living in a universe like the one lived in by very young children, a universe which is utterly whimsical and unpredictable, where nothing has anything to do with anything else—with this difference, that these children had come to feel, as most very young children do not, that this universe is an enemy.

Then, as I watched, the dark-haired boy saw! Something went "click" inside his head, and for the first time, his hand visibly shaking with excitement, he reached without trial and error for the right rod. He could hardly stuff it into the empty space. It worked! The tongue going round in the mouth, and the hand clawing away at the leg under the table doubled their pace. When the time came to turn the rods over and fill the other empty space, he was almost too excited to pick up the rod he wanted; but he got it in. "It fits! It fits!" he said, and held up the rods for all of us to see. Many of us were moved to tears, by his excitement and joy, and by our realization of the great leap of the mind he had just taken.

After a while, Gattegno did the same problem, this time using a crimson (4) and yellow (5) rod between the blue rods. This time the black-haired boy needed only one cycle to convince himself that these were the rods he needed. This time he was calmer, surer; he knew.

Again using the rods, Gattegno showed them what we mean when we say that one thing is half of another. He used the white (1) and red (2), and the red and the crimson (4) to demonstrate the meaning of "half." Then he asked them to find half of some of the other rods, which the dark-haired boy was able to do. Just before the end of the demonstration Gattegno showed them a brown (8) rod and asked them to find half of half of it, and this too the dark-haired boy was able to do.

I could not but feel then, as I do now, that whatever his IQ may be considered to have been, and however he may have reacted to life as he usually experienced it, this boy, during that class, had played the part of a person of high intelligence and had done intellectual work of very high quality. When we think of where he started, and where he finished, of the immense amount of mathematical territory that he covered in forty minutes or less, it is hard not to feel that there is an extraordinary capacity locked up inside that boy.

It is the tragedy of his life that he will probably never again find himself with a man like Gattegno, who knows, as few teachers do, that it is his business to put himself into contact with the intelligence of his students, wherever and whatever that may be, and who has enough intuition and imagination to do it. He has not done much work with retarded children, but he saw in a moment what I might have taken days or weeks to find out, or might never have found out: that to get in touch with the intelligence of these children, to give them solid ground to stand and move on, he had to go way, way back, to the very beginning of learning and understanding. Nor was this all he brought to the session. Equally important was a kind of respect for these children, a conviction that under the right circumstances they could and would do first-class thinking. There was no condescension or pity in his manner, nor even any noticeable sympathy. For the duration of the class he and these children were no less than colleagues, trying to work out a tough problem—and working it out.

The point of this incident may be misunderstood; indeed, is being misunderstood. Many people, reading of Gattegno's work with these boys, will think I am saying that if Gattegno could have just spent enough time with them, he could have made them smart. That is not my point at all. What I am saying is that they were already smart. What Gattegno did, for an hour or so, was to put within their reach a miniature universe on which they could exercise the intelligence they already had, a universe in which they could do real things and see for themselves whether what they had done worked or not.

Many people, having finally realized that human intelligence in any broad and important sense is not fixed but highly variable, may be and indeed are drawing the wrong conclusion that we can now set out to "teach" intelligence just as we used to try to "teach" math or English or history. But it is just as true of intelligence as it has always been true of school subjects that teaching—"I know something you should know and I'm going to make you learn it"—is above all else what prevents learning.

We don't have to make human beings smart. They are born smart. All we have to do is stop doing the things that made them stupid.

Ingenious teachers, "gifted" teachers, teachers who are good at thinking up new and better ways to teach things, can do just about as much harm to their students as the teachers who are content to plug along with the standard workbooks and teachers' manuals. These gifted teachers can'tstopteaching. They are like someone who tries to help a friend start a car by giving it a push. He grunts and strains, the car gets rolling, the engine catches and begins to run. The driver says, "It's going now, you can let go." Butthepusherwon'tletgo. "No, no," he says, "you can't go without me, the car won't go unless I keep pushing." So the car, now ready to run at full speed, is held back—unless the driver wants to break free and leave the helper on his face in the road. And most learners, children above all, can’t break free of their teachers.

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Before going on to the next reading, it may be worthwhile to consider some of the lessons to be learned from Gattegno’s class. The first is that there is a distinction between learning and teaching and that the successful teacher is one who is concerned not with what information s/he is presenting but with what the students are learning. The key to learning is engaging the student’s interest and keeping him/her involved in the learning task. The learning that takes place in this demonstration class is experiential, meaning that students are learning from doing. It is heuristic, meaning that students learn through a process of discovery. It is also inductive learning, meaning that students are not given rules and instructed to apply them, but that they themselves devise rules to explain the phenomena they observe. Such learning is more fundamental and sticks with the student. In the language of our curriculum, the student is developing his/her own criteria for correctness and not simply learning by rote or echoing information presented by the teacher.

What is happening in this class is much larger than the learning of discrete information. The seeds are being sown for the student to become an independent learner. The student is actually learning how to learn. We cannot expect our students to become proficient at a second language by filling them up with vocabulary words and grammar rules. They will only achieve proficiency if they learn how to learn from every sentence they read and every utterance they hear. The teacher should not be a dispenser of information but a mentor who helps students do what they need to do in order to learn.

Caleb Gattegno is not typically seen as an affectively oriented teacher. However, there is one overridingly important affective element apparent in this class - he has complete respect for the student. It is a real respect for the student’s learning capacity and is neither condescending nor insincere. If there is one trait that distinguishes a good teacher from an indifferent one, it is this quality of respect. Gattegno’s class is supremely “student-centered” not because he allows students to do what they want but because the needs of the students are clearly the very core of the class.

It should also be noted that Gattegno was able to accomplish a great feat of teaching with a group of students others would have given up on upon entering the classroom. He did not come into the class with a lesson plan of “things to teach.” Rather, he started from a “needs-based perspective” of working with the students as they were, not as he would have wished them to be. Teaching is a profession of problem-solving, overcoming obstacles and trying to figure out how to reach and engage students who may be resisting instruction.

The INTERLINK curriculum does not provide a canned strategy for instruction or an inventory of items to be taught. Rather, it is meant as a toolbox to be used by the teacher to engage students in productive learning activities. Teachers new to the curriculum may feel they need more structure and have more control in the classroom. The following excerpt from the second chapter of Teaching Languages: A Way and Ways by Earl Stevick addresses the issues of control and initiative.

Abridged from Earl Stevick, Teaching Languages: A Way and Ways 1980, pp. 16-25

We may continue to affirm that the learner is in some ways "central" to what we do. But we should at the same time remember that there are other functions for which our society, and our students themselves, demand that we the teachers stand steadfast at the center of language education. I can think of at least five such functions:

1. Most obvious is the cognitive function: It is we teachers who possess the information which our students are seeking about the foreign culture and about its language. To say the same thing more bluntly, we have what caused them to come—or to be sent—to the course in the first place.

2. Almost as obvious is the classroom management function: Our students, and the society in which both we and they work, expect us to take responsibility for how they use their time while they are with us. In placing this expectation on us, they rely on our training and experience with materials, schedules, and techniques.

3. A third function has to do with practical goals. Our students, and society, have certain overall goals for language courses. Sometimes these goals are listed very explicitly, and sometimes they are only half-conscious. We are supposed to take these long-range goals and translate them into goals that are weekly, daily, hourly.

4. The fourth function is personal, or interpersonal. Because of our near- monopoly of information, procedures, and day-to-day goals, and because of the great power which society invests in the giver of the final grade, the teacher is by far the most powerful figure in the classroom. Therefore he, more than anyone else, sets the tone for the interpersonalatmosphere. That atmosphere, in turn, may mean that the students' nonlinguistic, emotional needs are met, or are denied, while they are in the language classroom.

5. Related to this fourth function, but centered still more closely on the person of the teacher, the teacher may radiate enthusiasmforthetask at hand, and conviction of its value, or he may not. I am talking here not so much about what the teacher says explicitly as about what the student infers from his manner. This is more subtle than the other four ways in which the teacher is "central" to the course, yet it is perhaps the most indispensable of the five.

These, then, are five respects in which the teacher may rightfully demand and accept the center of the stage in language instruction. The question now becomes, how can we reconcile the centrality of the teacher with the centrality of the learner? We sometimes assume that an increase in the learner's initiative necessarily requires some reduction in the degree of control that the teacher exercises, and vice versa and that all we can do is try for an appropriate balance, or trade-off, between control by the teacher and initiative by the student. However, this may not be so. There is a way to define "control" and "initiative," not widely inconsistent with everyday usage, which will allow the teacher to keep nearly 100 percent of the "control" while at the same time the learner is exercising nearly 100 percent of the "initiative." This distinction has proved to be one of the more useful ideas that I have run across.