Man I can not stop thinking about this.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/lessons-to-be-learned-from-a-one-room-schoolhouse/
Take a gander at the article above. It gives me shivers (the good kind). I started dreaming about becoming a teacher when I read an article about a one-room schoolhouse years and years ago. I was in training as a geneticist though, so there was that. While working in a genetics lab on Mount Desert Island, learning about neurodegeneration, I started thinking about the intersections between brain development and education. Later that year, I started volunteering at our local Waldorf school, now sadly defunct, and while not a one-room schoolhouse, it was the closest I’d seen (it had three rooms for five grades). I was teaching knitting, which has long been touted for having positive effects on the brain (for a nonacademic summary, see this article from CNN). At the time I was also taking classes at night to become a public high school teacher, but I left after a nudge nudge wink wink special seminar on why it was important to never have physical contact with a child in a public school. The wink was because it was openly acknowledged that we would do so anyway – a pat on the back or a welcoming handshake is an important human connection between teacher and child. But they (in my ferocious 20-something opinion back then) were covering their own legal rear ends by telling us not to do something they fully supported us doing. The hypocrisy angered me, but the reality of the situation hit me even harder – they were right, in today’s culture you should not touch a child in a public school classroom, and this was not a culture I wanted to participate in.
So it was with no small amount of surprise that I witnessed a teacher at the Waldorf school kiss a student on the top of the head as he left early for the day. She noticed my surprise, laughed, and said, “We’re encouraged to love our children here.” I’ll never forget it. I never went back to my public training class – I trained as a Waldorf teacher and worked at the island school for one year of total bliss before it closed its doors due to lack of children. I didn’t return to the lab after the school closed, as people seemed to expect – becoming a teacher was for me a homecoming, an outbreath, an inner sigh of peace. As one of my teachers told me during my last year of training, “You were born to do this. You know that, right?”
Waldorf is a developmental philosophy, so children are exposed to specific themes and skills at specific ages. Not really one-room schoolhouse friendly. At our school, I taught a combined class of 4th and 5th, and that is considered a stretch of the Waldorf curriculum and pedagogy. But what if our school had taken the one room approach? Would it still have had to close? Instead of 7 students comprising the largest class, it would have contained a combined class of 16 students grades 1-5, with one teacher’s salary to pay instead of three. There was a teacher at the school who could have done it. A public school teacher of 22 years experience, including time in a multiage classroom, Waldorf trained – she would have rocked it. So I have to broaden my view beyond traditional Waldorf, to take the elements of Waldorf that are borne out by cognitive science, combine it with the Universal Design for Learning framework – think outside the box.
Here are the elements of a dream come true. Could I ever have a small multiage group of students in my classroom, not only neurodiverse but diverse in age and grade as well? To work with those students for multiple years in a cooperative learning environment where every student is met exactly where they are at that moment, to guide them not only as learners but as developing brains?
If I can picture it this clearly, I think the answer is yes.
NB: Just after writing this I took a field trip out to lovely Isle au Haut and peered in the windows of their one-room schoolhouse, the subject of the long-lost article I mentioned that got me started on all of this pondering. All I can say is: go. What a lovely place. We stayed at the Keeper’s House, built in 1906 to house two lighthouse keepers and their families, of 10 children EACH. So, 4 adults, 20 children, 4 bedrooms. That is not math that I would enjoy. But with 20 kids in just two families, you have an instant school! Oh, the possibilities…
