… and the rabbit bobs past!

Introduction

Christine Charteris is a j.2-3 teacher of 32 children who teaches in a developmental style at Hillcrest Normal School. Fundamental to her way of thinking about teaching is the belief that the teacher shouldn’t hurry learning; that children should have plenty of time to work things out; that they often need to go back to activities – though always with the requirement that they eventually be completed. For all her patience and child-centredness, though, Christine could be called a tough teacher in that and other respects.

While some children may not cover as much of the curriculum as children in other classes do, her preference always is for quality thinking as against coverage of a subject area. The boys in the corridor, for example, will keep coming up with ideas for exploring force. Christine’s teaching strategy will be to challenge the children to discover different aspects of the same concept, and to give them time to follow lines of inquiry.

Allied with all this is a belief that learning should be integrated into real situations. Earlier in the year, the matter of calendars had arisen and the children were soon involved in a range of activities to do with time and how it can be represented. Time and calendars since then have become a regular topic. Christine has found the children keep returning to a number of topics like this – topics that have arisen incidentally as an outcome of chance daily interactions, or as a matter of intention by the teacher.

And then there is the big developmental characteristic of allowing children to work at a pace that suits their learning. If children have the ability and inclination to go on, Christine doesn’t hold them back by making them wait for those who don’t.

Teacher questioning is the main strategy she uses in helping children toward learning insight. The two groups of children working on calendars, for example, will be seen to function at a different pace and at a different level. One group quickly recognises that by establishing the first day of the month, the rest of the month can be worked out in patterns of seven day cycles. As a result, the children in that group quickly complete the drawing of the grid and the filling in of days and dates. The children in the other group, however, will be seen to be still at the stage of having to copy each day and date, one by one, off a calendar.

Christine never segments the children’s day, but does segment her day. This means, as far as the children are concerned, that a topic can just carry on. For example, she is generally especially available for language all morning and for maths between 1.00-2.00 p.m. but will help out at other times if needed. Her intention, though, is to have some kind of coverage of most curriculum areas every day.

Christine’s classroom is about problem solving. Her task, as a result, is not so much to give answers as to provide more questions and problems to investigate; to make full use of both planned and spontaneous teachable moments; and, in this way to help the children to make linkages for themselves. For example, in the forces work referred to above, the investigators come across the concept of pulleys which she leaves them to explore for another three or four days. Meanwhile a girls’ group moved in different direction, possibly a less fruitful one for the moment, but Christine’s expectation is that the two groups will eventually arrive at a similar degree of understanding.

An example of a spontaneous teachable moment occurred earlier in the year when a dog came on to the school grounds and, to the horror of the children, attacked one of the class hens. With the hen at the veterinarians, the children busied themselves writing indignant letters to the city council about the ‘dog problem’.

When a new topic is decided, Christine gathers before views and gets the children to write a question they would like an answer to; then she lets them think of ways of finding answers. A typical response might be to write a letter; use the internet; phone or fax someone who might know the answer; gather a range of resources.

In the morning programme to be described, the topic of force has been introduced, but other options continue from previous topics and interests. For example, rocks, which has been an earlier topic focus is still being pursued, though it is also linked to force and time; work on ‘Rata’s Tree’ is continued; as is the writing of autobiographies, and painting and drawing from observation.

The day’s programme in action

The morning programme

The situation and setting is a single teacher classroom (with a mezzanine floor) for 32

j.2-3 children. It is a city school and the teacher is Christine Charteris.

The rectangular-shaped classroom is divided asymmetrically. There are a series of barriers (screens, shelves, desks, cupboards, pigeon-holes, bookcases, pinboards, and tables with legs cut off) at various angles to create personal cubbies. The room appears full and from no direction can all the children’s work areas be viewed from a single vantage point. Carpet squares cover some of the lino. The overall effect is not of a pretty room but of a highly interesting one reflecting the children’s personality as much as the teacher’s – a room developed incrementally from the accumulated outcomes of children’s learning.

Papier mache hot air balloons are suspended from ceiling wires; children’s paintings of themselves doing activities look down from the walls; there are large, fat cushions; pot plants line the window sills; and, constructions in the process of development are scattered around the room. There are goldfish in a tank; birds in a large cage (outside in the sun today); and a rabbit roams the room.

A science table with a sloping display board at the back (covered with observational drawings) is set up with generous shelf and table space. It carries a variety of materials – a range of levers (crowbar, drill bits, cogs, drills, nut crackers, hole punches, scissors, bottle openers); a rock tumbler rotating; and books, including a hanging set of ‘Science Alive’.

There are two computers in two different parts of the room; a bookshelf for displaying enlarged books; a wet sink area with a lino floor; shelves for art equipment and resources; and a rock collection displayed at the back of a wall created by a cupboard. Access to the mezzanine floor is through a set of wide steps (themselves useful as a form of seating); the mezzanine floor displays books and language charts, and provides facilities for writing.

The morning begins. Sitting around the edge of the carpet, the children face the teacher and the whiteboard. With the money for lunches collected, the teacher gives it to a child to work out. The teacher oversees what has been done, and the child proceeds to organise the order form for the class. A prayer in Maori led by the teacher is followed by a waiata. The roll is called with the exchanges in Maori. Children who need help in this are quickly and positively helped by the other children.

The teacher outlines the morning programme, reminding the children of some of the ‘bits and pieces’ that still needed finishing. The current topic is a science one on force. Around this, other curriculum areas are incorporated. A series of options is provided. The children can choose from regular ongoing activities such as reading from individual reading boxes or the library corner display of ‘force’ boxes; or from completion-tasks such as writing (hand and word processed), the painting of Rata’s tree, and painting and observational drawings. Other options are to experiment with the tools on the science table or a new resource box placed near the science table (the contents are not revealed but they are referred to as being of possible relevance to an investigation of force); to put rocks that have been drawn and written about into the rock tumbler; and to make a wall calendar covering the next two months to help in the tumbler monitoring. The children volunteer suggestions about how paintings can be improved (one suggestion was to apply crayon over the paint), and how observational drawings can be given roundness and shape with shading.

‘Sort yourselves out and go’, says the teacher.

The children select their first activity, gathering the gear and resources they need. Painters lay out the plastic floor coverings, clamber to get paints and brushes from the paint shelves, bring in the partly-finished work from the corridor, discuss what they plan to do, and then begin the task.

The rabbit takes the opportunity to bounce over the paintings.

A girl is on stage three of her large observational painting of two birds in the cage. She had painted the birds with wings out first, then, after the paint dried, had painted the cage and its bars over the top of the birds. Now she was carefully filling in the background as it would be viewed through the cage bars.

Writers sift through the pile of writing books to find theirs and then a place to work. Some share what they have written with a friend before continuing from where they left off, others begin writing immediately. A girl is writing her autobiography (written autobiographies being one of the spontaneous ideas that have become part of the class’s repertoire). As she works at one of the word processors, she occasionally stops to show a passer-by her baby photo album.

Another girl, sitting alongside the tumbler machine on the science table, is contemplating the written description and observational drawing of the small rock she completed following a recent field trip. She decided to try to find out how many revolutions per minute the tumbler is rotating her rock. A boy with a digital watch is enlisted for her help. A girl close by is making an observational drawing of one of the tools on the table. The pair observing the tumbler agree on who is going to do the timing and who the counting. They finally agree on the start-counting-now spot on the tumbler. After three false starts the counting begins. Thirty-seven revolutions per minute are counted. As the teacher passes she suggests they might like to consider how long one revolution takes. They reflect on this and decide ‘it’s a maths problem’.

A group of children making ‘machines’ stand around their constructions discussing progress. They plan their next move, and then disperse to gather gear.

The rabbit bobs past.

Some boys rummage through the gear in the mystery box (see above) and try to work out what ‘those things are’ (spring balances), and what they are used for. One suggests the dial hand looks like a clock and could be for measuring something. Another notices the dial hand moves when you pull the hook. They list variations of pressure on the hook and note that the harder it is pulled down, the more the dial hand moves around. The teacher joins them and listens to their discussion. With each suggestion they make, comes a response from her to extend their thinking. Eventually they decide that the ‘things measure force’. The teacher suggests they might like to create loads of some kind to demonstrate different levels of force. The boys respond enthusiastically and search around the room for objects they might use.

As the children become engaged in their tasks, the teacher circulates. Two pairs of children have decided on the wall calendar activity and negotiate together which pair will do the current month and which the following one. The children concerned get two large sheets of paper, some felt pens, and a metre ruler, then locate a calendar near the whiteboard which they study intently. They start measuring and dividing the paper into squares. One of the pairs finds it is too slow with just one ruler between two calendars and tries to find another. They ask the girl writing her autobiography at the computer where they are kept, but she is concentrating on the keyboard and, in an irritated manner, says she doesn’t know. The two hens suddenly push out of one the art cupboard doors and peck around, heading for the door.

Two children sit in one of the large cubbies created by desks and buddy-read. They discuss the story and work out an inferential meaning for the last part. They have an even longer discussion about the dried fruit one of them is munching and decide, after it has been nibbled by both, that it does taste better than the ‘fresh stuff’.

In the writing corner on the mezzanine floor a number of children are hard at work. About a third of the class are studying rocks and writing detailed descriptions so they can make a comparison when the rocks come out of the tumbler in six weeks time. The girl writing her biography is now ready to respond to the question about rulers asked of her earlier. She shows the boy concerned where the rulers are neatly stashed in a tube behind one of the screens.

A child is doing a careful outline of another who is lying on a long piece of paper on the floor. Three children are sharing the drawing of a very detailed crayon picture of a tree – it has exquisite detail on the bark and with every leaf a separate work of art. They talk about the ‘Rata and the tree’ legend they are illustrating and wonder about the ‘force’ of the tree as it falls and whether the insects had to use as much force to get it back up again. They decide it would take ‘more force’ because pushing up is harder.

On the mezzanine steps a child is reading quietly to herself. As the teacher sits down beside her, the child spontaneously starts reading louder. They discuss the rabbit as it tries to wriggle under the bottom steps, and then continue reading.

The boys carrying out the spring balance investigation rush in from the corridor to inform ‘everybody’ that they’ve ‘discovered something’. Their faces are flushed with excitement. They invite a couple of children out to the corridor to have a look.

One of the investigators returns to the classroom to report progress to the teacher and especially that the slippery nature of the lino is affecting their ‘research’. The teacher focuses the investigator’s thinking with an open question and he zips back to experiment further. She resumes listening to the reading until a scraping noise gets their attention. The teacher and the child discuss the rabbit underneath them and how it likes going under the stairs to a hidey-hole to sharpen its teeth by gnawing the backs of the wooden step slabs. As the rabbit moves under the bottom step and bobs away, the child finishes reading. The teacher takes the opportunity to remind her of the three rules for coping with unknown words, and then joins the corridor investigators.

A child working on one of the calendars has suddenly become aware of the large group of twelve children working on the mezzanine floor. He calls up to them to ask what they are doing. They appear slightly at a loss how to answer, looking at each other and raising their shoulders as if to say ‘we’re just working, what’s the problem?’ Satisfied he’s not missing out on anything, he returns to his calendar-making.

A child who has decided she is ready to publish, checks her work with the teacher and together they decide the writing is ready for word processing. While meeting the corridor investigators, the teacher had offered to read them something related to their findings. By the time she has finished getting the computer operational, the boys have lined themselves up in a row of chairs in the science corner and announce they are ready for the ‘reading’. She suggests they move on to the carpet and that they fetch another boy to join them as ‘he’d probably be interested in the book’.

Sitting on the large cushions they listen while the teacher talks to them about ‘rough and smooth’ from the ‘Science Alive’ book ‘Gripping and Slipping’. A painter who overhears the teacher’s questions joins them and contributes to the conversation that follows. The painter helps to link the corridor investigation to the tree in the painting of Rata’s tree. While these children discuss a question posed by the teacher, she turns to read some writing (about a huge hole being dug in a nearby street by a digger) passed to her by a girl. Half listening to the boy’s discussion, she asks a question about the hole.

At that moment the rabbit bobs past.

The painter contributes some more information about the hole (which happens to be near her house as well). The writer decides to add this further information. Meanwhile, the teacher gets back to questioning the boys about ‘rough and smooth’. The boys say they want to try the idea they gained from the teacher’s questioning, but the teacher insists they think of the possible answer before they do this. The teacher reads them the text which they discuss before moving on to friction and its relevance to the picture of skates and rollerblades. Other children come over and ask the teacher the whereabouts of items (especially the stapler and a rubber). They are told to find them for themselves. A child wandering by is invited to join the discussion by the teacher who is starting to read aloud about skates and rollerblades. Questioning by the teacher prompts predictions from the children. This, in turn, allows the teacher to ask more questions. The bell goes for interval, but nobody seems to notice so the teacher shoos everybody outside.

The teacher returns from the staffroom, noting as she passes that the tray of water has, once again, been well used by the children during the interval. The plastic bottles, funnels, tubing, and frothy water have been organised into a complicated connecting system that has water moving up, down, and across different levels.

The two hens are outside for their morning scratch-about in the playground and are scavenging leftovers from the class rubbish bin. They don’t find much so they return inside. The children are back at their activities but things are a bit noisy.  After a request by the teacher about reducing the noise, the children continue with their activities. Some are taking up where they left off, others have started new activities.

The teacher staples the computer-published piece of writing produced by the tumbler observer on a wall in the science corner. Included in the story is the solution to the maths problem the teacher had posed earlier.

One of the corridor investigators has written a statement on the whiteboard about blocks and friction which he reads to another child. They join the rest of the investigators who have resumed their activities in the science corner; before long, though, they return to the corridor. Different lengths of wool attached to piles of blocks and the spring balances are being tested.

Two boys are using magnifying glasses as they do observational drawings of some of the lever tools displayed on the science table. Three girls reach up to the corner shelves in the wet area to get dyes to finish off their tree mural.

Some children are still writing descriptions of their rocks:

Neisha: My rock is orange. My rock has teth marks on it. My rock is five sentemetres. My rock whighs seventy five grams. My rock feels raf. My rock is hefy. The shape of my rock is actogon.

Kirsten: My rock has got some red and bluwy green coluer and my rock is crystal. It weighs 90 in a hafe grams and its width is 4cm. my rock has bumps on it. My rock is rafe and bampy. My rock is hard. My rock is an intaresting shap.

The teacher wants to do some guided reading with a few of the children but her inquiries are deflected by several of them who don’t want their activities interrupted. They ask her if they can ‘do it later’ when they are finished. She does, however, manage to entice two children from their tasks. A child brings his story and a ‘Spell-write’ dictionary to her. As he self-selects his spelling errors and checks them in the ‘Spell-write’, the teacher writes some of them into his spelling notebook.

Just then the rabbit bobs past. 

One of the corridor investigators reports in. The teacher invites him to bring everything back into the classroom for a sharing session. He says that it is going to be difficult ‘to bring all the findings in, as the gear ‘takes up a lot of room’ – including somebody’s full and heavy schoolbag ‘which they needed to use’. Eventually, though, the transfer is made and a group gathers around to hear about their discoveries.

They have the first string balance attached to a zip on the bag, and the second between the long string and a shorter string. By opening or closing the zip, they have found they can have an effect on how far the needles on the spring balances move when the block is pulled. They thought the two spring balances would show the same amount of force, but they didn’t. Would it matter, they wondered, if they held the bag in the air instead of having it on the floor? They want to draw and write about their discoveries, so they go off to find some paper.

One of the two calendar-making pairs has finished. This pair has decorated their work with a coloured koru patterns and backed it with a larger piece of black paper to form a frame.

The child writing her autobiography with her photo album is trying to work out the year she was born. She is given help by the teacher by means of a backwards scale started on a piece of paper.

1994 – 8 years

1993 – 7 years

1992

Except for the pair who have just finished dyeing their koru-decorated calendar, most of the children are still working at their activities. The teacher asks the children who haven’t gone back to their paintings to pick them up and put them in the corridor. The calendar-making pair, knowing the bell will be going soon, start to pack up. Some other children also start to pack up, but others remain engrossed in their activities. The teacher listens to a child reading, and then quietly calls the class to the mat.

A child shows the teacher a calendar she has made for herself in her ‘white book’ (the rock writing book) to enable her to track her own rock’s progress. The teacher praises her initiative and then gets the children to problem solve how many weeks they think there are in August. Using the work of the first-finished calendar-making pair, the children work this out. The children who understand, help their peers to realise that the number of days over from the full weeks have to be accounted for. The finished calendar is stapled to the wall in the science corner.

The teacher reminds the children to continue with their autobiography time-lines after lunch. She then reintroduces the idea of working out their year of birth using a backward scale. There is a moment of indecision when they try to work out the year before 1990. Options offered and written on the whiteboard include: 1999, 1980, 1989, 1995, 1677. After much discussion, the teacher covers the thousand and hundred columns of 1990 with her hand to help the children understand. They agree on 1989. The teacher rubs off the scale before lunch, urging the children to work it out again later.

… and the rabbit bobs past!

[Concluding comment by Kelvin Smythe:

The similarities between Christine Charteris’s teaching and Elwyn’s are clear: the patience displayed with children allowing them considerable time to observe, explore, reflect, act, and express; but associated with this patience, a demand for children to be rigorous in their thinking; the central pedagogical place of problem solving; the willingness to listen to the children and closely observe; the emphasis on observational, anecdotal evaluation; the opportunities for children to share their learning and learn from each other; the determination to make the curriculum serve the children not dominate and distort what they do; and, the teaching to goals providing both the necessary structure for the informality of practice, and the desired for freedom.

Differences between the two can be detected, for instance, Elwyn emphasised the imaginative link between the natural environment and creative expression; Christine cognitive demands in relation to a wider view of science. And in her problem-solving demands on children, she used a wider curriculum canvas. Elwyn in written and artistic expression was superb.

If I had to place Christine in the context of a particular philosophical approach, I would choose Dewey’s. This is not say Christine has read Dewey, she has more ended up there in a pragmatic way, also through people around her who have absorbed the Deweyan tradition. Dewey saw humans as intelligent organisms whose understandings are reconstructed in response to certain problematic situations, and that society to develop beneficially needed these reconstructions to be positive ones. The school, as a result, had a crucial role in both identifying what is best in society and then providing problem solving opportunities for children. She also falls into the integration category but, then, all developmental teachers do; it is where they end up as a logical extension of sharing classroom power – it is the best kind of curriculum integration.

Teachers looking at the two (Elwyn and Christine), however, should be inspired by them, not ape them in detail. There are curriculum learning detriments in both approaches (mainly to do with the need for more philosophical depth in problems set), greatly outweighed, of course, by the gains. The kind of principles outlined above should be acted on, but in ways that reflect teachers’ personalities’ and professional abilities and enthusiasms.

A look at how Christine became what she became is illustrative. The influences on her flow from the collective mind map of New Zealand liberal education philosophies derived from people around her. The main influence was the well-known Hamilton educator, Edith Ryan. Edith was Christine’s junior class leader and later taught at the teachers college. She instilled into Christine the idea of child-centredness and working out your practice from there. The influences on Edith were all the usual suspects: the New Education Fellowship Conference; Susan Isaacs; A.S Neill and Summerhill; John Dewey; John Holt; Elwyn and Sylvia, of course; Beeby; Lex Grey of playcentre fame, who needs much more recognition; Ruth Trevor; Dorothy Blumhardt; and Gordon Tovey. Then there were the people who kept the flame of the myth going, people like Jack Shallcrass, Keith Fox, Anton Vogt, Barry Mitcalfe, and Bruce Hammonds. But, above all she was from that magnificent and, as we see it now, heroic group of junior class leaders, who did it, with due recognition to their influences, their way.

These same influences also worked their magic on other people who affected Christine’s way of thinking, people like the remarkable Anne McKinnon who taught so brilliantly in the Hamilton area, and later went on to be the driving force for BSM; the charismatic Stan Boyle, one of her principals, and very much in the tradition of Elwyn Richardson, indeed, his name pops up in Elwyn’s book; Pam Halls, another of her principals, who believed in her, and gave confirmation to her practice; and Barbara Whyte, a lecturer at the school of education and the writer of this article, who did the same.

In relation to Barbara Whyte comes the main point I am making in this conclusion. If you look on my web site under ‘Curriculum’, you will find listed a posting, ‘Essence: Learning through drama and other things’, which recounts Barbara Whyte’s transformational encounter, in the ‘50s, with an inspiring teacher who mainly taught through drama. This teacher had a short though brilliant life, but whose influence continues in Barbara Whyte to Christine Charteris, and through her to Edith Ryan and to those in our liberal education pantheon. So if you are out there, a developmental teacher, striving for the kind of brilliance that comes from the those who are part of our education myth (the stories liberal educationists tell about ourselves), and wondering if the education world around you has gone mad, take heart, you are not alone, the myth will endure, and you are contributing to it.]