1. Estabrook School HSR Feb 26, 2013

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Joseph Estabrook School: Historic Structure Report Team Teaching Philosophy 12 In another incident, teachers found the solution that eventually had an important effect on girls at the school: People noticed in weekly planning sessions that girls do fairly well in science and some in math, but they don't talk in the classroom. We decided, with the consultants from the university, to try putting the girls in a classroom [by themselves] and having them do the same project as the boys. For the first week of the so- called experiment it was just the way it was before. The second week we began to notice that the girls were becoming more overt and talking with each other more. By the end of six weeks they were exuberant about science and math, where before they would never get involved in it. It really changed how they thought about math. When we put them [back] with the boys, they continued to contribute. I don't know who was stunned the most, the girls or the boys. We tried things like that. It was so easy in a school like that rather than in traditional classrooms. We did other things like that with different kinds of groupings. Frank Lyman's creativity was just sensational. Teachers who probably wouldn't have done things on their own became exposed to his techniques. It was really quite dramatic.31 Frank Lyman described two epiphanies that he had while teaching. The results inspired others and spread throughout the Estabrook School and beyond: [Here] is an example of an idea that was generated from a child. In 1965 I was talking to a boy who had a lot of problems and he wouldn't speak to anybody. I started to draw his problem with lines and vectors and he then took the pencil and started to draw and talk. It was a sort of Helen Keller moment. I went to one of my language arts classes, a four - five -grade combination, and said to them, could you draw a diagram of the causes and effects of the Western expansion? And they did.... There is nothing new about flow- charting ideas, but what was new was that no one had ever heard of its being done in elementary school.... The term for that now is cognitive mapping. That was an innovation that occurred within this very open, "let's- try -to- learn - how -to- teach" environment. I think it did affect people in the building and they did it. I was a pretty liberated person there — to think what I wanted to think and do what I wanted to do. Another [example] was cooperative learning strategies. When I was first there I didn't do any pair learning. When I left, half my day the children were in partners, teaching each other, writing poetry together, discussing together. This was another epiphany that occurred... from frustration when I was reading a story [to the children] about the Italian immigration and I ask them to tell me what I just read. The just didn't know. In a kind of frustration I said, "Alright, would you just tell each other what I just read," and they chattered and then I said, "Now tell me what I just read." And now they raised their 31 Ibid. Anne Andrus Grade June 2012