Experimenting with Futuristic Systems of Learning: A “Snapshot” of The St. Paul Open School
by Robert E. Skenes, Ph.D.
with Carolyn I. Carlyle, Ph. D.* * * * *
IntroductionThe classes and activities were only a part of my education at the Open School. Through the Open School experience, I’ve learned how to relate to many types of people from diverse ages, interests, and value levels…. Another aspect of my Open School education is that I’ve learned to be more independent. The whole atmosphere at Open School facilitates this. You must choose your own classes and be responsible for getting there on time. No one is pushing you to do anything, so all the push comes from within. Which brings me to the most important part of my experiences at the Open School—the realization that learning is fun and enjoyable when the motivation comes from within rather than from external pressures. Now when I want to learn something, it is for me, not the teacher. This is most important to me because it will carry on through my whole life.
--from an Open School senior’s graduation essays
The seeds which eventually grew into the St. Paul Open School found soil in October 1970 when the first North Country Festival was held. Put together by some Twin Cities free school people, the program included speakers like Jonathan Kozol, Herb Kohl, and Don Glines, founder of a k-12 open school in Mankato, 80 miles south of the Cities. According to one observer, the speakers “ignited long-festering discontents and helped focus the dreams of those who wanted to build” an open school. Soil for the grassroots effort which eventually followed was prepared by Glines’ message that “no one will do these things for you; you will have to do them yourselves.”
After this conference, the Coalition for Better Schools set up a committee to study alternative schools. Interest in the idea of alternatives grew increasingly, and the committee evolved into a non-profit citizens group of parents, educators and students from St. Paul called Alternatives, Inc. Starting from mutual feelings of dissatisfaction with traditional public schools, the group’s goal soon became the establishment of an open school within the St. Paul public system. They wanted to create “a setting which enables children and teachers to learn in many directions, to develop talents and interests, …to be excited about new things and people and ideas, to be in awe and wonder of the unknown—in short, to be enthusiastic life-long learners.”
Alternatives, Inc. quickly gained momentum, growing to some 2,000 members. On February 16, 1971, they presented a resolution to the school board calling for creation of an open school within the system. To the surprise of many and through the cooperative energies of even more, the St. Paul Open School opened the following September.
This case study of the St. Paul Open School is like a snapshot. It presents a picture of the school at a moment in time five years after the school’s creation. The first director and many of the original staff, parents and students were still with the school. This was 24 years ago, and the school is still going strong today!
The St. Paul Open School pioneered student-centered, community-based learning in the public school arena. With no bells, no grade levels, no course grades or credits, the Open School demonstrated that students could successfully learn through making choices and pursuing their interests with the help of supportive, facilitative adults both within the community of the school and in the broader community beyond the school’s walls. At the time of this “snapshot,” there were over 1,000 students on the waiting list to get into the school. There would have been more had people not gotten discouraged when they called to be added to the list and heard that there were a thousand ahead of them. Likewise, there was a waiting list of over 225 teachers who wanted one of the 19 formal teaching positions at the school. Something exciting and attractive must have been going on! (Today the school is still going strong, with 450 k-12 students and 52 staff members; however, the student waiting list fluctuates between 20 and 60, depending on the time of year, and there are no teachers on a waiting list to join the staff.)
The success of the Open School has been validated in many ways over the years. A very visible one was by its selection (through a rigorous research and screening process) as an innovation worth replicating by the U.S. Department of Education’s National Diffusion Network which then funded teachers and administrators to come and study the school for replication in their communities.
Bill Ellis, the catalyst for this book, has written about Cooperative Community Life-Long Learning Centers as places where “learning is an act of self-volition” and where “learning appears integrated into other community activities.” He notes that such centers are “cooperatively owned and controlled by the member families they serve” and that they provide counseling and mentoring as well as classes and workshops using “all aspects of the community for education.” These are all key features of the St. Paul Open School, except that the Open School has found a way to do these things humanely and on a large scale (nearly 500 diverse students aged 6 to 18), and with public education tax dollars and public accountability.
This study of the Open School during its early years, showing its structures and its humanity, is worth considering for inspiration about what is possible when people come together around core values with intensity, integrity, practicality, and commitment. Although the study was conducted nearly 25 years ago, the school continues to demonstrate these values in practice and offers a model for significantly changing conventional thinking about schools. However, the Open School faces challenges to its design and philosophy as an innovative public school because it is tax supported and must demonstrate results to the public at large. The Open School was an attempt to experiment as far as a public school could go within this constraint. It has proved that learning does take place in a much more open environment. The challenge today, however, is for communities, parents and policy makers to trust the open learning process and not regulate it to the point that its integrity and effectiveness are sacrificed. School resources
Located in a remodeled warehouse in the St. Paul business district, St. Paul Open School began as a public school with five hundred students in kindergarten through twelfth grade. A student-painted mural covered the wall along the sidewalk in front of the building, hinting at what awaited within. It was bright and gay and flowing. Mostly hidden behind the twenty-foot space between the wall and the building was a “sandbox” play area designed and built of old tires and railroad ties by younger students. Except for the wall mural and play area, the unremarkable rectangular building blended well with its neighbors in the commercial district--at least on the outside. Within, however, was a kaleidoscopic variety of “theaters of learning” demarcated by paint, carpeting, parachutes, cardboard, lofts, and other means.
Two examples of these theaters of learning were the shop area and the music/drama/dance area. “In the shop area, students work on projects of their choosing in wood, metal, plastics, electronics, printing, duplicating, motors, welding, crafts, etc. Students may be building bookcases, polishing stones, fiberglassing a canoe, or designing a school intercom.” The possibilities for projects – both individual and group – were almost endless.
The music/drama/dance area was just as rich. There was vocal and instrumental music (opera, symphony, popular, jazz, etc.) for individuals and ensembles large and small. Students who wanted to listen instead of perform had access to listening stations for music and dramatic readings. Available equipment included “tape recorders, video tape recorders, stereo, Moog synthesizers, and musical instruments.” Students could also learn “classic, modern and folk dance or explore free or creative movement.”
The resource areas were small storehouses of information and equipment related to specific themes. Students go to them “to look things up, explore, delve into a topic, follow how-to-do-it materials and conduct research.” There were ten areas in all, each one supervised by a “liaison” person. They encompassed art, business, drama, early learning, foreign languages, home economics, industrial arts, math, music, physical education, reading media, and science.
Of course the building was only a fraction of the school’s facility. Open School students also used out-of-school resources such as school district learning centers, local businesses, hospitals, museums, other city schools (for courses in chemistry, Latin, etc.), and the University of Minnesota and other colleges. Anywhere from half to two-thirds of the school’s students could have been out of the building (sometimes out of the city or state) taking field trips, attending classes, interning, shadowing persons who work at jobs that interest them, or engaging in other learning activities. In addition, the school drew the city into itself through the involvement of volunteers (over 250 a year) and invited guest experts in efforts to feed the interests and curiosities of its students.
While many traditional schools might have been able to list a similar array of resources at the time, they were not likely to use them as the St. Paul Open School did. For at the Open School, one of the major premises of operation was that learning occurs through experiencing life. Paths and means of learning
Writing about the school in its first years of operation, then-Director Wayne Jennings noted some of the core values that guided its inception. “The school [is based] on some fundamental learning principles. These include that students learn most rapidly when they’re interested in a subject, that students learn from concrete materials, from involvement, from participation….” These principles are reflected in the three basic paths of learning in operation at the time. The paths consisted of taking classes, participating in open labs and resource areas, and planning and accomplishing out-of-school experiences.
While students had a great deal of freedom in navigating these paths, they were also subject to the state and the local school district officials’ views of what constituted an acceptable public alternative program. In order to graduate, students needed to demonstrate competence in six categories: career education, community involvement and current issues, consumer awareness, cultural awareness, information finding, and personal and interpersonal skills. The nature of the proof of competence varied from category to category. For career education, students documented their acquired skills in seeking jobs, developing plans for the future, and investigating career choices. They would also include “a brief description of post-high school plans.”
To fulfill requirements for competence in community involvement and current issues, they presented evidence from classes or projects to show that they had “the ability to actively participate in and learn from the community … and … to grapple with the complexities of current issues and events.” To demonstrate consumer awareness, they showed competence in “comparison shopping, personal finance, or consumer protection.” They also had to score at least 70% on the basic math competency test or “take the PSAT, SAT, ACT or other nationally normed math achievement test and score at the 50th percentile.”
To demonstrate cultural awareness, students showed in some manner “an understanding of the differences in attitude, actions and experiences of one’s own culture and at least two others, one of which must be Spanish-speaking American, Native American, or Black American.” Competence in information finding could be indicated by proving their “ability to identify, use, and evaluate a variety of resources to gain information which is important and useful to the student.”
Competence in personal and interpersonal skills required demonstrating an understanding of “(a) …maintaining a healthy body through good habits, physical fitness and recreation skills; (b) …interpersonal skills such as group process and decision making, conciliation, and how people react to each other; c) …ability to write coherently, comprehend written information and communicate via other media (photography, painting, etc.).” Students fulfilled these requirements through the various paths of learning.
With regard to one of the paths of learning – classes – the Open School offered a cornucopia of possibilities organized into three age groupings, each with specified locations in the school. The age groupings at the time were somewhat fluid, but in general the youngest one was students five to ten years old, the intermediate one for students ages nine to thirteen, and the older one for ages fourteen to eighteen. Students weren’t restricted to any one area and many classes were open to more than one age group.
Students in each age grouping could choose from among classes that ranged from those resembling traditional academic subjects to more interest-based ones appropriate to their age level. For example, in addition to math and reading-related classes, five- to ten-year-olds might have selected “Suzuki Piano,” “Guitar,” “Bells and Xylophones,” or “Beginning Band” from among the music classes. Or they might have signed up for “Growing Things,” “Creative Writing,” “What You Need to Know to Survive,” or “Birth and Death.” For chocolate lovers, “Brownies” might have been a personal favorite. What better way for a six- to nine-year-old to learn “reading, following directions, workmanship, making decisions, mathematics and some elementary principles of science"!
A bridge class between the younger and middle-years students was “It’s About Time.” In the process of learning to tell time, students also learned “some of the ways of measuring it and its effect on our lives…. [They] review … adding, subtracting, learn about the calendar, learn new vocabulary and spelling, etc.” Students in the middle-years grouping might have selected “The Metric System,” “Current Events,” “Sports,” “Bronze Sculpture and Jewelry Casting.” Or perhaps “Applied Music Theory,” “Jazz Workshop,” or “Improvisation” appealed to them. If they chose “Making a TV Show,” they would not only learn to use video equipment. Other skills needed and/or emphasized included “writing, talking, listening, using equipment, acting and organizing.”
Older students might have been interested in “Shorthand,” “Algebra,” “Advanced Accounting,” “Psychology,” “Physics,” or “Advanced French.” Learners with an artistic bent would have been able to study “Watercolors,” “Painting & Sculpture,” or “Drawing and Printmaking.” In preparation for life on their own, they could learn about “Grocery Shopping” or “Career Development.” The latter course combined on-the-job training and a weekly conference with a coordinator. It was intended to help students learn about “making a career choice, record keeping, preparing a resume, interviewing, writing a letter of application, and filling in application blanks.”
Open labs, a second path of learning at the Open School in those early years, took place in the resource areas. “Trying Things,” a class for ages five to nine, would have been typical. It entailed the use of “elementary school science units, which include puzzles, blocks, balancing, measuring and many other activities; a new set of activities every month.” Since the course operated as a lab, students were encouraged to “Come when it fits into your schedule.” Students could also do lab work as self-directed learners for a course they were taking, use a resource area to do research related to a course, or take a hands-on course like “Baking Brownies” within a resource area.
Then-Director Wayne Jennings noted the advantage of size in making the resource areas a cost-effective path of learning at the Open School. “We thought that five hundred [students] was a minimum in order to have a somewhat comprehensive program. … If you’re going to have a functioning shop, when you spread it over fifty kids, the cost is so great that you can’t have much of that sort of thing. … I never thought very much of a model of education … where most of the program is conversation or discussion. I think kids like to do things, to work with materials.… So I’m positive about a larger school.”
While the open labs and resource areas at the Open School constituted an important part of the learning environment, so did the community at large. Numerous classes took students outside of the school for learning. If nine- and ten-year-olds signed up for “Finding Your Way Around the Cities,” they would set off on “lots of field trips” and “Learn how to find your way back to school from any place in the Twin Cities.” Skills needed and/or learned included “map reading, question-asking, information getting.” Middle-years music students might have sallied forth on weekly field trips to “Meet the Entertainers” if they enrolled in the course by that name. Older students might have selected “Art Field Trips and Film” as one of their classes.
During one school year, students from the Open School took over 313 field trips to 162 places. Their destinations ranged from government offices (the Attorney General’s office, the capitol, City Hall, the Better Business Bureau, a politician’s campaign office) to cultural and nature centers (museums, the arboretum, the Children’s Theater, a state park, the zoo) to business and industry (the airport, a recording studio, a department store, a fish hatchery, hospitals, a bank, the telephone company) to other schools and colleges.
On student-planned cross-country field trips, students might have learned how to get from St. Paul to Chicago, Pipestone, Minnesota, or maybe New York and solved a host of travel-related problems. Joe Nathan, who facilitated a number of those trips, offered documentary evidence of their importance for young people learning to safely and competently find their way around their expanding worlds. “One year we did a study where we asked all the graduates what was the most important … learning experience they had here. Thirty-five to forty percent of them said it was one of those cross-country trips.” That kind of learning experience, valued as it may have been, wasn’t always painless. Nathan described the consequences of poor student planning on a trip to the Badlands: Students did not compile a checklist of equipment or practice pitching tents. After leaving some of the food and a tent at home, they discovered the value of such a checklist. Having to figure out at 10:30 p.m. how to put up a tent convinced them that they should have practiced before leaving St. Paul and begun putting it up earlier in that day. I had decided that students would not be seriously hurt by having opportunities to make these mistakes and so I did not avoid their happening. The only thing I made sure of was that we had a first aid kit along. In addition to going out of the building on field trips, students did internships and “shadow studies” as a way of learning about the worlds of work available to them. Some worked on museum exhibits; others spent time in child care centers or local hospitals and veterinary clinics. Some learned about areas as diverse as dance, food service, law, science, office work, and religion through interning. A student might have shadowed a taxidermist, an architect, a news broadcaster, or a stock salesman.
Joe Nathan maintained that having students participate in out-of-school, experiential learning was vital for several reasons. It made learning more interesting. It exposed students to people at work in the community, thereby expanding their awareness of the diversity of jobs available. It taught them that people could have an impact. “We’ve found that even six-year-olds are fascinated by attempts to improve part of the world that’s important to them (a park, TV show, etc.)”
Students selected classes in consultation with their parents and their advisor. They could go to the first two sessions of a course to see whether they liked it. If not, they were free to drop out with no questions asked. After the first two sessions, however, they were expected to complete what they started. One staff member explained the policy in this way: “While there are no mandatory classes, we feel that once they choose, …they have made a commitment and we expect them to be there. They may drop out, but only after having a conference with their advisor and with the teacher in that area to determine why they are dropping out.”
During my visit to the St. Paul Open School in the spring of 1976 , I noted immediately that the school was not a place where students sat quietly at their desks to listen to teachers lecture. Instead, the emphasis was on learning by engaging and experiencing the world. The “Protect Your Rights and Money” course is a case in point. The headline of a brochure prepared by students in the class read, “Are you getting RIPPED OFF? If so write us and let us work with you. Consumer Action Service, St. Paul Open School.” Intended to “help students learn about community organizations which are working to protect them,” the class took an out-in-the-community, action approach. Students visited and talked with people in consumer rights organizations, Small Claims Court, and other organizations to resolve problems presented to them by members of the St. Paul Open School Community or the community at large. According to author Joe Nathan, who was a full-time faculty member at that time and facilitator for the course, students tackled a wide range of issues. Problems with the housing redevelopment authority, an insurance company that “ripped somebody off,” and the sale of “a piano that doesn’t work” are just a few of the complaints students addressed. Nathan reported that of the twenty-eight problems students had taken on to that point, they “solved twenty-two of them, with a couple of others pending.”
The teenagers in the class liked “the way we get right to work on things instead of sitting on our duffs trying to figure out what to do.” They liked the feeling of accomplishment from helping people resolve problems. They liked learning about their rights as consumers. One student made this comment: “I’ve learned that the majority of the problems are caused by misunderstanding. Being able to work effectively and look at both sides solves it faster. Usually everyone’s first reaction is ‘I’m getting ripped off by them,’ but in many cases this isn’t so and a compromise is what’s needed. I’ve learned to think along these lines more after actually working on situations in class.”
The example of the “Protect Your Rights and Money” course illustrates three very important points about the St. Paul Open School at that time in its evolution. First, it was a learning community firmly integrated into the larger community. This was no accident but rather the result of the school’s genesis and its charter. Second, students in the school were active learners posing questions about things that interested them and ferreting out the answers to those questions. Third, standard subjects were often organically blended instead of segregated into discrete units. Students might have been learning reading and math, for example, as they worked on a project to eliminate the odor and air pollution around their school or to build a canoe for a field trip. Such an approach carries some very specific attributes with respect to resources, paths of learning, and the roles of students, teachers/facilitators, and administrators. The students of St. Paul Open School
The students of the Open School had some specific and optional responsibilities in those early years. As noted above, they were required to demonstrate an acceptable level of competence in certain areas in order to graduate. There were also behavioral norms, some of which are reminiscent of traditional schools (For example, Thou shalt not hit or bully younger, smaller students – or any students for that matter.) and some of which were unique to the complex learning environment created by having so many students coming together in a new, large-scale experiment. Students could also take upon themselves the responsibility of teaching if they wished to share with others their own advanced skill or knowledge. In addition, some participated on school committees. The most important expectation held up for students at that time, however, was that they would take charge of their own learning.
Of the approximately 500 students attending the St. Paul Open School in its early years, about eighteen percent were black, native American, Chicano or Asian minorities. Students were selected from all neighborhoods in the city so that the student body reflected the social and economic diversity of the community. The student body mix was maintained by taking students from a waiting list of more than one thousand to “fill spaces” on the basis of age, sex, race, and neighborhood rather than on a “first come, first serve” basis.
While at the St. Paul Open School, students learned how to function in a more open learning environment compared to traditional schools. Some were more effective than others in doing so. To provide structure for all students, but especially those unprepared for the lack of standard, traditional school routines, policy and decision-making groups made up of students, staff, parents, and community representatives identified student responsibilities. These included:
- Checking in each day with one’s advisor.
- Meeting regularly with the advisor (usually once a week).
- Serving the school in some way from one to five hours a week.
- Not infringing on the rights and activities of others.
With respect to school service, students selected from a number of options, such as straightening and cleaning up in a resource area, assisting with classes, tutoring another student, helping a staff member, serving as a tour guide for visitors to the Open School, participating on one of the school’s many committees, or teaching.
The chief decision-making groups at the St. Paul Open School were the Advisory Council, the Staff Steering Committee, and the Student Council. Students sat on two of the three bodies. Of the twenty-one members on the Advisory Council, ten were students. The Advisory Council was charged with making “recommendations on matters ranging from budget to staffing policy to visitors.” It set up “forums for communication with the total school community … and [was] also involved in the evaluation of the school’s program.” The Student Council attended to a wide range of issues, including communication among students, staff, and parents and the creation of social events, workshops, and forums. It developed protocols for inter-school exchanges, conducted school polls and elections, and sponsored events to raise funds for student projects.
As noted above, another way in which students could serve the school was through teaching, either informally or formally. Informal teaching occurred compliments of the school’s use of cross-age grouping in classes, labs, and resource areas. Cross-age grouping was an intentional strategy for fostering diversity in learning. From his perspective as the school director, Wayne Jennings asserted that both younger and older students benefited. Older ones served as models for the younger ones so that the latter were introduced to “many ways to act, to be and to appreciate life.”
More formal teaching gave older students the satisfaction of sharing with others something they enjoy. According to Jennings: One of the best categories of resource people are the students themselves. One teaches leatherwork, another has an extensive stamp collection, another is skilled and patient at helping young children read, another organizes a paper airplane club (along the lines of the Scientific American contest), another knows German…. When students teach, they not only learn their subject more thoroughly, but also learn presentation, how to organize information, some psychology of learning, personal effectiveness, and how to be more articulate. They learn these things in one of the most efficient ways by doing, by experience... Did cross-age grouping work in practice as well as in theory? One person observed early in the second year of the Open School that “many of the older students have just about run out of patience with the exasperating inquisitiveness of the younger boys and girls, and some of the latter sometimes seem overwhelmed by the presence of crowds of teenagers.” In contrast, an intern commenting at the end of the fourth year of operation was impressed by “how incredibly successful this place is at promoting relationships between kids of different ages…. The way the big kids work with the little kids is just phenomenal.”
Although students taught and served as role models for one another at the Open School, their most notable responsibility was taking charge of their own education. To do this they defined goals and then, venturing forward on the paths of learning mentioned above, selected learning experiences that led to the achievement of their goals in pursuit of the competencies needed for graduation. How did this work in action? One staff member explained that students developed goals at the beginning of each trimester in consultation with their parents and adviser. At the end of the trimester, the students, parents, and advisers would meet to discuss the students’ progress. Did he/she meet his/her goals? If not, does he/she want to modify some of them? Out of that meeting came a new set of written goals for the next trimester.
When students neared graduation, they chose a graduation committee made up of the Program Coordinator, the student’s advisor, a counselor, and one other person chosen by the student. This committee “reviews the student’s plans and provides support and ideas as needed…. [It] recommends the student for graduation. The recommendation must be made by at least three of the four members.” Unfavorable decisions regarding readiness to graduate could be appealed to a committee of “the Director, a parent and student selected by the Advisory Council from its members. At least 2/3 vote is necessary to overturn the Graduation Committee’s recommendation.”
How did students cope with the freedom and responsibility of designing their own learning? It varied. A mother related that during the first year of the school’s operation, her children did nothing until Christmas, when they got together with friends from the schools they had formerly attended. The comparison between what the friends had learned and what her two had failed to learn because of their own indifference shocked them into action. According to the mother, “They got down on their stomachs with their class schedules and decided they were going to keep up.” She liked that. She liked “the fact that they were scared silly that they were getting behind and that they are becoming aware that this is their education.”
Another student was a conventional school dropout. Nathan related how the boy “found his way to the Open School but spent most of his time away from the building. It turned out that he was busy organizing a center aimed at helping dropouts find jobs or encouraging them to return to school…. He is now headed for college; he knows exactly what he wants to take; he is highly motivated—and his mother [initially at odds with the school for the freedom it allowed] realizes how good it’s been.”
Many students fell somewhere in between the two extremes of “goofing off” or being highly motivated. Some exhibited the mindset that teachers were there to entertain them instead of finding the interest and passion within themselves for what they were learning. Some chose to “get by” and forego the opportunities to be as enthusiastically productive as parents and teachers would have liked. The responsibility for guiding all students – whether they were underachieving, highly motivated, or somewhere in between -- through such a complex learning environment fell upon teachers, advisers, and the school’s director. Teachers at St. Paul Open School
In the spring of 1976, the St. Paul Open School had nineteen certified teachers, ten educational assistants and three aides. Unlike teachers at more traditional schools, those at the Open School acted as 1) “learning facilitators,” 2) advisors and counselors, and 3) resource area developers. They also served on the school’s various committees.
With regard to teachers as facilitators, then-staff-member Nathan referred to the work of psychologist Carl Rogers, specifically his ideas about learning. Rogers clarified the orientation of facilitators by contrasting them to non-facilitators. Non-facilitators, he surmised, might ask themselves: “What do I think would be good for the student to learn at his particular age and at his level of competence?” “What does the state require him to learn?” “How can I plan a proper curriculum which absorbs this curriculum?” A facilitator begins with the students themselves instead of preconceived ideas or state-mandated requirements. “What do you want to learn?” the facilitator asks. “What things puzzle you?” “What are you curious about?” “What issues concern you?” “What problems do you wish you could solve?”
For example, in a Nathan-facilitated class on shopping (for students seven to eleven years old), a student’s question was “What boots should I buy?” It was a good starting point. Once the class had a focus, Nathan noted, the role of the facilitator shifted to that of resource locator. “How can I find the resources—the people, the experiences, the programmed learning facilities, the books, the laboratories, the knowledge in myself—which would help my students learn in ways which would provide answers to the things that concern them?”
In the boots example, the class started by listing questions: “How do the boots look and feel?” “How much do they cost?” “How long will they last?” These questions led to a discussion of how to find the answers, which led to visits to several stores, talks with sales people, relevant reading, and “a trip to a factory where boots are hand-made. The craftsmen are delighted that children have come to see them.”
At the end of the two-month project, the students synthesized what they had learned in a two-page paper. It described “`buys’ for different factors (the longest lasting boots if price isn’t important and you won’t get tired of them, places offering a variety of boots, styles the students liked, etc.) Nathan observed that “once teachers start consciously trying to build on interest, their ability increases tremendously. It’s a matter of starting to think in a much expanded way.”
However, not all teachers want to be learning facilitators. In the beginning, staffing the Open School with people in agreement with its philosophy was difficult. Nonetheless, there was an emphasis on choosing staff based on “their attitudes about kids and education, their flexibility and willingness to innovate and change, their ability to work cooperatively and democratically with others, and their own personal life-style.” Because the Open School emphasized experiential learning, from its inception it sought people who, in the words of staff member Cynthia Gardner, had “done something other than go to school.” Gardner offered the example of one teacher who was a member of the Peace Corps. Comfortable with immersing herself and students in another culture, she took groups to Mexico every year.
In addition to being learning facilitators, the Open School teachers and educational assistants served as advisors. Jennings described the crucial role of the advisor in the Open School structure: [The advisor is] the student’s advocate, champion, expeditor and facilitator. The advisor acts as an “educational broker” by helping arrange learning experiences in and out of the school that achieve the student’s goals…. The advisor helps students appraise their strengths and weaknesses to the end of becoming lifelong designers of their own education. Students selected their advisors at the beginning of each school year. Should the relationship prove unsatisfactory, students could change advisors (although it was “not encouraged whimsically”) if both the old and new advisors agreed.
Cynthia Gardner, an advisor for middle-years students, saw herself as a liaison between children, parents, and the school. It was up to her to balance the interests and needs of the children with the desires of the parents and the requirements of the school. To that end, she kept the records of her advisees, held conferences with the students and their parents, and wrote year-end evaluations. She also met weekly with the advisors of other middle-years students to discuss problems with children and learning goals and issues.
It wasn’t always easy for the Open School staff to function as effective advisors. Nathan noted the sense of inadequacy staff sometimes experienced when, lacking training in counseling, they were nonetheless drawn into trying to help students with emotional problems that couldn’t be ignored because they affected students’ behavior and interfered with their learning. Consequently, advisors had to deal with emotional problems regardless of whether they felt qualified to do so.
Then there were the students who were being asked what interested them and they didn’t know. One advisor related these examples. A high-schooler refused to discuss “goals” because “I don’t know what I want to be yet.” An eight-year-old had difficulty in developing a practical and feasible way of accomplishing the goal of “improving spelling” and had to be coaxed into picking a workable number of specific words to master each week.
Faced with gaps in their own knowledge and skills, Open School staff showed a willingness to take action. At the end of the first year of operation, they identified a number of things which would improve their performance as advisors. These included interpersonal and counseling skills in working with both younger children and adolescents (observational skills, conflict resolution, gaining trust and building rapport), increased knowledge about different cultures and ethnic groups, and goal-setting and organizational skills for themselves and their students. In addition, they identified “sources of grief” which had to do with organizational problems such as chaos, lack of communication, issues with staff accountability, and difficulty with record keeping and follow-through.
In the second year of operation, efforts were made to address these problems. To handle routine business more quickly and efficiently, the school created a Staff Steering Committee. Students were organized into the age groups described above, and staff support groups formed for advisors of each group. Staff and advisor manuals were created to offer guidelines and practical suggestions. Forms were developed. One helped advisors organize and maintain students’ files. Others helped instructors report on student progress in classes. A list of items to be covered during advisor-parent-student conferences was created. Staff hammered out procedures for dealing with student behavior problems.
As part of their own growth and learning, staff participated in small group, peer evaluation sessions every two weeks. In addition, there was a more formal staff evaluation at midyear when “all parents, students and staff write comments about each staff member. These comments … are reviewed by a parent-student-staff committee and discussed with the staff member. If consistent problems or complaints are raised, the committee can recommend a hearing to decide whether the staff member should be kept in the school.”
The Open School definition of a teacher as a learning facilitator, advisor, and resource area developer carried unique challenges. Demands were great. Teachers had to be well organized indeed to keep track of their advisees, plan and facilitate classes, and contribute to the resource areas. And there was the disappointment of students who took advantage of the system to be less than they could be. Not surprisingly, the staff perpetually struggled with these challenges.
One person observed, “We are constantly talking about dealing with children on an individual level. My goodness, this takes a lot of time…. We give so much, and we find that we haven’t been consistent. We do not follow through on things that we should follow through on.” Another reflected that “we staff members still aren’t as honest with each other as we ought to be. But I think we’re moving towards that. There are all kinds of ways we ought to be working together, that we know we should be doing, but people are too tired to spend the time needed to do it, or they haven’t figured out better ways for organization.”
As if teaching and advising weren’t enough of a load, staff also contributed to the day-to-day running of the school and helped develop policies and practices that kept it aligned with its charter. Four staff sat on the Advisory Council. (See the sections on “The Students of the St. Paul Open School,” above, and “The Director of the St. Paul Open School,” following.) Seven staff served on the Staff Steering Committee, described below.
Paradoxically, the very conditions that would sometimes challenge teachers to the limit were also the ones that unleashed the magic of learning. Teachers/facilitators/advisors had the pleasure of working in an innovative, interest-based learning community and seeing students “catch on” to being in charge of their own education. They had the opportunity to know their advisees much better than most teachers know their students in traditional schools. They had the satisfaction of being part of a successful educational experiment that, according to Director Jennings, “should have fallen on its face.” The Role of the St. Paul Open School Director
Wayne Jennings described his role as director of the Open School as if it were a combination of pioneer, liaison, networker, coordinator, and upholder. How does a person become the director of an experimental undertaking like the St. Paul Open School? Jennings did it by accumulating more than twenty years of experience in teaching and in working with alternative and experimental programs. In college, he studied progressive education of the ‘30s and ‘40s. Later, he was involved in a “planning seminar that explored many educational ideas around the country.” Before coming to the Open School, he worked with alienated youth and started a successful Career Studies Center in St. Paul. Jennings once described the Center as “a public school unit for the most turned-off secondary age kids that’s built on progressive ideas.”
Jennings liked the idea of alternative schools. “I see in [them] a possibility because you don’t have to convert people. You can just operate independently and let the regular system continue on without feeling so molested or defensive about it.” He viewed a large – and very important – part of his job as managing and maintaining good relations with the school board and the district administrators, a part made easier by the credibility he’s built up as a result of his years of experience in the St. Paul school system. He believed that it was that credibility which kept the district administrators from “checking and double checking” everything going on when the school first opened.
For Jennings, the role of director was not so much executive decision-maker as it was coordinator of decision-making processes and executor of recommendations and decisions rising out of the community of Open School participants. As noted above, the three bodies primarily responsible for recommending and deciding were the Advisory Council, the Staff Steering Committee, and the Student Council. The Advisory Council was a large body of twenty-one members to which numerous subcommittees reported. The subcommittees dealt with topics such as evaluation, educational facilities laboratories, human relations, safety, volunteers, program, permanent records, physical plant use, graduation requirements, budget, enrollment, staffing, personnel problems, trip review, and inter-racial advising.
At one time, the Advisory Council tried to hold discussion on all school-related matters. However, that proved cumbersome. Hence, the Staff Steering Committee was created. Consisting of nine members including Jennings, its purpose was to make decisions regarding “routine business matters” so that operations didn’t get bogged down by the need to take all affairs concerning the running of the school to the Advisory Council. The creation of the Steering Committee reflected one of the challenges of operating a school on democratic principles. Although a more representative body, the twenty-one member Advisory Council could not always address concerns and make decisions quickly enough to remain effective.
Jennings believed that willingness to entrust decision-making authority to the Steering Committee indicated two things. One was that people were worn down by trying to discuss the details of everything that needed attention. The other was that a certain level of trust had been achieved. “People said, ‘I’m willing to trust the Steering Committee or trust Wayne to make some of these decisions.’” Reflecting on that time, he noted, “Maybe a school needs people who can work on trust-building too and deal with that—someone with some experience in group dynamics.”
Although, when I visited the school in 1976, the members of the St. Paul Open School were still learning and growing with respect to crafting decision-making mechanisms that upheld their philosophy of democratic participation, it was remarkably successful. As Jennings stated, “The St. Paul Open School is not a flimsy, poorly conceived or half-baked idea. It is a bold and aggressive step melding many modern practices into a single project.” Under the circumstances, he said, the school “should have fallen on its face.” I know of no other school that’s testing so many of the traditional assumptions about what schools are and should be, and testing them all at once. Not some little experiment in modular scheduling, but the whole concept of student-designed education. Not whether it’s worthwhile to teach fifteen minutes more of math a day, but how you motivate kids to take math without ever forcing them to. And doing all these things with all-aged kids at once. To what, then, did Jennings attribute the school’s success? One factor was the good fortune “to employ enough staff with this kind of vision (and I include myself) who seized on the opportunity, moved ahead, … and no matter what the problems said, ‘Let’s try to solve it and stay on our original goal,’ rather than changing goals every time we ran into an obstacle.” He also cited the staff’s “resourcefulness and political skills” in getting the school up and running without a lot of monitoring from the school district and central administrators. Another factor was “the times.” People were open to new ideas about education, thanks to books and television coverage challenging the status quo. He believed that most important of all, however, were the parents who started the school. “The parents were farsighted ... and progressive enough to set sort of general guidelines for the employment of staff and the thrust of the school. We’ve picked up on these and made the most of them.”
Without doubt, parents played an important role in the St. Paul Open School since its inception, and their on-going participation was of prime importance in the learning community. The role of parents in the St. Paul Open School
Cynthia Gardner was in a unique position with regard to the St. Paul Open School. One of the parents involved in its formation, she was also a staff member. “All of us here agree that this is not a perfect institution,” she said in an interview, “but it’s a heck of a lot better than anything else we have. We look at the system and say, ‘If this school fails, where do we send our kids? What do we do next?’ We would rather continue to put in a lot of energy into this one to make it better than to just let it go and take our kids someplace else. There isn’t any place else.”
Gardner was not an example of one in her involvement with the school, nor in her disappointments and satisfactions with it. The findings of an external evaluation completed at the end of the Open School’s second year of operation showed that about twenty percent of the parents (about 290 families had children in the school) “were rated as being highly involved with the school program. This is a higher proportion than would be found in most traditional schools.”
The foregoing descriptions of various aspects of the Open School supported these findings. Parents met at least four times a year with their children and the children’s advisors to set goals and review learning. They participated on the Advisory Council and some of its various subcommittees. They served as volunteer teachers, helped organize resource areas, and did phoning. They communicated their opinions, feelings, and recommendations about school programs and staff via staff evaluations and questionnaires.
Parents pointed out where the school fell short and where it excelled. Regarding the need for improvement, some expressed concerns that the school could do a better job of meeting the social and emotional needs of younger children and of addressing feelings of anonymity among some of the students. Some parents were not pleased about situations in which staff seemed reluctant to follow through on problems, set behavioral limits, and step in to prevent older children from bullying younger ones. Some parents wanted their children to know whom to approach to ask for help and to feel free to do it instead of holding back in reluctant confusion.
The same internal evaluation that highlighted problems also revealed strong satisfactions. Many parents report their children have made excellent adjustments to the informal structure and have progressed far beyond work done in traditional school. Parents like the flexibility of time and scheduling, the wide range of learning experiences, the opportunities to explore and experiment, and the individualization. They are pleased that their children can develop and learn according to their interests. In addition, many parents reported satisfaction with seeing their children at ease with adults and with such a large, complex environment as the school. Many also believed the staff was warm, sympathetic, committed, aware of and concerned about the needs of children, accessible, willing and helpful. Conclusion
Parents, students, staff – indeed all involved with the Open School – knew in those early years that it was a work just barely begun. As Wayne Jennings wrote in his “Design, Rationale, and Implementation” paper: The program improves as perplexing problems are mastered. Progress is rapid but several years will be required to accomplish most elements of the design. Students and parents join with staff to seek solutions and to establish new norms of expectations and humanistic procedures. A common task builds strong bonds that sustain the school through its design shortcomings. In a sense, the building itself, the curriculum, the need for materials, becomes everyone’s responsibility, everyone’s problem, and everyone’s pride as progress is achieved. Now, over 24 years later, in January of 2000, the St. Paul Open School describes itself this way: We are a kindergarten through 12th grade community encouraging individual growth and self-directed learning from each other and the world around us. We believe that balancing independence and community responsibility is vital to learning and that takes place in the context of the entire community. Students still create learning plans with the help of their advisor and parents. They still demonstrate learning via portfolios rather than grades. Past graduates frequently come back and volunteer in the school, serving as validators for students’ graduation competencies (which have now grown to 18 in number). Current graduates reportedly do well when they go to college. Students still participate in school governance and decision-making on the Advisory Council and the Site-Base Council (where they are a majority). The school is in its fourth building since it began, and it has had 10, 20, and 25 year reunions (and it’s planning its 30th).
And today, we find that Dr. Wayne Jennings is the founder of Designs for Learning which has developed a “Community Learning Centers” model with a $5 million grant from New American Schools. Jennings’ website (http://www.designlearn.com) states that “the project began with a year of research into the best in educational research and practice, followed by two years’ work implementing the model on a pilot basis with nine schools in Minnesota. Designs for Learning now manages full implementation of the model in five charter schools.” A great many of the basic elements and core structures of the St. Paul Open School form the heart of his CLC model. And a great many of what he calls the CLC “Design Specifications” sound like the kinds of things Bill Ellis describes so passionately in his CCL-LLC writings—things like “systemic or comprehensive” rather than piecemeal change, “transformational learning outcomes,” “real world linkages” for learning through experience, “learning experiences… [that] are child-centered, life-centered and brain-based,” “Personal Learning Plans,” “elevating the position of teachers to ‘facilitators of learning,’” “students… viewed as powerful resources” and participants in decision-making, “vigorously involved parents,” partnerships with other entities in the community, CLCs as “headquarters for learning for the community,” and programs based on needs which are “family centered and family supportive.”
Dr. Joe Nathan has carried forward his learnings from the Open School as well. He directs the Center for School Change at the University of Minnesota’s Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs. He has consulted, researched and written about parent and community involvement, strengthening rural communities to help increase student achievement, school choice, charter schools, and youth community service. He recently published Charter Schools: Creating Hope and Opportunity for American Education, and he writes an education focused newspaper column published in several Minnesota papers.
These are just two of the lives affecting other lives based on their St. Paul Open School experiences. One wonders what other seeds for growth, independence and democracy have grown in the more than one thousand graduates from the Open School since its founding.
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© Copyright 2000. Robert E Skenes - All Rights Reserved.
RobertandCarolyn@3n.net
