“He believed in playing to our strengths and that teaching should be child‐centered. He called a staff meeting to discuss how we could redesign the school day and asked each of us to talk about our subject specialization and what we loved to teach best. At that time it was usual for children to stay with their class teacher all day. Over the course of a few months of meetings we came up with a plan. In the mornings, we would teach our class reading, writing, and math, and then in the afternoon we would teach our favorite subject. This meant that over the course of a week each teacher was teaching the whole school.
“As a drama teacher, my job was to look at the topics each year group was studying in all subjects and to bring them to life in the hall. Another teacher would take art, another geography, another history, and so on. Then we would pick the topics for each year group. When the ten‐year‐olds read the story of the French Revolution, they built a guillotine with the help of the science teacher, and then we constructed trials, held executions, and even spoke some French. We “decapitated” a few teachers, too.
“When the topic was archaeology in Roman times, we performed adapted versions of Julius Caesar. Because they had become comfortable with the process, when it came time to put on the school plays, the kids were confident and desperate to be involved, to perform, sew costumes, build sets, write, sing, and dance. They couldn’t wait to get to their lessons. It was a lot of fun, and it was so fulfilling to see how kids developed social skills and interacted.
“They were using their imaginations in ways they never had before. Kids who had never excelled at anything suddenly found they could shine. Kids who couldn’t sit still didn’t have to, and quite a few discovered they could act, entertain, write, debate, and stand up with confidence to address an entire group. The standard of all their work improved dramatically. There was great support from parents, and the governors used the school as a model. It was all because of the head teacher, Albert Hunt, a wonderful man.”
Unlike his experience with music classes, Paul McCartney had a wonderful experience with the teacher who introduced him to Chaucer because that teacher chose to do so in a way that he knew would reach the teenaged boy.
“The best teacher I had was our English teacher, Alan Dur‐band. He was great. I was good with him too because he understood our mentality as fifteen‐ and sixteen‐year‐old boys. I did Advanced Level English with him. We were studying Chaucer and it was impossible to follow it. Shakespeare was hard enough but Chaucer was worse. It was like a completely foreign language. You know, ‘Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,’ all that type of thing. But Mr. Durband gave us a modern English translation by Neville Coghill, which had the original Chaucer on one page and the modern version on the facing page, so you could get the story and what it was really about.
“And he told us that Chaucer was a really popular writer in his time and quite bawdy. He knew that would get us interested, and it did. He told us to read The Miller’s Tale. We couldn’t believe how bawdy it was. The bit when she pokes her bum out of the window and he talks about kissing a beard… I was hooked. He really turned me on to literature. He understood that the key for us would be sex and it was. When he turned that key, I was hooked.”
There are inspiring models of education at work throughout the world. In the northern Italian town of Reggio Emilia, a breakthrough method of preschool education arose in the early 1960s. Known now internationally as the Reggio approach, this program sees young children as intellectually curious, resourceful, and full of potential. The curriculum is child‐directed; teachers take their lessons where student interests dictate. The setting of the school is vitally important and considered an essential teaching tool. Teachers fill the rooms with dramatic play areas, worktables, and multiple environments where the kids can interact, problem‐solve, and learn to communicate effectively.
Reggio schools spend a great deal of time on the arts, believing that children learn multiple “symbolic languages” through painting, music, puppetry, drama, and other art forms to explore their talents in all of the ways in which humans learn. A poem from founder Loris Malaguzzi underscores this:
The child
is made of one hundred.
The child has
a hundred languages
a hundred hands
a hundred thoughts
a hundred ways of thinking
of playing, of speaking.
A hundred always a hundred
ways of listening
of marveling of loving
a hundred joys
for singing and understanding
a hundred worlds
to discover
a hundred worlds
to invent
a hundred worlds
to dream.
The child has
a hundred languages
(and a hundred hundred more)
but they steal ninety‐nine.
The school and the culture
separate the head from the body.
They tell the child:
to think without hands
to do without head
to listen and not to speak
to understand without joy
to love and to marvel
only at Easter and Christmas.
They tell the child:
to discover the world already there
and of the hundred
they steal ninety‐nine.
They tell the child:
that work and play
reality and fantasy
science and imagination
sky and earth
reason and dream
are things
that do not belong together.
And thus they tell the child
that the hundred is not there.
The child says:
No way. The hundred is there.
Reggio teachers build the school year around weeklong short‐term projects and yearlong long‐term projects in which students make discoveries from a variety of perspectives, learn to hypothesize, and discover how to collaborate with one another, all in the context of a curriculum that feels a great deal like play. The teachers consider themselves researchers for the children, helping them to explore more of what interests them, and they see themselves as continuing to learn alongside their pupils.
For the past two decades, Reggio schools have received considerable acclaim, winning the LEGO Prize, the Hans Christian Andersen Prize, and an award from the Kohl Foundation. There are currently schools all over the world (including thirty American states) using the Reggio approach.
The town of Grangeton is very different from the town of Reggio Emilia. In fact, it isn’t technically a town at all. It’s actually an environment run by elementary school students at Grange Primary, in Long Eaton, Nottinghamshire, in central England. The town has a mayor and a town council, a newspaper and a television studio, a food market and a museum, and children are in charge of every bit of it. Head teacher Richard Gerver believes that “learning has to mean something for young people.” So when the school board hired him to turn around the flagging school, he took the dramatic approach of creating Grangeton. The goal was to inspire kids to learn by connecting their lessons to their place in the real world. “My key words are experiential and contextual,” Gerver told me.