How a very slight change in Summer School (High School or College) can make for a huge positive gain in educational outcomes
by Win Wenger, Ph.D.
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Summary
A very slight change in summer school procedures, even without formal change in most teaching methods nor in the responsibilities of most teachers, can be used to create considerable and cumulative improvement in learning. Anyone interested in improved or accelerated learning should investigate the integration of knowledge in the school curriculum.
Jerome Bruner and others made a highly respected case on behalf of organizing a core of structured principles of understanding which are common to all fields of knowledge or study. In Bruner’s concept, each core principle would be revisited more formally at each rung up the educational ladder. A fundamental issue in education is the transfer of learning, from initial to subsequent contexts.
Without an integrated base of understanding, few students remember the contents of their courses for very long, much less transfer their learning to where it can serve them usefully in either the learning of subsequent courses or in living. With such a core of integrated understandings, most students will be able to do all these things and much more — very much in keeping with the goals of any educator interested in improving long-term and even short-term educational outcomes.
We propose here a simple, easy summer-school procedure for college or high school, by means of which to induce a richly productive integration of knowledge in its students, even where none of the school’s teachers or administrators or texts are themselves equipped with such a core!
“All knowledge is my province.”
—Roger Bacon
| Proposal The other end of Bruner’s Spiral — An easy way to integrate knowledge without disturbing school procedures |
The Problem
A serious complaint by some of the more intelligent among seniors and graduates is that most schools “teach each subject in a box.” Each subject is taught so isolated and separate from any other subject that there is little transfer of learning from one course to the next, even in closely related fields. Worse, for many, there is little long-term retention of learning. An apparent waste of most of the schooling effort. Nothing comes along to reinforce what was already learned at such effort and cost. Hence the oft-quoted definition that “an education is what you have left after you’ve forgotten everything you’ve been taught.”
Decrying this condition, many have argued on behalf of integrating the school curriculum around a common core structure of knowledge, with the contents of all subjects taught as examples of the common core principles in operation. Historically, some, from Aristotle on, have concentrated mainly on identifying a core of structural principles around which the body of existing knowledge can be encyclopedically assembled and organized. Others, from Oliver L. Reiser1 to Mortimer Adler and his “Propedia”-based Encyclopedia Britannica, have focused on compiling some identified core knowledge and principles in more accessible or teachable form.
Swamped by other issues, educators nowadays appear to feel that to consider how to integrate knowledge is but an intellectual luxury, one to at best be looked at some other time when classroom learning generally is in less immediate prospect of extinction. Indeed, interest in this topic may have peaked in the Sixties with the war cry of “relevancy” — which war cry was, alas, instead used mainly to demolish old scholastic and academic standards without replacing them with genuine improvements.
Bruner’s Spiral
At about the same time, on a far more respectable level, around the time he was leader of Harvard University’s Institute of Cognitive Studies, Jerome Bruner proposed an integrated “spiral” structure of all knowledge in the curriculum. Further, he argued that “any idea, no matter how ‘advanced,’ can be taught in intellectually respectable form to any child at any stage of development” if it is put into that child’s current cognitive vocabulary…if it is put into the structure of basic codified experiences with which he then processes other experiences2.
Ford and Pugno3, among others, assembled not only such arguments but proposals by various writers for integration within particular curriculum areas — math, English, social studies, and the natural sciences. More recently, this writer found the most widely accepted behavioral law of psychology to be a central descriptive principle not only for animal behavior but for vegetative — indeed, extending beyond lifekind to be a major structural and physical issue in the material universe4, which experience lends some further impetus to the consideration that we live in one universe with one set of “natural laws” which, once understood, render understandable also the contents of any academic or scientific specialization.
General Theory of Systems
Perhaps the most promising area for integration of knowledge has been through the general theory of systems, the study of how things work together. Because the dynamic principles of the interactions of things are consistent from physics to sociology to art and poetry, general systems theory represents an especially convenient set of descriptive physical principles around which can be assembled and organized the contents of all other academic fields.
Indeed, in a tradition consistent with Wiener5, von Bertalanffy6, Laszlo7, Kuhn8, and Miller9, among others, this writer has argued that, once equipped with a basic understanding of the general theory of systems, many or most learners should become able to transfer virtually 100% of everything learned in any one particular subject context into any other particular subject context(s) and into general usefulness10. However, very few faculty even at college level have any acquaintance with general systems theory, and virtually none at high school level, rendering problematic this most obvious solution for educational improvement in this topical context.
Yet the case for integrating the contents of the school or academic curriculum has not in any apparent regard diminished over the years — only the interest of current educators in that case. An encyclopedic review of what now amounts to a mere faded lesson in the history of education is not the intent of this brief. These few references were only to indicate that the case itself is respectable and was respected.
Further, we submit that this should still be a central issue to any professional who desires better methods of teaching and learning, or who seeks better educational outcomes. If such an integration, however arrived at, can
- reinforce prior learning;
- improve current and future learning;
- result in higher long-term retention of learning, and
- make what is learned more useful to subsequent pursuits,
then such an integration must become a central interest and concern for any quality-minded educator. Don’t go back to sleep on this one!!!
The Need
Traditionally, one factor especially has discouraged most teachers from taking an active interest in the integration of knowledge. Alas, much of the discussion of this topic has been beyond the convenient intellectual reach of most teachers, not only their students. Even for those of longer intellectual reach, more urgent pressures have usually diverted attention to concrete matters far more immediately understandable to school administrators, politicians, and fellow teachers.
That very urgency of other matters, though, now has most schools nearing the point of losing their support. To survive, they must begin to demonstrate improved educational outcomes. A summer school program is proposed here which can achieve most or all of the above desired objectives without teachers’ having to learn anything new or even having, in most instances, to change what they’re doing. We propose here a simple model program which could very greatly relieve the present vulnerability of schools to loss of support.
What We Propose
We propose here a simple way to enable students to begin creating their own integrated structure of knowledge, even where none of their teachers have any such integrated structure of their own! After even one such summer school session, students will attain a high-quality intellectual and aesthetic grasp of nearly all that they have been taught to date. The session’s students will build a strikingly high-quality command of the contents of current and subsequent courses of study. They will build and demonstrate a very high rate of long-term retention and render their schooling useful to their subsequent living.
Here is the core element enabling students to integrate their own knowledge:
| Integration Days Getting students to integrate all knowledge |
The advantage of intersessions and summer schools, for this purpose, is that they offer only one or two courses intensively over a period of but several weeks, instead of 5-6 courses at a time strung out over a semester. This greatly simplifies the initial task for students.
Begin with a pair of such courses. One course runs in the mornings and the other in the afternoons, as is usual in summer schools. Or, even better, over shorter, more intense intervals, run courses the whole day, one at a time. Announce, and anticipate, that such integrations will be attempted. Whether or not the individual teacher or professor refers to this expectation (though it is highly desired that he or she should do so), or indicates along the way various points relating to previously taken courses (that would be a very desirable practice in any case) — at the conclusion of each such pair of courses, feature an Integration Day.
For all that we’d like to see certain specified techniques used to teach these courses, these courses can be taught in the usual fashion, with the usual methods, by the usual teachers. What will make the difference will be the anticipation and use of these special Integration Day sessions at the conclusion of the course.
Part of the evaluation of the students’ degree of success in each course will be their observed performance during the processes of Integration Day, which will follow the final examination in each subject. Performance during Integration Day will be weighed as strongly in each student’s grade for that course as is the exam. Other than that, each teacher’s conduct of each course is not interfered with.
Discussion Format
Integration Day itself will feature use of the focused-interactive, classroom management techniques set forth in How To Be A Better Teacher, Today11. In an intensely focused, guided, interactive discussion format, students will pursue the task of tracing out relationships and structural similarities between the contents of the course just completed and other course subjects taken previously. Students will work successively in pairs, in threes and fours, in small buzz-groups, and in plenary larger groups converging as a symposium, and in personal documentation.
Repeat this same Integration Day procedure, for these same students, through a sequence of two or three courses. The second Integration Day will be at least ten times richer in its intellectual product than the first, and the third several times richer than the second, as an integrative context builds from course to course.
It would be helpful to have each teacher of those courses involved in supporting these integrative processes, rather than having these conducted entirely by special personnel who were prepared for the purpose. Those teachers and laymen who are willing to participate can be well prepared for their role in leading Integration Day, in less than one day’s briefing and training. With that preparation, even reasonably competent laymen can, if need be without help from teachers, escalate the students’ comprehension and integration through these Integration Day sessions. Still better outcomes would pertain if teachers were involved, especially from the beginning, supporting from time to time throughout the course the anticipation of a pending integration in their classes.
It is highly desirable to include many tape recorders and clerical services for transcribing select portions of the resulting recordings from Integration Day. This not only builds higher attention-levels in participating students: the budding intellectual integrations will emerge in forms useful for more than just those particular participating students. Some of these integrations will emerge in forms useful to other teachers and students beyond the boundaries of the model project.
To compare two just-completed courses at a time, if two at one time have been taken, will be more complex than simply relating the contents of one course to prior courses taken. It should, however, make the ongoing process more interesting as well as richer. And the two courses together will give students an initially broader frame of reference from which to draw their initial responses, making it easier for them to begin making such responses.
The task of each student, individually and in successively broader teams, is to recognize and highlight a structure of descriptive dynamic principles also found in previously studied courses from before this project. The format will go for fluency first and correctness later. First get students to begin generating a good many responses and to get into a productive flow of responses leading toward the desired integration. Even comparing the structured contents of two recent courses, or of the one recent course with one prior course at a time, will generate some useful initial responses on which to build. Do not leave matters there, however, since part of the objective is to integrate all previous and subsequent learning.
Summer Model
Summer schools are better for this purpose than are intersessions. At least two successive courses, or even two successive pairs of courses, can be taught and then cumulatively integrated, to allow the greater part of this intellectual and aesthetic integration to happen. Intersessions usually are not long enough to allow students the greater part of the benefit from this procedure, and at best could afford only one Integration Day, with no further cumulative benefits from successive such integrations.
After monitoring the gains from the summer model, schools may well consider re-engineering their wintertime programming as well, into successions of pairs of intensive courses followed by Integration Days. This winter application might be a problem, though, for teachers whose specialty is engaged for only one two-week session. This winter application would, however, have major advantage in providing opportunity to engage especially high-quality instructors from the community and from elsewhere in the educational system, without the expenses of committing them to a year’s full appointment. Many leading researchers and educators currently engaged or on sabbatical, and truly emeritus educators, could be available in such a project who would not be available to the school for a year’s commitment.
Outcomes of the Model Integration Days Project
- Very high long-term retention of course contents by students (and recovered retention of prior learnings).
- Very high quality understandings by students of course contents, past, current and subsequent.
- Very much higher quality of performance by students in courses taken subsequent to the project.
- A very much higher rate of usefulness of course contents, in the subsequent lives of the students, however measured. A far higher proportion of learning will transfer from initial learning context to other contexts.
- A body of integral understandings useful not only to the participating students, but as a supplemental resource for such teachers and other students as will find such matters to be of interest.
- Higher morale among students finding such gains in their experience, and among their parents, and eventually among the sources of support for the school.
We think the results of this project, if closely monitored and measured, will encourage further such investigations, and bring us considerably closer toward the educative ideal where, for each student, everything learned and everything encountered adds rich meaning to everything else ever learned or ever encountered, forever.
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References
- Oliver L. Reiser, The Integration of Knowledge (Boston: Porter-Sargent, Publishers, 1958)
↩︎ - Jerome S. Bruner, Toward a Theory of Instruction (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1966). See also his popular and more assertive The Process of Education (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962). For more on the Piaget-like theory of a core of codified experiences with which one processes his subsequent experiences, see Bruner’s private monograph, Processes of Cognitive Growth in Infancy, The Heinz Warner Lectures (Worcester, Mass: Clark University, 1963), as well as his more widely read work with Jacqueline J. Goodenough and George A. Austin, A Study of Thinking (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1953).
↩︎ - F.W. Ford and Laurence Pugno (eds.), The Structure of Knowledge and The Curriculum (Chicago: Rand McKnally and Co., 1964).
↩︎ - Win Wenger, Breakthroughs (Gaithersburg, MD: Project Renaissance, 1994). This document is now out of print, but similar discussions have been rendered at numerous points throughout this Project Renaissance website. Moreover, this extension of psychology’s Law of Effect to not only all living systems but to most complex non-living systems behavior is a core element in the writer’s forthcoming book, Toward A General Theory of Human Development, Learning, Creativity and Genius.
↩︎ - Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (New York: Doubleday-Anchor, 1961). Wiener developed the now generally accepted case that since all information is a form of energy and all structure is a form of energy, the laws of thermodynamics — which apply to all forms of energy — describe and account for the phenomena of information, information processes and structures. His physics was more pessimistic, though, than modern formulations, which recognize on various bases the negentropic or self-organizing characteristics of both the physical universe and these energy aspects thereof. (See Wenger’s The Progressive Strangification of Order for an example of this perspective.)
↩︎ - Ludwig von Bertalanffy, General Systems Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications (New York: George Braziller Press, 1966). His is one of the most widely accepted general expositions of general systems theory.
↩︎ - Irvin Laszlo, A Systems View of the World (New York: George Braziller Press, 1968). Using basic concepts of systems theory, thought and perception to view various societal issues.
↩︎ - Alfred Kuhn, The Study of Society: A Unified Approach (Homewood, IL: Irwin-Dorsey, 1964). An outstanding unified description of twenty-some specialized socio-behavioral fields through a cybernetic model closely related to the general systems model — and an overview of some larger issues of science; passim, but invaluable if you can obtain a copy.
↩︎ - James O. Miller, a series of papers on “Living Systems,” published in successive issues of Behavioral Science throughout much of the 1960s and 1970s.
↩︎ - Win Wenger, A General Theory of Systems: One Man’s Window on the Universe (Gaithersburg, MD: Library of the Republic of the Sciences, Psychegenics Press, 1987).
↩︎ - Win Wenger, How To Be A Better Teacher, Today – While REDUCING Your Workload! (Gaithersburg, MD: Project Renaissance, 1994, second edition). This is an expansion of the Dynamic Format procedures abstracted from several and various creative group problem-solving systems. These and other creative methods revolve around modern versions of Socratic method, enabling people to develop their perceptions by describing them within an appropriate focus.
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