Larry Cuban - In How Teachers Taught (1984, 1993) and Hugging the Middle (2009), I collected 9,000 urban and rural classroom reports between 1890-2005 on common features of teaching. I examined how teachers organized classroom space, grouped students, and structured tasks for students after repeated progressive efforts to alter traditional teacher pedagogy occurred in the 20th century. I found the following classroom patterns.
Since the 1890s, the social organization of the classroom has become informal. In the early 20th century, dress-clad women and tie-wearing men facing rows of 50-plus bolted down desks controlled every move of students. They gave permission for students to leave their seat. They required students to stand when reciting from the textbook or answering a question. Teachers often scowled, reprimanded, and paddled students for misbehaving.
Over the decades, however, classroom organization and teacher behavior slowly changed. By 2010, few classrooms had rows of immovable desks. Classrooms were now filled with tables and movable desks, particularly in the early grades, so students faced one another. Jean-wearing teachers drinking coffee smiled often at their classes. Students went to a pencil sharpener or elsewhere in the room without asking for the teacher’s permission. The dread and repression of the late 19th century classroom marked often by the swish of a paddle and a teacher’s sneer slowly gave way, decade by decade, to classrooms where teachers were more informal in language and dress, and had a light touch in controlling unacceptable behavior.
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1 comment:
Of course such pedagogy must have worked since those students, my grandparents' generation, became the force behind the progressive era and the new deal. They read Henry Adams. They believed in education. Unlikely they would have tolerated our current slide into fascism. They lived in an uncrowded rural-bssed democracy.
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