Thirty Years of Progressive Education—Here, Right under our Noses

Calgary’s most unfortunately best-kept secret is that a progressive school has been living in its own small niche in this city for 30 years, largely unknown. This school began in November of 1979 by a single teacher with a dream, and two lone students. Banbury Crossroads it was called. A. S. Neill, who wrote Summerhill, provided her with the initial seed of inspiration to re-think “school”. Neill believed that children have a right to be happy, and that they should be able to direct the course of their own lives, as long as they don’t interfere with the rights of others. This concept is at the root of mutual respect and democracy itself. That is why this type of education is sometimes called “democratic education”. Summerhill still exists in England, and is now associated with similar schools across Europe. Banbury wasn’t only inspired by Summerhill, however. John Holt was another major influence. He wrote many books in the spirit of objectively examining the process of learning for children both within schools and outside them. He is perhaps best known for starting the homeschooling movement with his newsletter, Growing without Schooling. When Banbury Crossroads began, its founder started from scratch, in terms of creating an environment that would work best for children and adults to come together in the pursuit of learning. In the end, the structure used in the Modern British Infant System, called open classroom or integrated day, was chosen for Banbury. This choice of model was due to its emphasis upon individuality, student pacing, relationships, movement, self-responsibility, learning based upon inquiry and projects, and ultimately, student autonomy. For thirty years now, this progressive school has been developing and providing very special learning experiences for the children in Calgary. It’s time that everyone knew this.

As part of the educational scene in Alberta, Banbury now plays a unique role. Its atmosphere is engaged and peaceful; its students free to be themselves and to prosper in multi-aged classes of no more than 12 students. The small class sizes allow teachers to really know their students, and to provide socially adept role-modelling and intensive individual and small-group instruction. The environment is designed to be familial—like an extended family or village that is devoted to learning. The values that parents live by in their homes are also honoured there. In addition to providing for physical needs, parents give their children visibility, affection, stimulation, safety, encouragement for talents, reasoning skills and communication strategies. Banbury values the same approach to its students.

Individuality is one driving theme that underlies all aspects of the school. Students progress through the curriculum at their own pace, and with respect given for their personal interests. Teaching is not lecture-based; rather, it is tutorial-based. This is a more effective way to engage learners—when discussions are relevant and personal. Time management and organizational skills develop as students take responsibility for their own education. Since children are treated as people with hopes, dreams, fears and feelings, and since teachers have time to help their students with emotional and social challenges, healthy relationships are more possible between children and adults. Under these conditions, trust grows.

Opportunity and exploration are other underlying themes of life at Banbury. Students are given many and various opportunities to really explore their world, as they use their innate curiosity and energy to master their environment. Since one purpose of education is to draw people out from themselves and into the world around them, it makes sense that we not close our youngest citizens up within four window-scarce walls, with only pictures and words to describe that real world outside. The community needs to be part of the learning equation.

At Banbury, the community is touched not just through field trips and cultural excursions, but also through frequent volunteerism and contributive internships. Every Junior and Senior High student participates one day per week off-site at various businesses and services. They design projects to connect the learning they pursue in the classroom with the needs of living in the real world. They develop a sense of altruism and purpose, and the buoyancy that comes from working side-by-side with adults who care about their work. This allows young people not only to explore career opportunities, but to extend their intrinsic motivations and interests in a concrete way. Learning is not just about reading and writing, although it certainly does contain those necessary communication tools. Learning is also about seeing the world as a scientist, a mathematician, a sociologist, a psychologist, a political scientist, and so on. To actually do this work is much more impactful than just reading about other people doing it.

Young people need to learn concentration and persistence and the power of passion. At Banbury, such goals are held in high esteem, because over the years, it has been very obvious that students who are raised in such a fashion become effectual people. Their social responsiveness is greater, because they have been able to truly care about the small number of people they spend each day with, and because they have learned to communicate and negotiate. Having lived with the idea that the best reason should win, they are able to analyze situations so that they can make better decisions. Our graduates are quietly confident about their accomplishments and their ability to learn more. They are the future entrepreneurs and service providers who will spread, like ripples, across our Canadian culture. They will change the way that the world works. People should know about this school. It’s about time.


- Diane Swiatek
www.banburycrossroads.com

Banbury Crossroads School

Here is a video on Banbury Crossroads School that was produced by Shaw Cable TV and aired on the community channel in Calgary.

Relate and Communicate

When my Mother died recently, the whole process of waiting with baited breath at the hospital, reassuring family members, and coping with grief reinforced my belief that relationships may be the most significant element of our lives. When we are toddlers, we need our parents and families to acknowledge our presence with respect, to encircle us with hugs and kisses, to assist us with learning about the world around us, and to protect us from elements we are too young to realize may hurt us. When we are children, we need parents and other caring people to provide healthy role models and meaningful environmental stimulation in order to grow into self-assured, strong, competent and socially-responsive adults. When we are in our middle adult years, we need relationships to create the synergy that is necessary for cooperative ventures. Together we build homes, high-rises and bridges. Together we organize musical and artistic events, humanitarian projects and businesses. We need to collaborate to create healthy marriages and functional families. When we are old, we rely on relationships to help us cope with the disabilities that old age brings, we thrive if we still have social gatherings with friends and family, and we remember our adventures with people in the past. We are social beings. Relationships are crucial to a life well lived. Every thing that we accumulate is not taken to the grave. How we relate to others, how we influence the growth of others, how we make an impact on the world around us—this is what really matters in the end.

Therefore, it makes sense for us to pay attention to the quality of those relationships that we create every day. If we try to live in an aware manner, becoming involved with our moments, and evaluating our experiences, then we have more hope of creating relationships that nurture us and that we may value. A relationship isn’t something static that you can grasp in your hand, like an object. A relationship is really more like a verb—it exists only in its creation and maintenance. Actions build relationships. It takes reciprocal actions of loyalty, kindness, patience, empathy, honesty, and unselfishness to create the atmosphere of mutual trust that is the major underlying component of any good relationship. With trust and integrity, we can make assumptions about the positive intentions of others, so that our interactions may flow easily throughout both pleasant associations and problem solving.

A relationship is like a river of communication. There may be boulders in the way, but water can flow around them. Moreover, just as river water can be pristine or polluted, communication can be clear or polluted. Water is best clear, and communication is also best clear, since the truth will out in the end, anyway. Unambiguous communication allows us to realize what we have to deal with, and to feel comfortable with others. Polluted communication is the cause of much misery in the world. The older I get, the more I realize how polluted communication leads to power mongering, fear, missed opportunities, misunderstanding, discrimination, and insecurity. People need to communicate their feelings, thoughts and needs openly to their family members, at the very least. When people spend every day with co-workers, they need to be able to communicate shared goals and methods, and personal requirements. For every interaction, both parties need to respect themselves and others, and to reflect this respect in their words and actions. Communication is not just verbal. So, a healthy relationship is made of a flow of never-ending constructive interactions. Adults need to nurture those who are weaker than themselves, including children, making sure that their needs are taken care of, too. They may need to read between the lines and check out their guesswork. They need to care.

Communication is usually learned by example. Formal instruction in the home is usually limited to reminders to say polite words, to avoid swear words, to watch the tone of voice if it becomes belligerent or sarcastic, to remember words of apology and forgiveness, and other small details. However, the topic of communication is immense. Whole courses at university are devoted to this topic, both in psychology and sociology. Most people could do with some objective evaluation of their own communication techniques and patterns. We have all seen children in public getting scolded or punished in impatient, uncomfortable and disrespectful ways. Communication is not just about how we say something. It is also about what we have to say, and how we interpret the situations in our lives.

We have a lot to learn, as a society, about this topic. Every day in the news, we see evidence of communication going awry. Politics, criminal law, domestic strife and community issues all display examples of communication that either didn’t happen, or got twisted, or revealed selfishness, or got stopped in its tracks before proceeding to resolution. However, even when truthful communication reveals basic discord between people’s beliefs and values, good communication skills used by participants and mediators can lead to an honest search for solutions. I recently read a quote about how war is the ultimate failure of imagination to solve problems. So, communication is the means whereby people can live together in harmony.

Because Banbury Crossroads School is so devoted to the emotional and social growth of our students, we support the use of good communication by teachers and amongst our students. We have realized long ago that parents also appreciate input on this topic, seeing benefit within their families and marriages through learning new options for dealing with discord. Therefore, several years ago, we began offering P.E.T. (Parent Effectiveness Training) classes at least once a year. This course is based on the work of Dr. Thomas Gordon, who was nominated several times for a Nobel Peace Prize. Judy Arnall, herself the author of Parenting Without Distress, taught most of them over the years, although she has also recommended a few other presenters, such as Donna Joy.

The next time we are offering this course will be next autumn. These sessions are always extremely well-attended, with the class size being limited to 10 to 15 participants. We invite any parent who wishes to extend their understanding of how to listen, how to complain, how to problem solve, and how to deal with values issues, to join us next fall for this valuable opportunity. Please call the school for information at 270-7787. If we all learn and deal better with the people around us, we will inevitably change the way relationships work in the future. The investment of time is worth it!

By Diane Swiatek, Principal, Banbury Crossroads School

http://banburycrossroads.com/homepage.html

How to Turn a Student On: The Passion Puzzle Piece

Educating a child is like putting together a puzzle. There are a lot of pieces that need to fit together to create the whole, coherent picture that we are aiming for. When beginning any puzzle, we may have a difficult time knowing where to start. There are so many possibilities. The edges, the limits, are not clear. We try starting with a simple corner, to give ourselves a direction. Sometimes, a piece doesn’t look like it fits—until it is looked at from another angle. And finally, all the pieces need some linking to the other pieces, so they can hold together. Education is a complex process.

It is very helpful for parents and teachers to think deeply about this process, in order to do it justice. One of the crucial pieces in the puzzle is the intelligence of each individual child. Malcolm Gladwell, in Outliers: The Story of Success, describes how intelligence is, to some degree, innate, yet social savvy, the element that allows intelligence to blossom, is knowledge, a set of skills and attitudes that are learned within our families. He quotes a study by sociologist Annette Lareau, who followed twelve families of different social strata and focused on their parenting styles. She discovered that there were only two parenting philosophies, divided along class lines. Wealthier parents were heavily involved in their children’s free time, offering classes and activities to develop their children’s talents and interests. They talked to their children about relationships and advised them to speak up for themselves. These middle-class parents discussed issues with their children, reasoning with them. They didn’t just issue commands. They expected their children to negotiate and question adults in positions of authority. They intervened on behalf of their children. Lareau called this middle-class parenting style “concerted cultivation”, describing it as an attempt to actively assess and foster a child’s talents, opinions and skills. Poor parents, by contrast, tended to follow a strategy of “accomplishment of natural growth”. They saw their responsibility to care for their children, but to let them grow and develop on their own. These styles were not judged as morally better or worse. In fact, the poorer children were sometimes perceived as better behaved, less whiny and more creative in making use of their own time, and they had a well-developed sense of independence. However, concerted cultivation had enormous advantages in a practical sense. The middle-class children exposed to more cultural opportunities could cope with shifting sets of experience, interact comfortably with adults and speak up when needed. They learned to customize whatever environment they were in, to suit their best purposes. They were more alert, poised and even attractive. The working-class and poor children, however, were characterized by “an emerging sense of distance, distrust, and constraint.” They could be quiet and submissive, having low expectations of success. The key learning from this study is that the skills to interact with authority figures in the larger community are learned, not inherited. Children need help from adults that provides, in effect, a cultural advantage. Even geniuses, Gladwell explains, need such assistance to develop their potential. They need their homes filled with books, and adults in their lives who are committed to the pursuit of knowledge themselves. They need “a community around them that prepare[s] them properly for the world”. Parents design their piece of the education puzzle, and this design affects the finished puzzle.

Schools are also significant pieces of the puzzle, since they are communities that provide resources and challenges to children. They can enhance or stifle the efforts of parents. Schools’ philosophies and practices are not written in stone, and there is wide variety even within Calgary for parents to pick from. Recently, a contingent from our school, Banbury Crossroads, headed to Providence, Rhode Island, to visit the Met, a Big Picture School. Our goal was to speak the same language with like-minded educators, a new experience for us, as our school is unique in Alberta. We discovered many attitudes in common, and realized that an affiliation would be reasonable. Both Big Picture Schools (which have received funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) and Banbury Crossroads have examined the education puzzle and have filled in blank spaces with aspects that have been commonly missing. One of these elements is the idea of dealing with students individually, within small tutorial classes. Another is helping students to accept responsibility for their own learning. Still another is assisting students to create connections within their outside community through volunteerism, project-inspired learning and internships.

Teachers in schools can borrow the best from both parenting approaches described by Lareau. They can be active participants in students’ cultural lives, showing intellectual, emotional and practical interest in their endeavours. They can encourage deep exploration of academic topics. They can promote effective communication, negotiation, problem solving, and critical dialogue about ideas and values. In addition, schools can encourage independence and self-organization in the pursuit of student autonomy. This requires a balance between adult interference and laissez-faire. Balance provides the linking between all the other elements. The balance is necessary in order to allow students to discover their own passions, talents and interests.

This is one of the most important pieces of the education puzzle that has been missing for thousands of students across North America: the piece called passion. Students are much better off if they leave high school with a clear idea of their passions, their talents, their interests. If careers and professions are based on personal passion, practitioners will find the experience to be fulfilling. Intrinsic passion provides the stimulus and energy for people to endure the work and tedious aspects inherent in any field of endeavour, so that they can put in their ten thousand hours of practice to achieve mastery. If we really want to turn students on to the process of discovery, to the joy of studying the world around them, then we need to help them discover their passions, and then employ them in a useful fashion. Confidence and a sense of purpose and usefulness are fine attributes to carry out into the world beyond school.

The truth is that the education puzzle is really the puzzle of life. We are all building our own puzzles continually, year after year, because we cannot avoid learning. Each puzzle is beautiful if it is built with passion, commitment and social responsiveness, and if it is painted in our own unique colors.


By Diane Swiatek, Principal and Founder of Banbury Crossroads School

http://banburycrossroads.com/homepage.html