How Learning with Aloha Evolved

The Learning with Aloha author helped create one of the first public school programs for “educationally and emotionally handicapped” children in California during the mid-1960’s. He then joined the faculty in the Child Study Unit, Department of Pediatrics, at the University of California, San Francisco, participating in multi-disciplinary team evaluations of children with learning and other problems (1968*). Then, a multi-disciplinary team that included highly skilled teachers, a pediatrician, neurologist, and child psychiatrist, was taken one month at a time into many public elementary schools in order to better share information and ideas with educators on the front lines (1972). The team and school staffs learned from one another primarily by means of “teaching triads:” A child from each class who was having difficulty taught the teacher and the specialists how the child learned best. The child taught by suggesting ideas and by responding to the adults’ experimental teaching efforts. The teachers and specialists then met as a total group once a week to discuss their learnings. This proved to be an extremely valuable learning method for all concerned, and tests showed that the children made marked progress both academically and interpersonally.

One of the things the team learned was the importance and difficulty of being a school principal. A principal is the “hub of the wheel” for a school, the facilitator or inhibitor of relationships among teachers, parents, and students. It was apparent that every school had an enormous pool of talents and good intentions among its teachers, but they had great difficulty in sharing their ideas and moral support in most schools because of physical walls, bell schedules, and other things that kept them apart. However, if a principal helped to develop ways to enable teachers to somehow get together periodically to share ideas and moral support, staff morale and productivity, as well as student growth, greatly increased within a year or less. Coupled with the need to develop ways for teachers to interact was the realization that principals were often isolated from their peers and many were undergoing a great deal of job stress.

To address these needs, an experiment was initiated in which ten elementary school principals from various districts around the San Francisco Bay Area volunteered to meet for a few hours at least once a month, rotating the meetings among their own schools for their own mutual growth and support. Although the basic learning mode was “peer teaching” with their own learning agendas, the principals were asked to focus on helping each other learn ways to enhance student growth by means of increased teacher sharing of ideas and support in their schools. This simple experiment was very successful in producing educator and student growth, including growth among students with learning problems (1974). The approach was cited as a national model by the Council of Chief State School Officers (1980).

The fostering of mutual respect seemed to be a central theme among the various successful ways that principals developed with their faculties and staffs, and periodic self-evaluation seemed to be one good way to foster mutual respect. So, an experiment was conducted in one Hawaii public school district in which K-12 students, staff, and principals all periodically evaluated themselves on their own mutual-respect behaviors, such as good listening. These behaviors had been validated with school, business, church, and government leaders in Hawaii and internationally. The approach proved to be quite effective in stimulating both good relationships and academic achievement (1985).

During the foregoing experiment, it became increasingly apparent that teachers who were frequently engaging students in cross-age learning were producing particularly good gains among students, both socially and academically. Therefore, in-depth efforts in California were initiated to see how well school-wide and consistent cross-age learning helped teachers to exchange ideas and support as a means for increasing student growth. One of the tools developed to facilitate cross-age learning was a Spanish-English picture vocabulary book, which proved to be successful as an “off-the-shelf” starter tool (2000). As reported on page 4 of this guide, school-wide cross-age learning is very successful and self-sustaining in low-income as well as more advantaged schools. Even in the midst of No Child Left Behind pressures, teachers who frequently use cross-age learning have produced higher test scores, on average, than teachers who did not engage students in cross-age learning or who did so infrequently (2006).

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Lesson Plans:
Teamwork - Language Arts - ESL - Mathematics - Science - Social Studies - The Arts -PE