Educator Mary Poplin Hears Sound of Students

Mary Poplin says the tree of learning is dying from root rot, and the way to give it new life is to let teachers teach what children want to learn.

She says two things are choking the life out of American schools: “an excess of administrators and the teaching methods they demand.”

Get rid of most school administrators, and give teachers the chance to teach a new way; that will make education worthy of its name, said Poplin, an associate professor and director of teacher education at Claremont Graduate School and a frequent contributor to professional journals.

Her proposal: “We have to allow teachers to create their own programs rather than following a script that someone else gives them,” and “we have to attach what the teachers want to teach to what the students care about: their own language, their own problems, whatever they care about. And we have to teach more the way that children actually learn, which is from the whole to the parts instead of from the parts to the whole.”

So, instead of sentences about Mary or John chasing Spot, instead of word problems about the number of beans in a jar, instead of essays about Lindbergh’s flight to Paris in 1927 and how cold George Washington’s troops’ feet got at Valley Forge in 1778, Poplin would have students writing notes to each other and analyzing them, writing letters to friends or public figures about situations that concern them, solving word problems about spending their allowance or the statistical chances for their football team to have a winning season or a class officer to win reelection.

“There is a big difference between learning grammar and spelling from a canned sentence like ‘The cat chased the dog’ and learning it from a sentence you want to write to your girlfriend, or a sentence about something that excites you,” Poplin said.

Folly to Teach From the Specific

She feels it’s folly to teach from the specific to the general, which is the way almost all curricula are designed today.

That is not the natural way to learn, Poplin contends. Using writing as an example, she said, “We find in our studies that there is absolutely no reason to teach grammar, spelling, capitalization before the students are writing at least five sentences of their own, even if they are all punctuated as a single sentence. Until then there is no reason in the child’s head to learn to punctuate . . . every day kids have to fix grammar in sentences that they can’t even read.”

Fifteen years ago, when she was a 20-year-old second-grade teacher in her hometown of Wichita Falls, Tex., Mary Simpson Poplin quit to become a special education teacher “because there was more freedom there.”

She kept seeking freedom to develop her teaching style and skills as a special education curriculum director in Texas, an educational consultant in North Dakota, a director of two associations for learning-disabled children in Texas, a college instructor in Kentucky, Texas and Kansas and a lobbyist for learning-disabled children in Texas before coming to Claremont.

“Administrators take schools and divide them into little squares,” Poplin said. “And each of the administrators only sees that little piece for which he or she is responsible, and then loads that little piece onto teachers, and all those pieces overload the teachers.”

The trouble with this excess administrative baggage, Poplin said, is that it prevents both teachers and students from “thinking for themselves.”

She believes that teachers become mechanical “rabbits,” leading student “dogs” around a closed, prescribed track.

Poplin said the solution to the problem is as self-evident as it is difficult to achieve: permit teachers to teach the way they want, permit students to learn the way they want.

The problem is spiraling out of control, Poplin said, observing that “it’s self-perpetuating . . . administrators get really hung up on test scores, and then create managerial positions to teach the teachers how to get the kids’ test scores up. But they are really scripting the teachers, not teaching them. They literally give the teachers a script of how to teach.”

She observed that, “Nobody ever deals with what children are thinking or feeling. What administrators really want kids to do is respond with the ‘right’ answer, which is generally the one in the teachers’ guide . . . You’re not supposed to think for yourself.”

Not everyone buys Poplin’s educational philosophy in its entirety. To find meaningful opposition requires no more than a stroll from her office across a courtyard to visit Paul Albrecht, Claremont Graduate School’s executive vice president and executive dean, and incidentally, Poplin’s boss.

Respect and Admiration

After emphasizing his great respect and admiration for Poplin, and in large measure crediting her with doubling the size of the graduate school’s teacher-education program since last year, Albrecht called her educational philosophy “an exciting one to which teachers resonate,” but he expressed serious reservations about it.

“I have some strong opinions based on a long time in higher education,” said the administrator who has made his living in education for 33 years.

He agreed with Poplin’s contention that testing drives curricula, but noted that, “My impression is that the current emphasis on testing is a rather recent phenomenon. In so far as I am aware of it, it’s recent enough so that it can’t really be the principle determiner of the teacher’s role in the classroom.”

Albrecht observed that the reason for rigid testing is “the schools were not being guided by clear performance objectives, and the performance was slack.”

He stressed the need for students to develop strong technological skills in an increasingly technological society. “Historically,” he said, “the people who have emphasized the whole child have generally not been those who have had a strong skill emphasis.”

However, Howard Adelman, a UCLA psychology professor and an expert on what causes children to do well in school, agreed with much of what Poplin said.

“But it’s not just Poplin I agree with,” he said. “She is saying essentially what John Dewey said so very long ago.

“I think there are two different things that are killing us in education. First, that teachers do teach to satisfy the tests. And second, that the essence of good learning has to do with what moves youngsters toward learning as opposed to pushing them as we end up doing so often when we ask them to learn about things that have no interest value to them.”

‘Most Creative Teachers Leave’

Poplin noted that Adelman had put his finger on two of the main reasons children and teachers are passive about school. “The most creative teachers leave and go to another profession, and that leaves the less creative ones, who just acquiesce and ‘retire’ on the job. And the kids, because their curriculum is based on objective tests, learn they just have to respond, not to think, invent or create . . . kids are supposed to be passive. They are supposed to sit and take in what’s out there.”

What children are supposed to be depends on who’s doing the supposing. Poplin passionately believes that the American education system can be saved if students and teachers get deeply involved in and excited by the system.

Poplin grants that what she advocates is a big order. Not only does it require revamping the entire American education system, it also means substantially more work for teachers.

Basically, teachers would be tailoring lesson plans to their students instead of tailoring their students to canned plans available today.

But testing students for whom lessons are specifically tailored would present a serious problem at the secondary school level, said Clyde Fawcett, principal of King City Secondary School in King City, Ontario, Canada.

Fawcett, who recently attended a seminar where Poplin taught, said, “I admire Dr. Poplin’s excellent presentation and I plan to search for ways to implement parts of her educational philosophy. But I find it difficult to understand how we could use it in regular classes.

“Assessment is necessary, and she did not put much emphasis on assessment . . . as if testing wasn’t really important. Testing is important. Universities are crying for marks. In addition, the universities are giving their own tests, and there has to be some correlation between their test results and the secondary schools’ test results. I think there would be difficulty in correlating the two.” However, some administrators believe that Poplin’s teaching method is compatible with current testing procedures at both elementary and high school levels.

High School-to-College Transition

Clare Eckhardt this year became principal of Claremont’s Sycamore Elementary School, which cooperates with Claremont Graduate School in a program using methods Poplin supports. Before coming to Sycamore, Eckhardt spent nine years counseling teen-agers and adults at Claremont Adult School, where her work involved the transition of students from high school to college.

She observed that the primary yardsticks by which universities measure applicants’ academic qualifications are high school grades and the nationally administered Scholastic Aptitude Tests.

There is no reason to change those yardsticks, Eckhardt said, noting that “I think universities could use the same assessment procedures they are using now” if elementary and high schools taught by Poplin’s methods. In fact, Eckhardt said, she thinks students will score better on Scholastic Aptitude Tests if Poplin’s approach is taken.

“I don’t think that approach is diametrically opposed to more traditional education,” the principal added. “I think it is a question of balance. While we involve and engage students in an active way, we can also spend time and effort on some of the traditional skill building, but always relating it back to the context.”

Low Point in Morale

Most teachers, Poplin argued, would consider the extra work required to tailor schoolwork to schoolchildren a small price to pay for the extra satisfaction it would bring. “Teachers right now are at a really low point in terms of morale,” she said. “Part of the problem is the bureaucracy, part of it is that teachers know what they are doing doesn’t work.”

Despite her vehement insistence that teaching methods must change if education is to be successful, Poplin knows that her recommendations are not good for everyone.

“I think there are some teachers who won’t do this method well,” she admitted. “And they should choose another one that they are comfortable with. I find my recommendations better for the more mature teachers than the beginning teachers because the more mature ones have something in their heads to tie it to. And they know the existing method doesn’t work.”