Learning to the Beat of Their Own Drummers : Education: Turning Point, a multi-year program in use at seven San Diego schools, lets students find the structure that works best for them.

Say you walked into a typical elementary school classroom and saw some students leaning against the window counter while reading their books, a few children on the floor painting, still others lounging in bean bag chairs with assignments, three or four talking with each other at their desks, and one or two walking back and forth to the pencil sharpener every 10 minutes.

The traditional reaction would be one of horror at the seeming chaos. How can there be learning going on with so few children seated properly at their desks to face the teacher at the front of the class?

Yet more and more, a visitor to San Diego city schools these days might encounter such classroom situations, as well as teachers who defend the scenes as anything but out of control.

Some 30 teachers from seven schools are volunteers in a multi-year program to give them practical ideas on how to make use of the fact that students learn in different ways. Now in its second year, the program helps teachers develop a bigger “bag of tricks,” especially to reach the 25% or so of students in a typical class who seem never to connect with the material or the teacher.

By realizing that some students learn best by sitting still for hours on end, but that others need music or the help of colleagues or a drink of water every 20 minutes, teachers can also avoid lowering expectations for those who don’t fit the particular learning style that the teachers themselves probably grew up with.

Under this new system, a teacher labels the student who gets up five times to sharpen a pencil not as disruptive but rather as someone who needs mobility--to move around the room occasionally and shake out the cobwebs.

“I’m really, really enthusiastic about this effort,” San Diego city schools Supt. Tom Payzant said. He believes the program, known as Turning Point, can play a major role in boosting self-esteem and academic achievement, particularly for the increasing number of nonwhite students who now form a majority in the nation’s eighth-largest urban school system.

For several years, educators such as Payzant have pointed out that the traditional school system, and the methods to train teachers, continue to be centered on students coming to class with white, middle-class values, despite profound multiethnic and socioeconomic changes in the San Diego Unified School District.

Testing and college-preparatory data shows that large numbers of African-American and Latino students do poorly in urban schools here and across the nation.

“If we can get children becoming more engaged in learning by having our teachers more engaged in knowing the various learning styles of children, then there’s a tremendous positive effect on the classroom climate and on achievement,” Payzant said.

The teachers in Turning Point are equally enthusiastic, especially because it provides concrete suggestions and support both from special resource teachers and from their colleagues.

During a special six-week summer school session run by program teachers, only 10% of the 181 elementary students enrolled dropped out--a small number by summer school standards--and of 26 students given pre- and post-school reading tests, 73% showed reading gains of at least two months or more.

“I realize that when kids can work together on a math assignment, for example, they’ll approach me more easily and say, ‘We don’t understand,’ rather than being afraid to say something (individually) in front of the whole class and end up going home not understanding,” said Harrison Boyd, a fifth-grade teacher at Fulton Elementary School in Paradise Hills. “And a child can tell another child in a way sometimes that makes more sense than what I can do as a teacher.”

Boyd, in his third year of teaching after many years as a businessman, said education needs to change faster.

“In business, you naturally swallow your pride to fix or improve something,” he said, reflecting how program teachers have examined their own assumptions about learning by thinking about how they best worked as students.

Sixth-graders of Boyd’s colleague Valeria Davis were sprawled all over the room the other day writing letters to U.S. troops in the Middle East, causing some consternation on the part of her principal--not yet totally convinced by Turning Point--who looked in on the class and wondered about the noise level.

“But the fact is that I got 27 good letters written by the students,” Davis said.

Ruth Rappaport-Power, one of eight teachers in the program from Green Elementary in San Carlos, said she is “now reaching some kids who haven’t been at their top potential before.”

“Last year, I’d scold them by saying, ‘Put your bottom in your seat and do your work!’ But now I let them work standing up, lying down, if that is what works best,” she said.

Other teachers now let students have water bottles on their desk if they choose, and provide crackers and other snacks the children can have whenever they want. Some offer students the chance to work alone with music headphones, or simply wear headsets to eliminate general classroom hubbub that otherwise would distract them from their work.

“The students understand that what we’re trying to do is help them work in the best way possible,” said Carol Benesch, a first-grade teacher at Green whose own son has a teacher in the program.

“He’s so pleased,” Benesch said. “He told me, ‘We get to drink whenever we want to drink, and if we want to walk around, we can!’ I think it’s a great way to establish good rapport with many kids.”

If Benesch or fellow teacher Susan Maze-Murray has a student not reading well, they now sit down with the student and ask about ways to get into a book, rather than making decisions without involving the child.

“We’ll talk, for instance, about partner reading, of pairing off with a friend, or trying a book in a subject they find interesting,” Benesch said.

Added Maze-Murray: “What we’re doing is allowing choices and responsibility-taking by the students, which makes learning for them more enjoyable.”

At Green, a physical-fitness magnet school that draws large numbers of black children who are bused to the school, the program helps teachers make the non-resident students more comfortable in an environment outside their own neighborhood.

By letting students find a way to fit into the classroom, “we allow them to have a real home at the school,” teacher Minia Goodwell said. She even has her fifth-grade students write about how they think they learn best.

But what the teachers make a point of saying is that they are not going back to the schools of the 1960s, in which some educators gave up control of the classroom and many students failed to learn. The guiding principle of the Turning Point program isn’t whether the students are seated and quiet, or whether they are lively and noisy, but whether they are learning the material.

“When I assign something, it’s still due the next day, and we call parents even more now, in terms of holding kids responsible for their choices,” Green sixth-grade teacher Sandi Bennett said. During the special summer school, parents were called at least once a week to follow up on techniques.

“We have boundaries, we’re not without structure,” Tony Jackson of Fulton said. “I’ll talk with a student and agree to try something, but if the results aren’t what we want, we’re going to try another way.”

The bottom line is that students know they are expected to learn, he said.

The two resource specialists who coordinate Turning Point see pluses in the way program teachers have adapted to their own classroom needs the wide range of techniques available.

“It’s not that we’re going in and trying to revolutionize everything,” Angela Bass said, emphasizing that the program uses many ideas already being tried individually in San Diego and elsewhere by teachers, and groups the techniques under the “umbrella theories” of learning styles and teacher expectations.

“I like to think we’re reaching the untapped potential of many teachers and students,” Bass said. “Hopefully, teachers initially find a piece that works and then expand from that.”

Her colleague Barbara Balser cautioned that the changes do not come easily for many teachers.

“That’s why the first successes are so important, because teachers will relax a little as students start to improve academically,” she said.

“I’ve learned that when you just can’t reach a kid, it’s not that I’m doing everything wrong, or that the kid is doing everything wrong, but rather it’s ‘What are we not doing quite right?’ and that’s a big change,” said Jackson of Fulton.

The program is being gradually expanded this year to seven new schools, under funding made possible as a result of a multi-year, multimillion-dollar federal grant to assist in integration-related instruction.

Teacher participation remains voluntary, although both Balser and Bass hope other teachers will begin to wonder why certain “good things” are happening in those noisier classrooms.

Some teachers find it difficult to accept a room full of children sharing ideas, while others initially gasp at the increased noise level, though Bass prefers to call it a higher “energy level.”

“One teacher felt it would be cheating if students worked on math problems together,” Bass said. “But when it came time to test, both students showed they knew the material much, much better than they would have otherwise . . . and such cooperation is part of (society’s) work culture.”