Two Rooms With a View on Learning and Teaching

Rooms 34 and 48 at Logan Elementary School each house first-grade classes of Spanish-speaking children from Los Angeles’ core. Each has number and color charts, computers and chalkboards, four clusters of desks and chairs.

The only hint of a difference between the two is that in Room 34 all those chairs and desks are filled and in Room 48 they are not.

But beneath the surface, fundamental change is afoot. The Echo Park campus is straddling the line between past and future for California elementary schools, with five of its first- and second-grade classrooms already scaled back to 20 or fewer pupils under a new state incentive program, the other nine still packed with up to 32.

And as a recent school day unfolded, what at first seemed a simple question of furniture evolved into a demonstration of dramatically different teaching and learning opportunities.

With 29 fidgety students, teacher Esperanza Olvera has to adhere to a strict schedule and spend much of her time ensuring crowd control. Upstairs in Room 48, teacher Barbara Goya was able to loosen up a little. With just 18 students, she could let the 6-year-olds rove at will among workstations.

“When I’ve had 30 or 32 kids, I would never let them do this,” Goya said, motioning toward two students moving from the puzzle table to the computer terminal. “They would be out of control! I just couldn’t give them this freedom.”

Logan Elementary is one of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s class reduction pioneers, but dozens more campuses are expected to follow suit when classes resume this week, followed by another wave next week.

Some educators maintain that the state’s $971-million campaign to improve reading and math scores by cutting classes to 20 may not produce the desired results. Real academic gains, they say, are not seen until class enrollment falls closer to 10.

Those critics cite an extensive study by an Arizona State University professor, which found barely measurable test score gains when classes of 30 students were cut to 20. Below that, performance improved with each fewer student.

Reducing classes by a third “means a one-third increase in cost, [while] kids gain a couple of percentile ranks,” said the professor, Gene V. Glass, who reviewed 75 research studies dating back to 1900. “Nobody who makes decisions on achievement grounds is going to get excited about that.”

But the teachers of Rooms 34 and 48 beg to differ.

“My husband asked me if 20 will really be different,” Olvera said, surveying her crowded classroom. “I told him with 30 now, when two are absent, there’s a difference.”

The Past

As a public schoolteacher for more than a decade, in Los Angeles and Montebello, Olvera has only known large classes. She makes do, and offers amazingly creative lessons inside Room 34, using approaches that have earned her status as one of the district’s mentor teachers.

But she sees the cost of crowded classrooms. A third of the way through the first-grade year at her year-round school, only one student is beginning to read.

She has too many children to give any of them enough personal attention, she said. One of her favorite ways to teach reading and writing is to have students write or draw daily in interactive journals. But the “interactive” part depends on her daily responses to their efforts--sort of like a teacher/student pen pal arrangement--and she can only get to a few of them each day.

Pressing open the word-filled diary pages of Ernie Ibarra, the only student who has learned to read, she said: “If I could get to 10 kids a day, I know I could get all of them to this level.”

For years, this has been the mantra of primary teachers: These are crucial years, and teaching reading requires one-on-one attention. Just please give us smaller classes. Please.

Now, under a state program that provides $650 per student to districts that lower class size, many teachers are getting their wish.

Olvera will join their ranks this week when Logan expands its reduction program and moves a third of her students to a new class. For her, the only hardship is making the change midyear, after she has formed attachments to her students. Parents are equally torn, she said.

Principal May Arakaki, who first told Logan’s parents about class-size cuts at a meeting a month ago, said everyone was clapping until she explained what that meant.

“When I said, ‘Some of your children will have to go to new rooms,’ they all stopped smiling,” she said.

But her greatest ammunition with parents is describing the advantages of smaller classes.

In Room 34, there is no wiggle room. Much of the instruction is delivered lecture-style in Spanish, as the children sit shoulder-to-shoulder on the small rectangular rug at the front of the classroom, although a first-grade lecture is often a song, a demonstration or even pantomime.

Olvera calls on students to help out, asking them to write a letter from the alphabet on the blackboard, or answer a question. To keep track of who has already had a turn, she uses a can filled with sticks, each marked with a student’s name, pulling one out each time she needs a volunteer.

Any sign of misbehavior, such as talking out of turn or standing when the others are sitting, is immediately squelched by Olvera, who lowers her voice instead of raising it so students must be quiet in order to hear her. Even so, keeping them all focused is a tough job that causes her to roll her eyes in frustration at times.

After the lecture, the students begin a noisy migration back to their desks, where they sit elbow-to-elbow and begin drawing animals pictured on the board and copying the names of sounds they make.

Olvera travels around the room while they work, but can never get to them all. The bolder ones beckon her, “Maestra! Maestra!” (teacher, teacher). Olvera tries to draw the others out, making a point to stop at their desks and ask questions about their pictures.

Perhaps the hardest part for Olvera is her inability to satisfy the needs of not only those students at the bottom of the class, but those at the top. When one boy finishes his animals 20 minutes before most of his classmates, she praises him, draws a smiley face with a scented marker on his paper and asks him to turn it over and draw on the other side.

The Future

That same broad ability span exists among the 18 children in Room 48, but Goya is able to offer her students options aimed at teaching the same lesson on different levels.

On this day, she explains a math work sheet briefly to the whole class, then sends them back to their chairs to figure out simple addition problems with the help of an abacus.

That launched, Goya begins guiding pairs of students to computer terminals, which are loaded with simple math games. When they finish their stint on the computer, they will circulate back to complete the work sheet.

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This freedom seemingly invites chaos, but with so few children, it proceeds without incident. Those students who finish their work sheets first can shift to a table filled with number and letter puzzles. At one, three boys take out a box of large connecting blocks and create a balancing experiment.

During the hour-long period Goya dedicates to the math lesson, she makes contact with each child at least once, usually twice. She pays particular attention to those struggling with the work sheet, but also starts each pair of students on the computer, explaining the game she has chosen for them. Later, she visits the alternative workstations, making suggestions for more creative uses of the tools there.

“Here are word cards to use with the letter puzzle,” she explains in Spanish to one boy, who had previously been grouping random letters.

Even with the children in constant motion, Room 48 is far less noisy than Olvera’s more structured classroom. And having more breathing room means bad behavior is not quite so contagious. When an antsy Armando Gomez climbs up on his desk during the abacus lesson, the other students barely notice and Goya ignores him. He calms down on his own.

And Goya is able to keep closer watch on her students, to notice when one is not paying attention. Later, when Armando fiddles with his crayon box instead of starting a row of F’s during a writing assignment, Goya is there in an instant, leaning over him. She wraps her hand around his and helps him write two letters. Armando immediately snaps back on track and winds up finishing ahead of the others.

Even when Goya does lecture to the whole group, she can call on more student volunteers and, when they do desk work, she calls them four at a time to her desk to write in their journals under her supervision.

Those practices mirror the approach advocated by early childhood education experts, who are working with the state’s school districts to develop methods for handling smaller classes.

Many of those being drafted to teach in California’s new first- and second-grade classrooms are inexperienced instructors who may sorely need that help. At Logan, they will not only receive the state-required training, but they will be teamed with veterans like Goya for more informal advice.

Goya has been waiting for more than 10 years--her entire teaching career--for a chance to try out these techniques.

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In the two weeks she has spent in her new class, she has learned some things are the same among first graders, whether you have 20 or 32. No matter how well-conceived the lesson, it will undoubtedly be interrupted several times a day by squirming children with full bladders.

“I forgot that with first grade, you have to take them to the bathroom a lot,” she said, laughing.

Times education writer Richard Colvin contributed to this story.