Learning How to Learn

Laying the foundation for future doctors, lawyers and engineers is not the main mission of education. Rather, in George H. Wood’s view, it should be creating good neighbors and citizens.

“We get so tied up thinking about college and jobs,” said Wood, director of the fledgling Wildwood Secondary School, a private school that opened last September in a converted TV production studio in West Los Angeles.

“But college lasts for only four to six years. [Students are] citizens all their lives.”

At a time when policymakers are pushing schools to embrace prescribed curricula and standardized testing, Wildwood’s focus on what Wood and other educators call students’ “habits of heart and mind” might strike many parents as out of sync.

Yet Wildwood is committed to a distinct approach that includes personalized learning, longer class periods, student exhibitions and portfolios rather than tests, and 30-page teacher narratives about students in lieu of grades.

This approach is gaining adherents in Los Angeles and elsewhere as parents seek alternatives to traditional college-prep academies.

At Wildwood, the individual attention comes at a cost. Tuition is $15,750 a year. Most of the children the school attracts come from middle- and upper-income families. This year, however, 15% of the students qualified for some financial aid, and that proportion will increase to 18% next year.

The school has yet to prove itself. “It’s very sound in theory,” said Thomas C. Hudnut, headmaster of Harvard-Westlake School, a traditional private secondary school in North Hollywood. “We’ll have to see how it plays out in college admissions offices. Despite what they say, colleges are inclined to fall back on grade point averages and test scores.”

An admirer of Hope Boyd, Wildwood’s head of school, he added: “If anyone can pull it off, she can.”

Even in its infancy, Wildwood has attracted notice. Earlier this year, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Microsoft mogul Bill Gates’ charitable organization, awarded Wildwood a $140,000 grant based on the school’s commitment to meeting the learning needs of adolescents. The money will be used to create a center to help develop small schools featuring individualized instruction.

Wildwood’s first student body consists of 90 students in seventh, eighth and ninth grades. Plans call for the school to expand to 250 students in grades six through 10 next year and to top out at 400 in grades six through 12 within four years.

Classes, which meet for 90 minutes rather than the standard 40, typically have 11 to 15 students. As they wait for permanent classrooms to be completed by September, many students working on projects spill out into the halls from their spartan but serviceable temporary quarters.

“I was really close to going to Campbell Hall [a more traditional school in North Hollywood], but it didn’t excite my mom,” said Maesa Pullman, 13. “The idea of Wildwood excited her.”

“Teachers work with you where you need help,” said Jeremy Preimesberger, 12.

The Wildwood Secondary program is the result of five years of research by parents at Wildwood Elementary School, a private school for kindergarten through fifth grade, on the Westside. They dreamed of opening a small middle and high school, one that would prepare students for college without subjecting them to the stresses of grades, standardized tests and homework overkill.

(To maintain its accreditation, Wildwood administers a standardized test widely used in independent schools, but officials say the results are not used to drive curriculum or make decisions about students.)

“When we started planning the school, there was a sincere desire by parents to continue the elementary school’s style--less competitive and more developmental,” Boyd said.

Parents turned for inspiration and advice to Theodore R. Sizer, a veteran education reformer who has helped create hundreds of schools where teachers know students well and where the emphasis is on developing essential life skills rather than memorizing facts.

A former dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Sizer is known for his formula for school reform: Create one school at a time and allow for dynamic changes. “No two good schools are ever quite alike,” he has written. “No good school is exactly the same from one year to the next.”

In 1984, Sizer founded the Coalition of Essential Schools. This growing nationwide network now counts more than 1,000 private and public schools as members, including Wildwood. Coalition principles have inspired educators at Lincoln Middle School in Santa Monica, Whittier High School, Torrance High School, Hollenbeck Middle School in Los Angeles and several others throughout California.

Sizer urged Wood, 47, the author of two books about the advantages of personalized education, to become director of Wildwood’s secondary school.

The coalition offers 10 principles to guide educators. Among them: Teachers should know students well. To the extent possible, teaching and learning should be geared to the students at hand. Principals and faculty should decide what to teach and how to teach it. The environment should be one of high expectations, but without threats. Teachers should help students to learn how to learn.

Wood used the ideals to improve a low-performing Ohio public high school where he was principal for many years. As he showed a reporter around Wildwood one morning, he called every child by name and revealed tidbits about them, such as age and interests.

Students at Wildwood Secondary spend nearly an hour each morning with a teacher-advisor. They use that time to huddle about matters academic and emotional. The advisors get input from all other teachers. Parents then meet with the advisor throughout the year to get feedback, including reports on whether the student works well with others.

“This is time spent with an adult who . . . gets to know you better than any teacher in any school you’ve ever been in,” said Lyle Poncher, president of the Wildwood board of trustees. “That teacher . . . can be useful in helping the student navigate his or her way through adolescence and school.”

Mel Preimesberger, Jeremy’s mother, said the school supports the notion that “you do your best. Once you do your best, you do better.” She was astonished when Jeremy, not fond of writing, spent three months polishing a literary analysis. She prefers the regular assessments to seeing an end-of-term grade “when it’s too late and nothing can be done.”

Kelvin Chin, parent of seventh-grader Jesse and first-grader Samantha, acknowledged that he and other parents took a risk when they signed on at a secondary school with no track record.

But, “for us, there’s a huge potential upside. . . . It’s the closest I’ve seen to anybody walking the lofty talk in education,” he said.