The Interview at Horizon School

A Learners’ View (ALV) Is Of Choices On The Shortest And Fastest Path To Learning, The Oxyen Of Social Life.

Horizon School, where all students learn all lessons the most accomplished people have learned.

Main Page: New Era School Initiative (NESI) Horizon School

Theme: The search for educators who choose priorities to academic performance of learners for the new era school initiative (NESI). This era marginalizes the value of instruction that does not result in all students learning all lessons that the most accomplished people have learned. This interview fictionalizes the setting and people. The name Dr. Martin Wallace refers to the same character named Dr. Doynit elsewhere on this site. The content of their discussion is real, featuring a learners’ view (ALV) of teaching and learning techniques and strategies.

“THIS INTERVIEW, Ms. Ramsey, may be the most optimistic one you have encountered,” Dr. Martin Wallace said greeting me as I entered a small office in the Normal Unified School District administration building in Normal, California. “You do want to be a teacher at Horizon School, yes? I think I remember seeing you in the auditorium during my talk of a completed teacher”

“Yes, I heard your talk and yes, I want to be a teacher at Horizon School ,” I responded with a smile. The room was clean and bright with minimum furnishings. This was not what I expected for a superintendent’s office. It held only a long table for a desk that went from one end to the other of the wall to my left as I entered the room. A few books stood upright on a shelf and a framed poster on a wall opposite the door read, All learners learn all lessons at Horizon School.

A bank of six computer monitors two high dominated the table. It reminded me of a single trader’s station I had seen on TV of the trading floor at the New York Stock Exchange. A keyboard lay idle with a muted On button light shining. He motioned for me to sit in one of the two chairs. I see he has a copy of my application papers in his hand. The opening of my application demonstration lesson CD is frozen on one of the computer screens.

“Educators have engrossing careers,” he continued. “We are, when we choose, at the forefront of helping people to live healthy lives filled with satisfying choices. As you know, at Horizon School we choose to give priority to instructing in ways that scientists report will likely fulfill that goal. Failure to learn is no excuse. Reasons for failure rest in incomplete or inaccurate instruction, both of which are manageable.”

“Now, I want to hear and see what you can do for us. Our application review committee members are impressed with your video demonstration lesson. So am I. I watched it twice. What have you accomplished in your life? What can you do and what do you need to accomplish even more here? Here’s our bottom line for this school. What can you do for us? Take your time. Show and tell me why we should hire you instead of someone else?”

Wow, I thought. This is more like an audition than a talking meeting. He goes directly to the bottom line. This is a no nonsense outfit, at least for the new school. I wonder if what he calls the new era school initiative is all just calculation without human manners?

“First, Dr., I want to thank you and your committee members for reviewing my application. I know that takes time and other resources. I also want to thank you for guiding development and approval of Horizon School. That’s, in my opinion, a major accomplishment in light of the strong community skepticism about accomplishments of public schools.

“I want to join the team that instructs in ways that all learners learn lessons the most accomplished people learn. I first made that commitment as a child in Mrs. Hyatt’s first grade classroom. I noticed that she showed us the steps to take to learn to read, write, spell, and do arithmetic as other people I knew do. After her, I look for steps to learn more, and try to show others which steps to use so they can learn more.

Mrs. Hyatt made learning easy. All of us learned all of her lessons. Over the years, our class of about 35 students including a judge, a Naval flying Top Gun who later became a commercial air line pilot, and a Ph.D. among others active in their families, businesses, and local communities. I want to look back over my teaching knowing that students I instructed have lived lives that have given them as much satisfaction as I hope Mrs. Hyatt had from working with us.”

“A noble ambition, Ms. Ramsey, but what can you do so people learn? I saw on your CD you teach a science lesson in a high school laboratory. You did a good job. Students seemed pleased. Do you have to have all of that equipment to teach the same lesson? We may not have such a complete lab set up for you to use with our 11 and 12 year olds taking, say biology. Can you teach an introductory organic chemistry lesson in a biology class to our students before they complete the equivalent of the 12th grade their last year at Horzon?”

“Yes, chemistry, like other sciences, is based in physics. They’re applied math that represents relationships among the elements that form objects we sense and theorize about. If you are asking if I’m a biologist, chemist, or physicist, the answer is no. Can I reduce to lessons the principles of chemistry and physics that scientists have described in biology, the answer is a qualified yes. I haven’t, but I can work with a physicist to convert those principles to lessons 11 and 12 years olds can handle.”

“How would you work with a physicist, say we have one meet with you from the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory or Cal Tech. What would you do?” asked Dr. Wallace.

“First, it’s important for you to know,” she responded, “that I haven’t heard or seen a lecture, met or worked with any scientist except on TV.”

“That’s a weakness in your background, Ms. Ramsey,” Wallace commented.

“I’ve taken science classes at the teaching university where I earned my bachelor’s degree and later a teaching certificate. No science professor was also a researcher. What I know of science is from textbooks and lectures along with a relatively few hours in laboratories, plus my own reading and watching science programs on TV. I can, though compose lessons that learners learn.”

“Where did you learn to do that? In your university classes? I know some of the professors at that university and didn’t realize they use a behavioral approach to lessons.”

“They don’t,” Ramsey responded with some growing discomfort. “They are whole child, quality teaching of concepts oriented, with limited attention to behavior patterns of teachers or learners.

“Good, now please go back to working with a physicist,” Wallace requested.

“I’d like to meet and work with a physicist,” Ramsey continued, “to compose lessons. My general question would be, ‘What is the most important principle of physics that biology students should learn? What must they do to show they learned it? What must they do one step before they learn it? and so on until the lesson begins with what learners can already do. In general, that’s what I’d do with a physicist.”

“How,” questioned Wallace, “did you learn to talk about lessons as you just did? You talk like someone familiar with a background in the science of teaching and learning not just in the physical sciences. By the way, you gave a straight forward description of steps I’d expect a teacher to take.”

“Thank you for noticing. I’m self-taught posing lessons this way in science, but grew up among people who make and fix things. I just do in lessons what I learned from my parents. They both said, ‘Where there’s a will, there’s a way’ over and over, usually followed by, ‘If someone else can do or make it, so can they, and better when they work hard enough.’ And they did. I worked along side of them in and outside of our house. They are practical people living paycheck to paycheck.”

I read articles from the 1960s and ’70s cited in references and footnotes about teaching and learning in an introductory ed psychology class textbook. Then I read on my own some of the articles and books that those cited. Then I tried some of those methods while baby sitting and on friends. We did those kind of things with each other in college. I used added to those methods in my first years of teaching.

“You’re a credit to your family, Ms. Ramsey. Between you ad me, I’m also self-taught with the important things in this job as are others in our district. I like your way of handling yourself in what some might consider a stressful interview.

“You’ll be offered a contract to teach science at our new Horizon School at the beginning of our academic year,” Wallace said as he rose from his chair. “I hope you’ll accept it and that I see you during teacher orientation. We’ll also have some professional development workshops so all of our teacherscan enlarge our online instructional reference library. And, yes, we’ll arrange for whichever scientists you need to compose lessons with you. Let’s show skeptics how to teach so that all learners learn all lessons. By the way, we shorten that phrase to ALLAL.”

References

Last Edited: July 27, 2015