Most authors, such as Frank Riessman (1962), speak of “the culturally deprived child” as a monolithic entity. In contrast, these [research] results emphasize the importance of considering variations within the group. The study of personality variations within lower class children not only has the advantage of understanding these children better, but also provides the opportunity to observe similarities as well as differences between them and middle class children. Stage classification is applicable to persons of all social classes. Hunt, p. 32.
A teacher who can purposefully exhibit a wide range of teaching styles is potentially able to accomplish more than a teacher whose repertoire is relatively limited. Joyce and Hodges, 409.
Students have a significant effect on the instructional behavior of teachers although some teachers are more able to change their behavior than others. …In general, research on teaching should account for the “student effect” identified in this study. Ignoring such an effect would seem to bias whatever findings result from the study of teaching. Rathbone, p.vi.
I was a student in the Urban Teacher Education Program during the twelve months from June 1964 to June 1965. My very first experience with the program was the role-playing interview for admission (or not) where I was asked to teach four urban junior high school students (played by staff members) about the balance of powers that characterizes our three branches of government. What seemed like an amazingly discordant performance task was actually a highly structured interview protocol played out with me as the central actor. The program was assessing where I stood with respect to two dimensions of behavior: strength and sensitivity.
“Strength” referred to a capacity to project confidence, hold my own, be clear in my wishes, definite with regard to behavioral expectations, and consistent with my application of sanctions. “Sensitivity” referred to my capacity to make contact with the role players as people, listen to their chatter, extract teachable content from their banter back and forth, and my willingness and ability to flex my expectations if given contextually embedded reasons to do so. Thus my willingness to say, “Yes, if they have something to do with what we are studying,” to the query, “Hey Teach, can we read comic books in here?” was a demonstration of strength and sensitivity; strength in that the acceptance was conditional (had to connect with important knowledge and content) and sensitivity (accepting an interest and stated request of the kids). A weak and insensitive response might have been something like, “Well, I don’t know. Comics aren’t very good for learning anything but maybe… .” and a strong, insensitive response would have been something like, “Are you kidding? Absolutely not! That’s why so many of your kind can’t read; you spend all your time looking at pictures, stupid pictures at that!”
Measured flexibility of judgment, going with the flow, soliciting and utilizing student knowledge, while keeping a lesson moving more or less towards the purposes for which it was designed was a positive instructional trait to the UTPP staff. Turns out, it’s been proven to be an effective instructional skill thirty-five years later. Using “prior knowledge” in now generally accepted as a hallmark of cognitively based instructional strategies. To accomplish this, you had to know something about the kids and their background but also be able to think so you could connect with their interests and bring those interests forward to serve some of your teaching goals and objectives. Briefly put, we were continually challenged to deal with the interplay between content knowledge and process knowledge. Successful teaching results, in the UTPP world, often occurred in the actual space between teacher and student, a space where knowledge was created because of the negotiation of cultural life space between the learner and teacher.
Flexibility of judgment, tolerance for ambiguity, the ability to see things from different perspectives, and empathic understanding of others were important cognitive qualities. In fact, these personal dispositions supported the capacity to ascertain and draw on prior knowledge systems. These dispositions reflected the theoretical pedagogical positioning of the UTPP within Conceptual Systems Theory (CST), a theoretical system of cognitive psychology that guided the design and assessment of programmatic experiences while I worked with the program. CST also became the theoretical inspiration for my own doctoral research when I returned to Syracuse for study in 1967. I valued my work with Dr. David Hunt and Dr. Berj Harootunian as much as any of my professorial associations with theoreticians up to that point in my education or beyond for that matter.
Central to CST is the assumption that student behavior results from the interaction of person variables and environmental variables. Behavior is a dependent variable, not a fixed entity. Therefore, instead of seeing Harold’s predisposition to argue his way vehemently (his Behavior) as an inborn quality of stubbornness or inflexibility, the CST lens would have you think about the behavior as emerging from an interaction between Harold’s way of dealing with information ( the Person Variable) and the way he was being presented with the information (the Environment Variable). Stated in the more classic Lewinian sense, behavior results from the interaction between person and environment: Bƒ(P,E). If you don’t like the kid’s behavior, you change the environment you provide for the learner, not try to change the learner through disciplinary tactics. To a teacher, this opens up the idea that certain classroom environments are better for certain students and different environments are better for other kids.
To us who were learning how to teach, these ideas about matching child and classroom structure to create conditions for desired student performance were fascinating. What it meant to us was that student behavior was in large measure a function of classroom organization. If organized in a way that was compatible with a student’s person(ality), you were more likely to obtain the quality of learning you wanted from the child. This is where CST entered my frame about teaching. CST gave us a theoretical lens to inform how we might match environment and child. Theoretically, lower conceptual level students required more highly structured classroom environments. The rules of engagement should be clear, simple, and predictable. Academic expectations could not remain undefined. Better to give a lower CL child the choice of two options than simply letting them choose a course of action out of thin air. When conceptual level matured, choice and structure could be opened up. Operating at higher conceptual levels went hand in hand with the capacity to make more independent decisions. For lower CL students, whether they be college age or elementary school age, radiating a classroom environment that had lots of choices to make is frustrating and might drive the lower CL child to resist or act out. Likewise, for higher CL students, providing a classroom environment that requires them to toe to someone else’s line and gives them little choice about what and how to study is frustrating and might compel the higher CL child to act out. In this theoretical frame, misbehavior becomes a classroom dynamic partially controlled by the teacher. Bad behavior could not be attributed solely to a child’s background (or “disadvantage”). Bad behavior could easily be inspired by having to work within a mismatched cognitive environment day after day.
As a measure of cognitive complexity and flexibility, CL is relatively statistically unrelated to trait characteristics such as IQ and race, and the body of research that spoke to that independence was a huge awakening to me. Here was an intellectual and practical argument that could be made to counter the assumptions we interns would continually encounter; namely, that urban youngsters as a group were less intelligent and therefore intellectually inferior as a group. CL varied across IQ regardless of race. This meant a teacher could group students to achieve different kinds of intellectual outcomes in your classroom using CL as the grouping criterion. That meant teachers could avoid grouping criteria like reading level, IQ, or other measures of ability that also had the effect of separating the students out racially or socio-economically.
Another benefit that attended the application of CST in the school setting was the manner in which according to stage theory, slightly mismatched environments had the effect of moving the students along from lower to higher conceptual orientations. And high CL, of course, was valued as a positive person variable or trait. It was a good thing to have learners who could tolerate ambiguity, think their way around a given concept, argue and defend a position without resorting to physical confrontation, and feel what it was like to be someone else. Conversely, learners who were fixed in their conceptual ways needed the comfort of absolute certainty. These students would often threaten or resort to physical confrontation if they were challenged for very long. These learners were the students who posed most disciplinary problems in the school setting.
Hunt and his associates actually implemented grouping patterns at Madison Junior High School (MJHS) in order to reality test CST. Teachers who valued classrooms where kids took and defended positions and ideas, identified with and appreciated class groupings of higher CL students. Teachers who liked kids to be quiet and toe the line, doing what they were told, were not appreciative of the higher CL groupings of children in their classrooms. These teachers, lower CL themselves, seemed threatened by the challenges high CL children offered. Conversely, higher CL teachers who had classes of lower CL kids found them to be difficult to teach, not because they couldn’t do it, but because they had to adjust their teaching in ways that were unnatural to them. They had to teach with high structure and they didn’t particularly like doing that.
These matches and mismatches underscore an instructional reciprocity between teachers and students. This aspect of reciprocity was another characteristic of this particular theoretical perspective having to do with the way human beings process information that I valued enormously. HCL teachers could teach both HCL and LCL students. Although they preferred the HCL groups, they were conceptually flexible enough to shift their teaching strategies to be much more structured when facing LCL students even without knowledge of how the students were, in fact, grouped. LCL teachers preferred the LCL students because these students liked the authority based clarity of the LCL teachers’ classrooms. Note, I’m not talking authoritarian here. An authority based clarity means definite structure, low choice, clear boundaries, personal support within that framework. These are not “my way or the highway” classrooms. The LCL teachers were notably unsuccessful with the HCL students. They simply could not create enough independently based classroom practices to satisfy the HCL students’ urge for independence and self-definition.
This was the first time I’d heard the Lewinian dictum that “there is nothing so practical as a good theory.” David Hunt shared this insight often. At the time, there was no way I could know that I’d hear it again with another theoretical orientation that captured my imagination thirty years later.
This grouping work occurred in the year before the UTPP started working at Madison and CST was the lens through which our work as interns was viewed. Though I’m not sure, I suspect the situations we were placed in with respect to what was asked of us as we were learning to write and create curriculum were grounded in CST. I became much clearer about CST during my teaching years in Syracuse, especially my work at Madison and Roosevelt Jr. High Schools. I used the knowledge in very useful and uncomplicated ways, actually.
First of all, it was a powerful lens for me to view the learning capacities of my kids. With some informal assessment on my part, I could group kids instructionally based on the CST definition of need for structure. Then I’d plan my work accordingly. The perspective made me look to the kids for the clue about how to structure the content, how to teach it, how to assess. Even the structure of my handouts reflected how much ambiguity I’d build into answer choice. Student choice can be varied considerably with work requirements. And the degree of student success, aside from content knowledge, is also dependent on how they understand the task and how flexible they can be in providing answers. Asking a child who needs a good deal of structure to invent an open-ended response to a question that they will be held accountable to is not a good idea! And CST gives you one way to know why this is.
I remember many times I’d have two or three different groups operating simultaneously in my class, groups that interestingly enough, the kids would report were never put together in quite the same way in their other classes. Sometimes the groups would be formed on the basis of a match and sometimes on the basis of a mismatch. After some kind of demonstration by either myself or my students, one group might have a follow up task that required them to create 
a description of what they had just seen. Another group might have a list of outcomes and their task would be to select appropriate outcomes from the list. A third group which might in fact be five kids working alone at five different desks would have four descriptive sentences about what they had just seen with two answer choices for each question. I was varying the complexity of the task and yet in class discussion, I could call on any group for input because at some level, they were all dealing with the same content, just in different ways. Always there would be students who would never operate in groups. I might even arrange their workspace in such a way as to avoid eye contact with other kids as much as possible. All these variations I could understand because of my knowledge of CST. It made the organization of teaching much less random for me. Grouping was much less of a question about who was being good today or who had the best personalities to work together and much more about how I was going to get the content discussions going in the best way possible. Grouping decisions were based either on interest in the subject material and/or the activity, or on the cognitive characteristics of the task. Although it sounds fairly corny, it made the organization of teaching more of an intellectual experience for me and one that I could exercise more control over than if I were grouping kids randomly or according to the more usual criteria of “ability.”
I also thought it was better for the kids all the way around. They got to work with different peers than they usually got to work with, especially if their academic grouping had been done by reading level. Those groups tended to segregate out by economic class and in my schools, economic class was usually a proxy for race. Because they had task requirements that were better matched to their capabilities, the probability of completing their work successfully increased. That meant not only would they carry out their work well (process), they’d do it correctly (product). Good feelings resulted from good work. This was a whole lot different than good feelings resulted from some teacher saying you did well when in your heart of hearts you knew you didn’t have the slightest idea of what was going on. Thus having this theoretical base to organize and reflect on my instructional planning also helped create a more authentically positive classroom environment. No phony praise. And they knew it! Some of the groupings in the “What’s Good Money? Unit” previously referred to were organized using CST. I think that’s one reason they worked successfully over the time span of the unit.
One more observation with regard to my “experimental” use of CST. I think my classrooms were safer places. In the early work Hunt did with CST at MJHS, he and his workers discovered a flaw in the theory. There were a group of learners in the higher CL groups who could not tolerate disagreement for very long. They typically reverted to physical confrontation. In other words, if you didn’t intervene in the disagreement fast enough as a teacher, punches might get thrown or shouting and shoving might occur. When he worked with the teachers during the first round of the study, what Hunt figured out is that there were a group of kids who assessed at this level but who in fact were much lower in their tolerance for ambiguity. In the jargon of the time, their self-concept was so diffuse that they would argue with anything anyone said just in order to make their statement. They weren’t arguing a position, they were arguing power and being right and the only way they could show their power was through physical confrontation. So these kids became the kids who moved into highly structured individual settings, even within a classroom of peers, until they could get their ideas and their coping mechanisms under control. Once they began to thrive under conditions of high, predictable and steady authority, then they could gradually be placed into group problem solving situations for limited amounts of time. The mismatch was tender here. But once the theoretical correction was made, the pragmatic embodiment of it in the classroom made sense. As Lewin had said years before, “Nothing is so practical as a good theory.” Hunt’s formulations were true embodiments of this theory to practice reciprocity.
Having said this, once these quirky interpersonal dynamics were theoretically understood, classroom accommodations followed. The classrooms and school became a safer place for all the kids and teachers. School data showed a drop in physical confrontations and destruction of school property.
Now I don’t mean to suggest that CST worked perfectly or that I taught following its precepts all the time. That certainly was not the case. But occasionally I could use it to design chunks of instruction that gave us all – the kids and me – a different way of doing things and the unpredictable (to the kids) nature of “changing things up” was a good thing to do. The use of CST honored different learning styles and capabilities and enabled the kids to see each other as learners much more so than they did when they were operating with traditional book-oriented curricula.
Learning to teach in a world where theory could be helpful was very important to me. I guess coming from a psych background was useful and in fact helped me accept without question some of the dynamics going on. (I also have to say that history seminar with Professor Lindsey where he taught there was more than one way to interpret what was going on in the world had prepared me for this intellectual understanding as well.) I think what I appreciated the most was that in my first years of learning how to teach, I was able to see without much of a doubt that student ability was as much if not more related to the environmental conditions radiated in the classroom than it was any fixed native or genetic capacity. Differences in learning potential got connected early on in my career to variation in classroom environment, not person variables like gender or race or socio-economic level. Thank you David Hunt and your co-collaborator Berj.
In retrospect, this understanding was just another idea that I accepted as an “of course, that’s the way it is” at the time. It was an a priori assumption built into my education as a teacher. It was another way for me to grow into my teaching, emboldened by the idea that most learning problems were in fact, the results of shortcomings on the part of the teacher. If you knew how to meet kids somewhere on their path of learning, you would be so much more successful getting to where you wanted to go with classrooms where instructional resistance was minimized. And so would they. This way of thinking about teaching and learning required the variation of instructional styles. No way did one shoe fit all feet.
This idea of teaching and learning being a reciprocal event fascinated me. I went on to research student effects with teachers of differing conceptual levels. I had a hunch that more abstract teachers would be more flexible in their “read” of the student “pull.” HCL teachers were much more able to radiate successful instructional environments for both HCL and LCL students. In the terminology of my research, the HCL teachers generated high levels of interdependence. LCL teachers did not. What this means is that LCL teachers force a lot of feet into shoes that don’t fit.
As I look back on it, making student capacity an outcomes dependent variable, dependent in part on classroom environment, was also a radical assumption about teaching and learning, and even schooling. Think about the authoritarian ways most school processes remain organized today, even down to the way authoritarian administrators treat teaching staffs. It is an unusual school that isn’t organized and run around LCL principles. I think, in fact, that the majority of schools radiate Stage One environments. Articulated and mandated disciplinary structures, sequential lock step curricula, and administratively imposed mandates are hallmarks of Stage One environments. Do what you are asked, don’t make waves, and certainly don’t alter a mandated curriculum, and everything will be fine.
Consider the consequences this kind of setting encourages for students ready to emulate HCL environments. Curriculums have predefined outcomes, many of which call for the application of basic knowledge. Higher level thinking such as problem solving in mathematics and literary interpretation in English and literature classes is often taught in formulaic, procedural ways (LCL ways). Teachers are assessed using protocols that ascribe to direct instruction methodologies and professional development in most schools consists of experts marching through buildings telling teachers the next best thing that must be done. Independent action, true inquiry, tolerance for multiple points of view, and the appreciation of differences, while mouthed, are practiced little. I can only think these practices that increasingly characterize teaching, learning, and schooling occur much to the detriment of children’s intellectual growth. We were ahead of our times, for a brief moment. And then, as noted, the school closed. Hunt’s intellectual inquiry into matching models of education, carried out in a place where such inquiry was so needed and so valuable, abruptly ended. And students, once players in the derivation of instructional strategies, however indirectly, became increasingly marginalized.