TECHNOS

November 20, 2008

Massachusetts Elementary School’s Award-Winning Anti-bias Program Fosters Critical Thinking Along With Respect

At the Lesley Ellis School in Arlington, Massachusetts, a group of fourth and fifth graders are sitting in small groups around large pieces of chart paper. The words YOUNG and OLD are written in separate sections at the top of the page. Markers in hand, each group is busily recording their thoughts about each word.

“We need to write sports in young.”
“My grandparents have been sick a lot.”
“Write down opinionated. Older people have so many opinions. They don’t really want to hear new ideas.”
“I think that we need to add death. Old people always have to think about death and dying.”
“I want happy next to kids and sad. I think that kids have lots of different feelings all of the time.”

The chatter continues as the charts fill.

A minute warning is called and the students scramble to get their final ideas down as the group begins to congregate in the meeting area. The small groups are then asked to add their ideas to class charts, and the teacher asks for observations. At first the class is silent, but then a tentative hand goes up. “A lot of the words for old are pretty negative.” Another notices, “Yeah. Most of the words for young are good. I don’t think that it’s always so great to be a kid. People don’t take you very seriously.”

As the conversation continues, one boy raises his hand. “My grandmother always plays soccer with me when she visits.” Another adds, “My grandparents travel all the time.” A number of the children join in with their own realizations about how the words that they wrote do not match many of the experiences they have with the older people in their lives. After a pause, one child says, “Even though we know it’s not true, we can’t help but think it.” The other students agree and many are amazed at how many stereotypes they have already acquired. A hand shoots up. “What if we made it a Venn diagram with overlapping circles instead of columns? What would it look like?”

This simple project is one example of how Lesley Ellis School’s award-winning anti-bias curriculum comes alive daily in the classroom. Lesley Ellis was a recipient of the 2005 Leading Edge Award for Equity and Justice from the National Association of Independent Schools, which was awarded last year to just three schools nationally.

Unable to find an existing program that met their goals, the school chose, instead, to design its own, and over the past few years the Lesley Ellis School teachers have carefully crafted this unique school-wide effort. The resulting curriculum is designed to challenge the impact of bias on the children’s social and intellectual development by helping them build the knowledge base, skills, and attitudes necessary for respectfully living in a diverse community. It focuses on eight major areas of bias: racism, sexism, heterosexism, ableism, classism, ageism, religious intolerance, and size acceptance.

While many schools, both public and private, have initiatives aimed at creating tolerance and respect, the Lesley Ellis program is rooted in a developmental model of learning that engages and challenges children’s emerging critical thinking skills. It is designed to address the intellectual as well as the social dimension of children’s learning.

“It’s not the same old PC stuff,” said fifth-grade parent Ed Rapaki. “It really is about teaching kids to think without resorting to assumptions or ready-made answers.”

Instead of minimizing discussions of difference, the teachers at Lesley Ellis encourage it. For example, children in the preschool classrooms regularly talk about family structure, cultural traditions, skin tone, and religion in a way that builds from children’s natural conversations. “There’s an innocent curiosity at this age, which we try to encourage,” says preschool teacher Vickie Benedict. “We want them to be comfortable talking about difference. We don’t want to send the message that it is impolite, because it’s the same kind of curiosity that drives their interest in other subjects.” Another parent added, “Obviously, children, especially young children, are going to notice differences—they want to know why their friend has two moms, or why one kid is a different color from his parents, or why someone’s parents seem much older or younger or richer than their own.”

“The school creates a comfortable and respectful community—kids know and enjoy each other,” says first-grade parent Heidi Berke. “They’re already good friends—so that’s where the program starts. If you talk about racism or homophobia without that sense of safety, people can get defensive really quickly. I like to think that at Lesley Ellis my child is learning a more productive approach.”

“We’re a small school that enjoys a very close sense of community—our diversity enriches our school,” Jenn Young, second-grade teacher, adds. Daniel, a fifth grader last year, agrees. “Teachers don’t tell you what to think. But they do expect you to think hard about your opinions and also be responsible for how you treat other people.”

First-grade teacher Corinne Nicoara believes the program encourages greater curiosity. “You can’t spend 30 minutes teaching about the differences among plants or animals and then turn around and ignore the differences among the children themselves. By making room for differences, we are also making room for those things we share as human beings. It can be just as exciting for kids to discover what they share as it is to discover differences.”

“The anti-bias curriculum’s success has a lot to do with this school’s developmental, progressive pedagogy,” adds Andy Stratford, fifth-grade teacher. “The natural process of learning is to make observations about your environment and then to create rules for ordering your experience. Young children are remarkably observant and they are quick to find rules. Rules help children generalize about the world and organize what they know.”

Kindergarten teacher Jon Pfeifer was involved in the development of this program. “Rules for organizing information and experience are typically acquired from logical thinking processes, learned from parents and teachers, or absorbed from the culture. What we as educators try to do is provide children with really good ideas, knowledge, and experiences so that they can develop better, more powerful, and more sophisticated rules. But also, and more importantly, we want to help children to be able to evaluate and refine the rules they have for organizing the world.”

“That’s what the anti-bias curriculum does,” adds Deanne Benson, Lesley Ellis’s Head of School. “A curriculum that helps children recognize bias not only deepens their understanding of other people, cultures, and families, but also strengthens fundamental thinking skills. Knowing how to recognize stereotypes and preconceptions, how to distinguish between opinion and fact, how to draw valid conclusions from observations—these are skills that are at the heart of all learning. What we are trying to do is enable our students to become more critical thinkers who will retain the kind of openness, compassion, and respectfulness to others that we see in our own classrooms.”

This year and over the next two years, Lesley Ellis School, which is part of Schools for Children, Inc., (a nonprofit Massachusetts “incubator” for innovation in education), plans to refine their anti-bias curriculum and eventually make it available to other interested schools. “Independent schools have the freedom to experiment and model innovative programs that other schools can then adapt within their own settings,” said NAIS President Patrick Bassett. Dr. Ted Wilson, the Director of Schools for Children agrees. “As all our programs, Lesley Ellis School is a private school with a public mission. We’re eager to share our successes with others who believe that elementary education has an important role in creating a more just and equitable society.”

Courtesy of Lesley Ellis School Pubic Relations.