Confucius said, “Look to your past if you want to design your future.” And he couldn’t have been more correct. Looking to our past is the key to identifying good sound educational practices to improve teaching and learning. A wonderful example of this concept is a refreshing idea called, The Winnetka Plan, which was developed in 1919, and was the first time educators experimented in individualized and ungraded learning.

According to Daniel Shurgurensky, from the University of Toronto, “Participating students of the Winnetka Plan worked on several grades at once. Subjects were individualized in order for students to progress at their own rate of learning. In this way, quality was emphasized. According to this plan, a child needed to master material at 100 percent in order to progress to the next level. No student ever “failed” or “skipped a grade”. The second component of the plan consisted of cultural and self-expressive subjects in group settings. These included art, literature, music appreciation, crafts, drama, and physical activities. In the creative group activities, there were no fixed achievement standards. Each student could perform as they desired since there were no defined goals or tests of mastery. The overall-effect was a break from routine, from formal learning through textbooks, and the emergence of more emphasis on the individual by stressing the improvement of actual behavior, personality, and character. The Winnetka Plan sought to develop the “whole child” and was concerned with the physical, emotional, social, and intellectual education.”(Department of Adult Education, Community Development and Counseling Psychology, The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto (OISE/UT) )

There you have it. In 1919, the Winnetka plan was emphasizing all of the ideas that educators are desperately striving for today, the importance of individualized learning and the emphasis on the “whole child.” The question is, “In 2014, with testing mandates and great conflict over teacher evaluation and school funding, “how do we get back to what was good for children and for learning?”

One path that can lead us back to sound instruction and true learning is for educators to focus on giving quality feedback, instead of grades for students. If educators can get away from the idea that grades are the only way to define a student, then this would go a long way towards reforming our entire education system towards more individualization. As we all know, grades are subjective. One math teacher gives a student an A- while another teacher might give that same student a B or an A. For the most part, teachers do not uniformly align their grades with other teachers and while one person sees an essay as a “C”  another might give it something very different. Many times, teachers reward students with good grades for following rules, directions and general good citizenship. One, teachers need to separate compliance from what students really know and secondly, teachers need to stop assigning a grade to everything a student works on. With more meaningful individualized feedback, students will learn to focus more on their own growth than the reward of a good grade. With large class loads, this can be an arduous task, however, with the teacher acting as a facilitator, where students have time to work collaboratively or independently, there is time that can be worked in for conferencing and giving feedback to students.

@RickWormeli has paved the way in the area of standards based grading and his work goes into great detail about how to set up more appropriate ways to measure student learning. His videos and articles are inspiring and more importantly, they are practical and very easily instituted into a classroom or school. Moving away from traditional grading practices is one of the best ways to help shift teachers towards designing lessons that enable students to work at their own rate of progress.

Just as the Winnetka Plan had described, we need to aspire to give all students the opportunity for creative pursuits. Educators have a responsibility to provide students with as much opportunity as possible to “play” so that innovation will occur.  Whether the student is an athlete, artist or musician, there should be plenty of time for students to have time for their creative pursuits. Instead of the library being the only designated  place where a student can have some “downtime”, there should be playrooms in every school where students can choose to work on a craft, a piece of art or to code a game. We need to design places in schools where students have time for creative outlets instead of forcing them into a rigid class schedule where students begin to fatigue and shutdown after a few hours.

Although the aftermath of World War One, in 1919, was daunting for children of that era, today’s pressures seem to be overwhelming students more so than any other time in our history. With the increased testing atmosphere, many students have become anxious or school phobic. Furthermore, with the economy in decline, many families are struggling, thus putting more pressure on children. In order to improve the social emotional health of our children, we can no longer just focus on academics or even just creative pursuits. With our current societal issues, schools would be wise to put more resources (social workers, psychologists, counselors) at every level so students have the emotional support they need to be successful, resilient and overcome their anxieties. In fact, this generation is struggling with a lack of resilience or what many have termed as “grit.” To address this concern, a good character education program is needed.  One that is receiving great praise for its quality and cadre of resources is The Congressional Medal of Honor Program. This site has a well organized structure with teacher designed lessons that detail Congressional Medal of Honor Recipients and their gripping stories. It is a wonderful character education program that helps to strengthen students emotionally which in turn leads to improved academic performance. It is definitely worth checking out: http://www.cmohs.org

Although the Winnetka Plan was brilliant, its ideas lost merit in a quickly changing industrialized society that had to find a practical way to educate every child under the age of 16. Now that we have moved away from an industrialized economy, American schools are long overdue for reform. Although many schools are adopting technology to meet individualized student needs, this is not the case for all.  Like our forebears in 1919, we need an education system for all children that emphasizes individuality, creativity and the whole child. We need to get back to the future!