Organizing Subject-Matter for Supervised Study
One of the recent elaborate plans for supervised study is thus described by its author:
It has been erroneously assumed by many writers that supervised study was synonymous with effective study. It has been taken for granted that schools administering supervised-study schedules taught pupils how to study. There is a wide difference between more study and effective study. Supervised-study schedules may secure the former and miss the latter. Effective study depends upon many elements, among them proper time and place, concentration, reading ability, organization habits, questioning habits, and memory. Supervised-study schedules mechanically provide for the first two and more nearly secure the third than do other devices. The remaining elements involved in the technique of study are not necessarily concomitants of so-called supervised study....
The origin of the plan I am about to describe grew out of study of the classroom exercise in typewriting. In the typewriting class pupils remain in the same group, but are individually apart. A pupil taking typewriting may stay out of school for two weeks and return to the same group in his mathematics, Latin, and typewriting. In the last subject he starts in exactly where he left off with a distinct realization that his muscular-mental co-ordination has been impaired, while too often in the first two subjects he takes up the advanced work with his classmates apparently without any particular sense of loss. Why should he, if he makes his grade? Does he not figure out a distinct gain?
Two things differentiate the mechanics of the typewriting exercise from the mathematics and Latin recitations: (a) consecutive, daily assignments which the pupil may follow without the guidance of a teacher; (b) individual responsibility and progress or an accounting for individual differences. Apply these same principles to academic subjects and it becomes necessary to provide printed daily lesson assignments and to check upon individual preparation of these daily assignments. One added factor, however, appears with the academic subject which uniquely distinguishes it from the manual, namely, the expression of the lesson ideas.
In typewriting the pupil during the exercise concretely and muscularly shows the teacher how well he understands the lesson. In academic subjects the understanding must first be tested by language expression. There is no machine yet invented for eliminating this language-expression exercise. Consequently for all academics there must always remain the recitation period. Throwing one’s ideas into a language mold is not the same as expressing one’s ideas by mechanical means. For this reason the recitation period must always be stressed....
The laboratory-recitation plan is based on the fundamental idea that recitation groups should be organized on the basis of preparation. Pupils need not recite on the day’s preparation, but the recitation for the day is upon work previously prepared and tested. The recitation teacher knows that when his group assembles each and every pupil has previously prepared and has been checked in the work to be recited upon, otherwise the pupil would not be in the group. This is accomplished by the following modus operandi:
Co-operating laboratory-recitation teachers. Forty or fifty pupils are assigned to a certain laboratory-recitation period operated by two teachers—one the laboratory, the other the recitation, teacher—in adjoining rooms. While the laboratory teacher is supervising the preparation of lessons during the ninety-minute period, the co-operating recitation teacher is conducting recitations with groups of pupils taken from the laboratory on the basis of their preparation. For illustration, each Friday the laboratory algebra teacher in the second period will give the co-operating recitation teacher of that class and period the advancement of the slowest pupil in each of two or three recitation groups previously determined on the basis of laboratory preparation. The recitation teacher prepares his work for the following week on the basis of this information. If there are three groups, the recitation teacher devotes thirty minutes to each group; if two groups, forty-five minutes. The pupil spends either one-half or two-thirds of each period in the laboratory, the time depending upon the number of groups into which the recitation has been divided, and the remaining time in recitation.[80]