Organize schools into educational clusters where older students teach younger ones to break the linearity of the system¶

Strategy · All strategies
Evidence · no claims cited

Description¶

In her 1971 interview, Mead proposed educational clusters placing day-care centers, kindergartens, elementary schools, junior and senior high schools, and community colleges close together so different age groups can move back and forth and "the older students teach the young ones." The report notes Mead drew on Urie Bronfenbrenner's observations in the Soviet Union of paired classes in which older children look after younger ones, so that students being taught are also teaching, breaking the linearity of the system.

Design Implications¶

Context¶

Requirements¶

• Co-located institutions spanning day-care through community college so age groups can interact

Constraints¶

• The report presents this as Mead's proposal in a 1971 interview with Nation's Schools, not an evaluated program

Target Learners¶

• students across age groups from early childhood through community college

Target Learning Goals¶

• peer and cross-age learning; making students active participants rather than passive recipients

Related Strategies¶

• Cross Age Tutoring: the practice Mead's clusters would organise a whole school system around
• Mead's taxonomy of post-figurative, co-figurative, and pre-figurative cultures explains how accelerating change reverses the direction of learning: Mead's account of changing learning relations between generations, from the same report

Examples¶

-

Key Sources¶

• Monroe, Suzanne S. (1992). Margaret Mead: Anthropological Perspective on Educational Change. ERIC Document ED 356 168. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED356168