[Influencing this post – Chris Lehmann, Alan Shapiro, and sitting on a Philadelphia floor, almost 40 years ago by Ira Socol]

So I spent last night re-familiarizing myself with the 3i program, an alternative high school program in New Rochelle, NY that existed from 1970-1983. The school was born out of a moment in time when people believed change was possible, and it was steeped in the work of Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner’s classic text of resistance, Teaching as a Subversive Activity. The school was started by Alan Shapiro in collaboration with Postman and Weingartner, and it was part of a time in American schooling where many people believed school could be different.

I was doing this reading because of the dialogue between Ira Socol and me on his blog post-EduCon. It’s a good place for me to be right now because SLA rarely gets challenged from the left-side of the educational spectrum. We spend a lot of time explaining what we do to those on to the right of us on the continuum that it’s good to be stretched on the other side too. Given the personal experience Ira had in going to 3i, and the research and scholasticism he has shared since then, it might be a little ridiculous for me to write about 3i, but it’s what is on my mind. I hope I honor the spirit of inquiry with what follows.

Postman and Weingartner’s work was based in the belief – and SLA is, in many respects, a descendent of this belief – of inquiry education. From the wikipedia entry on inquiry method, good learners share the following traits:

• Self-confidence in their learning ability
• Pleasure in problem solving
• A keen sense of relevance
• Reliance on their own judgment over other people’s or society’s
• No fear of being wrong
• No haste in answering
• Flexibility in point of view
• Respect for facts, and the ability to distinguish between fact and opinion
• No need for final answers to all questions, and comfort in not knowing an answer to difficult questions rather than settling for a simplistic answer

And teachers worked to live these ideals:

• They avoid telling students what they "ought to know".
• They talk to students mostly by questioning, and especially by asking divergent questions.
• They do not accept short, simple answers to questions.
• They encourage students to interact directly with one another, and avoid judging what is said in student interactions.
• They do not summarize students’ discussion.
• They do not plan the exact direction of their lessons in advance, and allow it to develop in response to students’ interests.
• Their lessons pose problems to students.
• They gauge their success by change in students’ inquiry behaviors (with the above characteristics of "good learners" as a goal).

And the 3i Program, a school within the larger New Rochelle school, was built on those principals.

In reading those documents, you can see the valiant struggle to create something meaningful and powerful and democratic for students in the school. Kids and teachers made decisions together… classes were purely democratically chosen… students powerfully owned their learning. But I also read some of the same problems that we’ve seen in varying degrees at SLA. Student motivation to make those decisions or find learning on their own waxed and waned…. figuring out what to do when given ownership and freedom was hard… and maintaining the spirit of the revolution, so to speak, could be exhausting.

And that isn’t to say that the struggle was bad… or that the school was not a success. So many folks have spoken to the power of classrooms and schools like this all over that something incredible was going on. I wonder, though, as I look at the staff page, and I see how many teachers spent only a year or two there… how hard was it to teach there? (Gloriously amazing, yes, but hard, I’m sure.) How Zen did teachers have to be to be completely able to let go of all of the authoritarian nature of the role of teacher. There are times, so many throughout the day, where trying to 20-30 people to pull even a little bit of the same direction – even in a student-centered classroom – must have gotten frustrating. Did teachers get frustrated when projects were started and abandoned? Or when decision-making on everything became too much… and folks just generally let the most involved, the most committed make the decisions… until a problem arose? I thought Sam Chaltain had a great quote this weekend in the Sunday morning panel when he said, "Teachers need to be authoritative, but never authoritarian." Did that describe a 3i teacher? Or was that still too "teacher-y." And yet, I have no doubt that Alan Shapiro led… servant leadership, for sure but leadership nonetheless. And his writings have a powerfully defined moral center. It is easy to imagine that moral center came through in his teaching… not in a didactic fashion, but still powerfully from his role as teacher. (Read "On Falling Apart" for a sense of that voice and powerful moral core.)

And what were the bargains the school made as a part of the larger whole over time? By 1981, there were two hours of SAT test prep a week built into the schedule, and the documents suggest that trying to let students run their own gym was an uphill battle. 3i lost the battle to keep the Project Week at some point. And by 1983, with no lack of sad irony the same year A Nation at Risk was published, the school was closed – reabsorbed back into the larger school. The struggle had ended… at least it ended there.

But what a wonderful struggle. I am sure that so many of the kids in the program felt it was worth fighting for. And I have no doubt that many kids (and over the course of the program, there were between 50 – 125 kids in the program across all high school grades) found it to be a life changing and empowering form of education. (Ira’s writing – he might argue his life – is proof of that.) And while there was a class schedule and times for things to meet, kids went or didn’t go, and for much of the school’s existence, there was a week in the middle of the year where the only thing kids did was work all day on a project of their own design. (Interestingly, Masterman HS, not exactly a bastion of progressive pedagogy, does that for senior project. There are the seeds of 3i in many places.)

And I think SLA is one of those seeds. We are not 3i. We are far more structured. And I am more communitarian than individualistic, and I can point to many ways that influenced the choices we made. For example, that led to our belief in grade-wide essential themes and questions that allow student-driven interdisciplinarity because kids draw the connections between classes. That decision precludes multi-age classes in all but our elective courses. And believe deeply that it is incumbent on every member of the community to figure out (with support, help, care, love) how they can be themselves within the larger community… and strengthening the community in the process. I don’t believe (as some principals do) that you should suspend / punish / whatever kids for skipping classes, but I also admit that it drives me a little batty when kids do… not because I think whatever I might say is so important, but because I think what the student might say is. I think we make a social contract in our classes that together we will make meaning together. And I want every brain in the room for that. I miss kids when they are not there. (That being said, as an aside, when kids tell me that they made choices to not go to a class because they were still working on another class’ work, I am powerfully confronted with the limitations of any and all class schedules.) Is that better or worse than the decisions 3i made? For who? When in their academic career? The better or worse question is, to me, profoundly unhelpful, because it assumes that difference must assume a hierarchy of best to worst.

What I want… what I think we need… are schools that do things for reasons. I believe – and I think Ira believes – that if we were more reflective, more critical about why we do things, that more schools would move toward the progressive / inquity-driven edge of the spectrum. Maybe not to where 3i landed or maybe not to SLA landed, but they’d move. So little of what happens in school today is thoughtful… or based on a deep-rooted but still living and growing philosophical core. I want schools to make decisions based on what we think we can do – kids and teachers both – rather than what we can’t do. I want education to be based on the best of what we be, not on the deficit model of "Make sure everyone doesn’t suck quite so much" that is driving the language and policies of education today.

And in the end, I come back to a few places that feel like familiar ground for me and a few that are less common.

• I still love the question, "What is the worst consequence of your best idea?" There were so many moments in writing this post where looking at both schools through that lens made the issues make more sense.
• If any of this is too hard to do, it will never grow beyond the edges. And that is true for teachers and students both. We have to find the way to make the pathways to this kind of work easier. That trends too close to scalability / replicability for me, but I think we may have to figure out what transferability (is that a better word) looks like so others can learn from models and change without having to start from scratch every time.
• Yeah, it can’t be hard, but at the same time, it is incumbent on teachers to be scholars of their own profession. I might have missed the chance to connect with / connect to Ira had I not read Teaching as a Subversive Activity and researched the 3i school years ago. So many teachers are not scholars of their own profession, and we have to own that played a role in letting those who spoke with authority about their "research-based solutions" command the debate when we have so much research that has taught us so many… as long as we never forget it, and as long as we pass it along.
• "What do you think?" and its cousin "How do you feel?" are the questions that connect Nel Noddings’ Ethic of Care and Postman’s Inquiry Education. It is what allows teachers to care about and know their students and learn from them too.
• The teaching life must be livable. So must the the student life.
• The other movement that this kind of education draws on is a powerful humanistic streak. This is about seeing each other as people… and caring about each other as people too. And if we keep that in mind, we’ve got a good place to start.

On a less positive note, As I write this, a part of me is angry. Because the seeds of 3i live in private schools and the slow-growing, but growing (private) free school movement more than they live anywhere right now. No inquiry-driven teacher would ever say to my son, "I don’t get a chance to know the kids, because I need to get them ready for the next and stay on the curriculum guide. And I worry that the only kids who will get to experience an inquiry-driven approach to school will be kids who can afford it. (In much the same way that I’m kind of really annoyed that Harvard came out and said that Harvard isn’t worth the money… but I don’t see them charging less. We are at a very dangerous moment in time where we could regress quickly to the point where children of privilege will receive an education and everyone else will get trained.)

But the thought I want to end with is that our inquiry must lead us to action. We must ask questions that matter, work together to make sense of the answers and then be prepared to make change based on what we discover. We also have to always listen, with an open heart and an open mind, to those who disagree with us. If we are unwilling to do that altruistically, do it selfishly, because we learn so much when we do.

And by the way, Ira, in a nod to the past… we wish we had a gym too.