A children teaching children program

Co-Director, Frank Riessman New Human Services Institute Graduate Center City University of New York T he purpose of the present article is to describe how a children-teaching-children tutoring program is being institutionalized in a school district in New York City, in Harlem. Particular attention will be paid to how theory is translated into practice-how the learningthrough-teaching principle is actually being implemented and how the specific problems of implementation are dealt with on a day to day basis in a school with a high percentage of underachieving children. In addition the program is concerned with the training of teacher interns (in a National Teacher Corps project) to utilize the children teaching children learning concept as a integral part of their teaching strategy. Children, of course, have been teaching other children throughout history in manifold settings. The approach was used in the room school house, in the Lancaster system and it was an important ingredient in the Montessori approach in which the older more advanced children are utilized to teach the younger less advanced ones. The teach one approach has been applied in many countries-in Cuba, in China, in Great Britain in the infant schools, in the Soviet Union where class of pupils adopts another class. In an intensive cross cultural study David Klaus observed that developing countries would benefit significantly from the use of tutoring techniques and that understaffed schools could utilize tutors for benefits to younger children. Benjamin Bloom notes that most students can learn what the schools have to teach if the problem is approached sensitively and systematically by tutors.3 Bloom observes that the top fourth of students in a class, typically are given the greatest attention by teachers and the bottom half are given the least attention. This system of group instruction produces errors in learning at each stage of a course or term. For Bloom the model of good instruction is the individual tutor who takes into account what the student has already learned, chooses the next learning task, immediately corrects mistakes, makes sure the student is participating, etc. Success leads to further success. And without the prerequisite skills, failure leads to

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• Human Characteristics and School Learning

  Benjamin Bloom, Benjamin Samuel Bloom•Human Characteristics and School…•1983

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• Children as Teachers

  Carol Taylor Fitz‐gibbon, Carol T Fitz-Gibbon et al.•American Educational Research…•1978

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