A New Beginning

It’s my honor to be the first post on John Linton’s website “Linton Minute” I have known John since about 1991 when we started working together on the Video Journal of Education. John and his former wife Blanch had worked with me before on a small number of professional videos including one for the Utah State Department of Education. That came as a result of the Jordan School District having John Leave the classroom at Alta high school to do some training videos for the district. They knew he had a background in professional film producing having once been a documentary producer for Brigham Young University. At that time the state board of education gave the school districts block grants to teach their teachers about the methods they were interested in their teachers using.

After 40 years I came to know that education supervisors, district people and superintendents are always looking for “the next thing” in education. Over the last 40 plus years I have learned a lot about education through the work I did with John and that has led to a lot of other knowledge about life and work because much of it is interrelated.

The buzz word of that day was “Outcomes Based Education” which was the simple premise of telling students what they were expected to learn in the next unit of study in their class, organize and present their lessons in a way that supported what they wanted the students to learn and then test them on what they had been told they were supposed to learn. In other words, there were no “gotchas”.

In my schooling I had some truly excellent teachers, but I also had teachers who were very personable and the classroom was very informal until Friday when there was a quiz which at least 20% of the students failed, 60% passed and 20% did very well on. The theory of many people at the time was that was good. It fit the “Bell curve” where you were expecting some students to fail, some to excel and the majority to just get by with a passing grade.

The initial core of outcome based education was the statement that “All Children Can Learn”. Many educators at the time may have outwardly agreed, but their practices such as what I outlined above did not truly support that outcome. But since their class followed the bell curve, it was acceptable to teach that way.

Outcome Based Education was invented in Johnson City, New York and everyone from the superintendent to the janitors in the school worked to help every student achieve. Even at that, and with documented positive results, there were critics because parents who students did well in the "gotcha system" – for whatever reason, weren’t happy that everyone was now supposed to do better. If some kids didn’t do worse, how were their children supposed to stand out?

A lesson in education and people.

Since 1991, John and I have done hundreds of projects together and I actually joined School Improvement Network for a short stint after their children bought it from John and Blanch.

All of this is saying I know John well and respect him as a friend, video colleague and creator. His purpose is to make the world a better place even after having done that with his years of helping teachers be better. As I came to understand in my work, a teacher can do the teaching, but the learner has to do the learning. There’s lots to learn here.