Ballon, Rosemarie E.

BPED 2

William Heard Kilpatrick

William Heard Kilpatrick (November 20, 1871 – February 13, 1965) was an American

pedagogue and a pupil, a colleague and a successor of John Dewey (1859–1952).

Kilpatrick was a major figure in the progressive education movement of the early 20th

century.

Kilpatrick was born in White Plains, Georgia. He had an orthodox upbringing and was

educated at Mercer University and Johns Hopkins University where he later became a

mathematics teacher at High School and at Mercer University. He first met John Dewey

in 1898 and again met him in 1907. Kilpatrick decided to make philosophy of education

his specialty and attended all courses given by Dewey at Teachers College, Columbia

University. From this developed a cooperation, which persisted up to Dewey's death in

1952. Both men's ideas directly impacted the 1932 founding of Bennington College in

Vermont: they were both on the original College Board of Trustees, with Kilpatrick soon

becoming President of the Board, and two of the original 12 houses on campus are named

after them.

His first teaching job was at Blakely Institute, a combined elementary and secondary

public school in southwest Georgia, required that he attend a July 1892 summer at Rock

College Normal School, Athens, GA. There he learned of the educational theories of

German educator Friedrich Wilhelm August Fröbel (1782-1852), kindergarten founder

and learning-through-play advocate. He again studied at Johns Hopkins University,

summer 1895, then taught seventh grade and was principal at Anderson Elementary

School, Savannah, GA, 1896–97. He was at Mercer University, 1897–1906, taught

mathematics, was vice-president, 1900, and acting president, 1904–06, but resigned

when the trustees were concerned about his doubting the virgin birth of Mary, the mother

of Jesus Christ.

In 1907-1909 Kilpatrick was a student in Teachers College at Columbia University (New

York City), where he took courses in history of education under Paul Monroe (1869-1947),

philosophy of education under John Angus MacVanne (1871-1915), psychology

under Edward Lee Thorndike(1874-1949), and philosophy under Frederick James

Eugene Woodbridge (1867-1940) and John Dewey. In 1908 Kilpatrick wrote in his diary:

"Professor Dewey has made a great difference in my thinking." Dewey wrote to

MacVannel and said the following about Kilpatrick: "He is the best [student] I ever

had."[ Dewey was Kilpatrick's most important professor and mentor while Kilpatrick was

a student at Teachers College. Kilpatrick spent his professional career and the rest of his

long life at Teachers College, Columbia University (TCCU), where he was instructor in

history of education (1909-1911), received a Ph.D. in 1911 with his thesis (supervised by

Paul Monroe) titled The Dutch Schools of New Netherland and Colonial New

York (published in 1912 in various editions), was assistant professor of philosophy of

education (1911–1915), associate professor of philosophy of education (1915–1918), full

professor of philosophy of education (1918–1937), and emeritus professor thereafter.

Kilpatrick's 1st wife was Mary (Marie) Beman Guyton (November 12, 1874 - May 29,

1907). William and Mary married on December 27, 1898, and they had three children.

William's 2nd wife was Margaret Manigault Pinckney (December 4, 1861 - November 24,
1938). William and Margaret were married on November 26, 1908. William's 3rd and final

marriage was to Marion Isabella Ostrander (December 23, 1891 - January 29, 1975) on

May 8, 1940, she having been his secretary.

Kilpatrick taught summers at the University of Georgia, 1906, 1908, and 1909; the

University of the South (Sewanee), 1907; was visiting professor, Northwestern University,

1937–38, and taught summer sessions there, 1939–1941; taught summer sessions,

Stanford University, 1938; University of Kentucky, 1942; University of North Carolina,

1942; and University of Minnesota, 1946. His trips abroad included school visits, lectures,

and meetings with prominent educators in Italy, Switzerland, and France, May–June

1912; Europe and Asia, August 1926-June 1927; and round the world, August–December

1929.

He received honorary LL.D. degrees from Mercer University, 1926; Columbia University,

1929; and Bennington College, 1938 (which he helped found in 1923 and where he was

president of the board of trustees, 1931–38); the honorary D.H.L. degree from the College

of Jewish Studies, 1952; and the Brandeis Award for humanitarian service, 1953.

After retiring from TCCU, 1937, he was president of the New York Urban League, 1941–

51; chairman of American Youth for World Youth, 1946–51; chairman of the Bureau of

International Education, 1940–51.

Kilpatrick had several critics but many more admirers and followers. His eighty-fifth

birthday, November 20, 1956, celebrated at Horace Mann Auditorium, TCCU, resulted in

a special March 1957 issue of Progressive Education, "William Heard Kilpatrick Eighty-

Fifth Anniversary," containing 10 articles. Both heralded and criticized as John Dewey's
chief educational interpreter, Kilpatrick was a leading advocate of progressive education.

He died after a long illness at age 93 on February 13, 1965 in New York.

Philosophy of education

Kilpatrick developed the Project Method for early childhood education, which was a form

of Progressive Education that organized curriculum and classroom activities around a

subject's central theme. He believed that the role of a teacher should be that of a "guide"

as opposed to an authoritarian figure. Kilpatrick believed that children should direct their

own learning according to their interests and should be allowed to explore their

environment, experiencing their learning through the natural senses.[7] Proponents of

Progressive Education and the Project Method reject traditional schooling that focuses

on memorization, rote learning, strictly organized classrooms (desks in rows; students

always seated), and typical forms of assessment. He has been described as a develop

mentalist.

Kilpatrick published Foundations Of Method - Informal Talks On Teaching in 1925.

Hilda Taba

Hilda Taba (7 December 1902 in Kooraste, Estonia – 6 July 1967 in San

Francisco, California) was an architect, a curriculum theorist, a curriculum reformer, and

a teacher educator. Taba was born in the small village of Kooraste, Estonia. Her mother's

name was Liisa Leht, and her father was a schoolmaster whose name was Robert Taba.

Hilda Taba began her education at the Kanepi Parish School. She then attended

the Võru’s Girls’ Grammar School and earned her undergraduate degree in English and

Philosophy at the University of Tartu. When Taba was given the opportunity to attend Bryn

Mawr College in Pennsylvania, she earned her master's degree. Following the completion

of her degree at Bryn Mawr College, she attended Teachers College at Columbia

University. She applied for a job at the University of Tartu but was turned down because

she was female, so she became curriculum director at the Dalton School in New York

City. In 1951, Taba accepted an invitation to become a professor at San Francisco State

College, now known as San Francisco State University

Author

Taba was a student of John Dewey; she wrote her first dissertation after studying with

him and wrote a total of seven books. Her dissertation entitled Dynamics of Education: A

Methodology of Progressive Educational Thought (1932) focused on educating for

democracy. She discussed how children should learn how to relate to one another

through democratic relationships. Two other key ideas in her dissertation included how

learning should involve dynamic, interrelated, and interdependent processes and how

educators are accountable for the delivery and the evaluation of the curriculum. She also

believed educational curriculum should focus on teaching students to think rather than
simply to regurgitate facts. After working with John Dewey, Benjamin Bloom, Ralph W.

Tyler, Deborah Elkins, and Robert Havighurst, she wrote a book entitled Curriculum

Development: Theory and Practice (1962).

Taba explains a process for what educators should teach and how they can accomplish

desired student outcomes. In order for teachers to teach effectively, they need to

understand the three levels of knowledge. Taba lists them as facts, basic ideas and

principles, and concepts. Too much factual information is often presented very quickly,

so students do not make connections between the new information and the information

stored in their brains. Hilda Taba explains how when facts are simply memorized and not

connected to previously known information, students forget the memorized facts within

approximately two years. Taba says basic ideas and principles should be selected based

on what information children are able to learn at their ages and based on what information

has scientific validity. The final level of knowledge, concepts, involves students using

knowledge from all content areas to predict outcomes or effects.

Approach

Because Taba died in her sixties while she was still an inspiring educator, her students

continued her work. Many of her students, who were members of the Institute for Staff

Development in Miami, used Taba's ideas to create four thinking strategies known as the

Taba approach. The four strategies are concept development, interpretation of data,

application of generalizations, and interpretations of feelings, attitudes and values. Using

all four strategies, the Taba approach's goal is to facilitate students in thinking more

efficiently. Based on Taba's methods, “to think” means “helping them [students] to

formulate data into conceptual patterns, to verbalize relationships between discrete

segments of data, to make inferences from data, to make generalizations on the basis of

data and to test these generalizations, and to become sensitive to such corollary

relationships as cause and effect and similarities and differences.”

Taba's strategies for encouraging students to think focus on the teacher as the mediator

rather than the teacher as the lecturer. When utilizing the Taba approach, the teacher

leads the discussion but encourages the students to share their opinions and to relate

their own ideas to their peers’ ideas. The teacher must not judge the students by their

answers and can neither agree nor disagree with their responses. Phrases such as

“That’s not quite what I had in mind,” are not acceptable when using the Taba approach.

Even positive phrases such as “Correct,” or “Now you’re thinking,” are too judgmental for

teachers to say. Along with verbal feedback, the teacher should avoid giving nonverbal

cues such as smiling during certain students’ responses and scratching his or her head

during other students’ responses. The teacher's role in the discussion is to encourage the

students to expand on their classmates’ ideas or to ask students to clarify their own ideas.

Legacy

Through Hilda Taba's teachings and through her books, Taba greatly contributed to

American education. In a 1970 survey of over two hundred educators who had

participated in training concerning the Taba approach, nearly all of the educators said the

strategies were valuable to their classrooms. Some of the teachers even reported that

Taba's approach to teaching was “the most valuable teaching technique they had ever

acquired.”
References:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Heard_Kilpatrick

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilda_Taba