The Effective Schools movement, thinking skills, brain-based learning, and Dimensions of Learning are a few innovations through which Ron Brandt has encouraged educators worldwide to engage their students in learning. Though he is retiring from ASCD, his thoughtful work continues—and perseveres in our efforts.
You have interviewed many people in your tenure with Educational Leadership, and you have persuaded many outstanding writers and thinkers to contribute to the journal. Who are one or two that stand out in your mind?
I've talked with a lot of exciting people. What an opportunity—to meet the leaders of our profession and ask the kinds of questions that any educator would love to ask. One of the most fascinating was Lee Shulman, because he is so insightful and witty. One who was a lot of fun was Sy Fliegel, who talked with me for a theme issue on school choice. Fliegel was assistant superintendent in the New York City district that pioneered school choice with Central Park East, Deborah Meier's school. What a sense of humor he has: "I drive half way across Manhattan to get my hair cut by a barber that I especially like. Now that's important! But school? That's not important. Just go to the school in your neighborhood!"
Who do you consider to be major influences on your thinking about schools?
Again, there are so many. But certainly high on the list would be David Perkins, with his ideas about intelligence and thinking skills; Al Shanker on restructuring schools; Bruce Joyce on coaching; Linda Darling-Hammond on the teaching profession; and Ben Bloom, who talked with me about mastery learning and later about his fascinating research on talent development. And, of course, there's Ted Sizer, and Lauren Resnick, and Howard Gardner . . . .
You mentioned David Perkins first. Can you talk a little more about how Perkins may have contributed to your developing ideas about cognitive science and thinking skills?
When I met David, he was involved in Project Intelligence, an effort by the government of Venezuela to improve the intelligence of all the people in their country, especially pupils in their public schools. David was co-editor of a landmark scholarly book on teaching thinking. Since that time he has written occasionally for Educational Leadership and has given many speeches and workshops.
David's strengths include his ability to write gracefully, his sense of humor, and his imaginative approach. His major themes are that we can understand intelligence and, with practice, can become better thinkers. He communicates these ideas through stories.
In one speech, David reminded his audience of a children's story about a little engine that kept jumping off the tracks and running off into the grass. The big engines decided they had to teach him a lesson, so they hid in the grass. When he left the tracks, they jumped up and waved red flags; the little engine went back on the tracks and never left them again. David said we do this to kids—we make them all get on the tracks and think the "right way."
To illustrate creativity, David told a story about a frog in a toilet. He said when he was in Venezuela, he went into a restroom and heard a noise in the toilet. He took the lid off the toilet tank and found a frog there. Someone had put the frog in the toilet for insect control! David frequently illustrates his ideas with such homely, humorous examples.
Creativity and thinking skills—those are probably among the themes that Educational Leadership made understandable to educators. Which ideas do you think were most influential?
Thinking skills was certainly one—but the first were effective schools and effective teaching. In my first year as editor, Gordon Cawelti suggested that we do a theme issue on effective schools. I didn't know much about it, so I talked with a man I had seen at conferences whom I greatly admired, B. Othanel Smith. Bunny Smith recommended several people as authors, including Jere Brophy, David Berliner, Penelope Peterson, Ron Edmonds, and Madeline Hunter. I didn't know what all of them were going to write, but it turned out to be a strong issue. That was October 1979, the first issue that I planned. The issue was reprinted in quantity and widely used.
A couple of years later, I began hearing about various programs designed to teach thinking. We did an issue in 1981 called "Teaching Thinking Skills," and I decided there was something very big here. I had sponsored a staff development program known as BASICS when I was an associate superintendent in Lincoln, Nebraska, so I was already interested in the topic. I heard that Art Costa might be interested in it, too, so I called Art and we put together an institute in Denver in 1984, the first of many that ASCD held on the topic. We also planned a theme issue for the October 1984 Educational Leadership—and David Perkins was one contributor. In fact, we collected so much material that we published two "Thinking Skills" issues in a row. And new angles kept popping up, like "How does effective teaching relate to thinking skills?" In all, we did five issues on the topic.
Other publications and programs came out of that, too.
Yes. I asked Art to do a resource book, so he edited Developing Minds. We did videos and books. A group of us, led by Robert Marzano, wrote Dimensions of Thinking, which became the basis for our professional development program Dimensions of Learning, which is still going strong.
Can you think of some trends that were ahead of their time?
It was never my intention to be too far ahead. Our issue on cooperative learning, for example, came just when a lot of readers were ready for it—December 1989—five years after the book Circles of Learning (by David and Roger Johnson and others) was first published.
But I believe we may have been a little ahead with the articles we published on brain research by writers like Leslie Hart and Renate Nummela. We published a set of articles on brain research in 1981 and an article by Renate in 1986, five years before we published Making Connections by Renate Nummela Caine and Geoffrey Caine. Many educators are interested in brain functioning these days. Over the years we have published material based on brain research that some people thought went too far beyond the data. But I believe visionaries like John Abbott, Robert Sylwester, and the Caines need to be heard.
What did you find most challenging about your job as Executive Editor?
The time to get everything done. What I had to do in some cases was the best I could under the circumstances—with a small staff but big ambitions. I read all the manuscripts myself and sent those I thought were the best out for external review. I shaped each issue, working routinely on Saturdays. There was no time to worry about revisions, so the editors ended up doing much of the work.
What did you like most about the job?
Oh, well, almost everything. I love to think about educational ideas. I like to read and write about them. One of the things that I enjoy most is fixing things up. That is, some people love to write—but when they get their thoughts on paper, they want to move on to something else. There's nothing I like better than getting something in a rough stage and then refining it. I like bringing out authors' experiences and helping them make their point—by moving things around, highlighting their examples, making their points clear, concise, and specific. Natural-born editors love to do that—making changes so that the reader will understand better. It's just a thrill.
So, as editor, you were a stand-in for the reader?
When I first began, I had no experience being an editor. If I liked the article, I would publish it. To me, the reader was me. I thought of ASCD members as like myself. I was a former associate superintendent in a medium-sized district in Nebraska. Like many ASCD members, I had been a teacher, a principal, and a staff development director. I knew about developing curriculum; I had worked with the board of education. When I started as editor, then, I chose what appealed to me.
I like articles that give readers a glimpse of the incredibly complex process of moving a school or a whole school system in a particular direction. Our specialty, of course, is articles that tell a story in personal terms, with warmth and conviction—and with a point that is useful to educators.
What a pleasure it is to be reading a pile of manuscripts and come across an article so powerful that you'll never forget it. I think of a piece called "Magic" by Carolyn Mamchur that we published in 1981. When we were preparing to publish Teaching and Joy, which is a compilation of articles collected by Bob Sornson and Jim Scott, I suggested that they include "Magic," so it would be available to a new set of readers. It brings tears to my eyes whenever I read it again, and in just a couple of pages helps convey what teaching is really about.
You mentioned your work as an educator in Nebraska. Can you say more about how your experiences influenced your thinking through the years?
Well, I don't know exactly how my philosophy of education came about. But I did go to a one-room school, and then to a very small high school (about 150 students). I worked for a few years in a radio station and was married before I went to college. I was a serious student and read many critiques of public education, books that were not assigned in my education classes. And I gave some of my education professors a really bad time because, like many of today's critics, I was impatient with the "educationists" and their fuzzy approach. I liked the intellectual life; I loved my English Literature classes. I was eager to be a demanding secondary teacher in the image of my professors.
My first teaching position was in a junior high school, and my style of teaching turned out to be more progressive than traditional. I was lucky in that I taught English and social studies in a two-hour block of time. Every week, I would write dozens of activities, and the kids would choose how they wanted to learn.
They had fun, but they learned academic things. I would say, "If you kids go to college someday, you will have to write essay exams, so we're going to learn to write essay exams." Near the end of a six-week unit, I said, "OK, if you were the teacher, what questions would you ask?" I would get six or eight really terrific questions, and we would narrow them down to three. Then we would discuss the questions and make an outline of the points they might make. Then on Friday I would say, "I've decided we're going to do question two." They would write and write—and they got a grade on it. I think those kids probably learned a lot in 8th grade.
What did I learn? I learned to adapt—to do what seemed best for the real, living students I was responsible for.
You lived quite a few years in West Africa. How did those experiences influence your ideas about education?
I went to Nigeria in the '60s to teach in a teacher training college—something like the normal schools we used to have in the United States. The students there were about the same age as American high schoolers; and the school prepared them to be primary (elementary) teachers. I was first assigned to teach the oldest, fifth-year students. We read Shakespeare and other classic English poets. Their response was amazing. The Nigerian students loved language—many of them spoke two or three languages. They would have debates after school, for example, and use the biggest words they knew. When one of them used an elegant phrase, they would all cheer.
Now, English is Nigeria's official language, so facility in English is one of the things that separates good students from weaker ones. So I asked to work with first-year students to help them get a good grasp of English. The principal assigned me a class—and a large block of time—and I took the students on field trips to places where people used English, to help the kids learn about the modern world (they came from villages in the country). We went into town—to the bank, the post office, the hospital. We talked with people in English about their work, and the kids were fascinated. I even took them to the airport, where the officials actually let the kids walk onto an airplane and sit in the passenger seats.
Why did I do that? Well, I believed they needed actual experience as the base for further abstract education. I wanted them to develop intellectual skills and master academic ideas, but in their situation an experience-based approach seemed the best way to go.
From the years you have observed and written about education, what lessons have you learned about how to effect change?
My most direct experience has been with manageable changes in publishing Educational Leadership, like moving to desktop publishing, editing on networked computers, and communicating through e-mail. Those were changes our staff made, and achieving them took lots of personal attention, training, support, and leadership.
But changing schools is far more complex. And on that score, the many articles we've published from teachers, principals, and superintendents telling their stories are more enlightening—and they're what I'm proudest of, because they convey the best qualities of innovative educators: commitment to what's best for their students and willingness to take risks to help them learn.
