English Journal - Volume 49, Issue 4, 1960

How can the teaching of writing in the high school be made more effective? This article, as well as the following two, is addressed to this question. A system of individual conferences furnishes one answer for the teachers in the Wyoming, Ohio, High School in which Miss Emig teaches. Wyoming is a suburb of Cincinnati.

The editor is reasonably certain that there will be few neutral reactions to this article! Formulated in an institute for teachers at Rutgers University last summer, the administrative plan for teaching English outlined here is both imaginative and controversial. Several schools are planning to carry on foundation-financed experiments with the proposal. NCTE officials report that this plan, and others having to do with utilization of teacher time, will be discussed at a special program during the Golden Anniversary Convention in Chicago next November. Mr. Diederich is a research associate in the Educational Testing Service, Princeton, New Jersey.

For several years schools have been experimenting with plans in which educated lay persons, usually housewives, assist teachers with the reading of student compositions. No objective evaluation of the results is possible yet, but this article presents the personal evaluation of a “lay reader” who is also a part-time high school English teacher in Schenectady, New York.

Team teaching of large classes is an innovation which has gained much momentum. The schools of Jefferson County, Colorado, have experimented with the plan under a grant from the Fund for the Advancement of Education. In this article Mr. Smith lists the advantages of team teaching of English as he and his colleagues see them.

Journal readers may remember that the September 1959 issue carried a review in “The Public Arts” of An Introduction to the Humanities, twelve half-hour filmed lessons prepared by the Council for a Television Course in the Humanities under a grant from the Fund for the Advancement of Education. In this article Mrs. Goldstein, whose classes at Newton High School, Newtonville, Massachusetts, used the films, reports on the experience. Her report is relevant not only to a specific experiment but also to television instruction in English generally.