My Developmental Stages In LearningTheories / Stage Two - 1955 - 1966

Teaching Experiences

During the 1954 school year I got a call from a teacher friend telling me that I needed to move to where he was teaching at the Barrington, Illinois, school district. I spent the next 11 years as an elementary - junior high school teacher and curriculum director in schools based on Progressive to Humanistic and Cognitive psychologies. I wrote my masters thesis on an Individualized Reading Program in my fourth grade classroom.

In 1963, I was accepted in the new doctoral program at Northern Illinois University.  

Educational Teaching Philosophy

The Discovery Method of Learning was becoming a part of the American public school 

system and I was strongly attracted to the thinking of three of the people instrumental in this movement.

Jerome Bruner, one of the most influential cognitive psychologists of the 20th century asserted that students learn far more effectively when they are active participants in the learning process – not passive recipients of information. His Discovery Learning Theory, introduced in 1961, fundamentally changed how educators think about teaching and helped create the student-centered pedagogy we have in our schools today.

Jeannette Veatch was known for her contributions in the field of reading; her challenging of basal readers - calling for children’s reading rights, and the promotion of the literature-based, learner-centered approach called Individualized Reading. Children are selecting their own reading materials.

Grace Fernald, whose Kinesthetic Method became a very important addition to my version of Individualized Learning. She worked with children who had spelling and reading problems using a step-by-step process from tracing letters to comprehension of the text. She is  also known for her creation of the multi-sensory approach called the VAKT technique, visual - auditory - kinesthetic - tactile senses. It presents new words to students through all their senses, making it easier for them to understand and remember.

College Educational Philosophies

I attained the Masters degree in Education at Northern Illinois State University in 1957. This introduced me to high level research and knowledge relative to various psychological theories. For one reaction, I was intrigued with Gestalt psychology including parts and wholes, laws of perception, and figure-ground. 

I learned more about Cognitive, Humanistic, and Progressive psychologies. I became a member of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD). I read the 1962 yearbook, Perceiving, Behaving, Becoming, and learned more of the works of Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, and Rollo May who were joined in the field of Education by Arthur Combs, Donald Snygg, and Earl Kelly.

I was impressed with Donald Roos, Social Psychology professor. I switched my Major and Minor studies from History and Psychology to Psychology and History. As stated above, Northern Illinois University added a Doctorate to their programs in 1963. I applied and was accepted as a member of the first group in the program and I was awarded the doctorate in the summer of 1966.