| BY SALLY ACHARYA The three-year-old girl in the Romanian orphanage weighed only 18 pounds. But there was a sparkle about her, and Russ Harrison and Natalie Shirley could sense her intelligence and wit. They knew Charlotte would struggle in life, but they were willing to struggle with her. It was soon clear they were right on all counts. Charlotte had a remarkable memory, but couldn’t recognize letters, or hold a crayon, or do the other things her classmates in kindergarten were learning easily.
Photo by Clay Blackmore |
The family had an advantage. They lived in Washington, D.C., and were able to enroll her in the Lab School, an innovative school founded by AU professor Sally Smith. By age 12, after a half-dozen years in the pioneering program, Charlotte had developed into an inquisitive girl who loved history and was so adept at asking questions that her father called her a “future Katie Couric.” Then the family made plans to move to Oklahoma City. The Harrisons found themselves in the same position as the parents and educators who e-mail Smith from across America, and even across the world. They knew the Lab approach works. But Oklahoma City had no Lab School. “The top 50 cities in the U.S. need a Lab School, and the top 300 cities around the world need one,” Harrison says. And like an increasing number of parents and educators, he set out to make it happen. Parents discover Lab approach Most parents learn only slowly that a child has learning disabilities. One child may be late to learn to speak; another may know all about dinosaurs, but can’t tell a “b” from a “d” or grasp the difference between addition and subtraction. In their quest to help their children, parents often turn into avid readers of research on learning disabilities. For many, that means they become familiar with the work of Smith, who heads AU’s master’s program in Special Education: Learning Disabilities, and founded the Lab School. The school uses a multisensory approach devised by Smith that immerses children in the arts while teaching them math and science, Shakespeare and Dante, Greek mythology and the stock market. The Lab School is so successful it sends more than 90 percent of its graduates to college. The school has won praise from the U.S. Department of Education and National Center for Learning Disabilities, and its methods are being studied from India to Saudi Arabia. Some people are so impressed they push to bring the teaching approach—or even a full-fledged version of the Lab School—to their own cities. In Philadelphia, a group of parents has been key to duplicating the Lab program in a school that opens this fall in a historic neighborhood near the Schuylkill River. In Milwaukee, a mother who first encountered Smith’s ideas on television helped to start a Lab-influenced charter school for youth failing in public schools, and another charter school inspired by the same ideas is opening this fall. Parents on opposite ends of the continent—in San Diego and Wilmington, Delaware—have launched plans for versions of the Lab School, and inquiries have come in during the last few months from as far away as Nebraska, California, South Dakota, and Texas. This summer, at the urging of Charlotte’s parents—and convinced by years of data on the Lab School’s success—teachers from her new Oklahoma school traveled to Washington for training in a unique Lab School approach that they will be replicating. It’s called the Academic Club Methodology, and it was invented by Smith in the 1960s to help her own son.
Photo by Jeff Watts
Visitors from Oklahoma City’s Trinity School, seated in chairs at right, learn how to run an academic club like the “Tarzan and the Jungle Club” they’re watching at the Lab School of Washington, led by Stephen Wolfe, CAS ’04. |
Instead of being divided into grades, students begin their school careers by, in essence, moving through time. The youngest children, from six to eight, spend part of each day in the Cave Club, where they don “animal skins,” sit around a paper fire, and are led by a teacher known as Wise Elder. Each day, the Cave Club members line up outside their classrooms and give a password, such as “Cro-Magnon,” or “opposable thumb.” Once inside, they recite the opening ritual, with suitable gestures: “We slowly rise up like Australopithecus. We use our hands like Homo habilis. We travel like Homo erectus. We speak and communicate like Homo sapiens.” A purpose to the play There is a purpose to the play. “I teach them content, but also the schema to build content on—like cause and effect, sequencing, recognizing patterns,” says Wise Elder Amanda Wolf, CAS ’96, one of many AU graduates who teach or intern at the Lab School and its offshoots. Smith views learning disabilities in terms of neurological immaturity. Most children, she explains, grasp concepts such as sequence and pattern in preschool and build on those skills to read, write, and do math. But if they don’t build the foundation, they won’t learn. Frequently, the challenge is compounded by attention deficit disorder and dyslexia. In a test of intelligence, or in a conversation, these children may be strikingly bright. But they live in a world of disorder, bombarded by stimuli they can’t sort into component parts. They may not see how 3-1 is different from 1-3, or grasp how letters make words, or remember a series of oral directions. So in the Lab School approach, school days are full of chances to internalize a sense of order while drawing a child’s attention by appealing to the love of play. After the Cave Club comes the Gods Club, where children portray (and learn about) Egyptian, Greek, and Roman gods. After that comes Knights and Ladies Club, Renaissance Club, Museum Club, and Industrialists Club. 
Photo by Jeff Watts
The red artists’ caps mark these Baltimore Lab School students as members of the “Renaissance Club,” taught by Susan Rome. Over the years, a lot of knowledge is transmitted—often through arts projects planned to subtly incorporate math, science, history, and life skills. For the Baltimore seven-year-olds in the Gods Club, the experience of building a “sarcophagus” was so exciting, recalls former Lab School of Baltimore director Tanee Trivedy, CAS ’94, that “at one child’s home, the process of mummification with all its grisly details was the main topic of conversation at the Thanksgiving dinner!” Given that many children enter the program with language disabilities and may stumble over grammar or have trouble recalling words, that was quite an achievement. Students don’t spend all day in a cave, a pyramid, or a Renaissance studio. There are also homerooms with desks and traditional academics. In Philadelphia, Jaclyn Ford, CAS ’03, ’04, will teach the 3Rs in unorthodox ways. Some students find it easiest to grasp the concept of syllables or do multiplication if they handle objects or hop across a room, she says. “If they learn differently,” Smith says, “they have to be taught differently.” The teachers, speech therapists, occupational therapists, and others on the learning team observe and evaluate each child’s progress to see what works and what doesn’t. Searching for ‘best practices’ Pat Roberts and Nancy Blair of Philadelphia had no link to AU or the Lab School when they began looking for best practices in special education, Roberts recalls. “Like many parents of children with learning disabilities, we’ve probably spent the last five years educating ourselves, we took courses and read research, and we recognized in doing our own research that there was a dire need for this kind of program.” They ended up helping to found and run the Academy in Manayunk, whose first academic year begins this fall. If a potential new school does its own fund raising, finds a building, and forms a relationship with a local university as the Academy in Manayunk has done, the Lab School is willing to, in effect, license it to use the curriculum, and train the teachers and staff. Teachers or schools can also subscribe to the just-launched Academic Club Teaching Service, which offers guidance and training in the Academic Club Methodology. Trinity School in Oklahoma City will be the first to take advantage of the service. The impact isn’t always formal. Smith’s ideas have had an impact in unexpected places. One is Milwaukee. More than a decade ago, Nicola Leather heard about the Lab School on television and felt wistfully that it would be wonderful for her daughter. She went on to become a teacher, had a chance to attend a Lab School workshop, and has since cofounded Wings Academy public charter school, which serves urban children from 4th to 11th grade with an arts-based, multisensory curriculum. “I still have all the handouts from that workshop, and I use them,” says Leather. The ideas do travel. Trivedy was an undergraduate in India when she first came across a book by Smith and determined to go halfway around the world to AU for graduate school. Now she’s one of several AU graduates using and teaching the multisensory methodology in India, while a Saudi alum is teaching the approach at a Jeddah university. Lab methods aren’t just useful for special educators, says Jennifer Dross, CAS ’93. She used the methods in teaching and tutoring. Now an at-home mother in Maryland, Dross says, “Every kid should learn like they teach at the Lab School.” Children tend to agree. “A lot of the siblings of our students want to go here,” says teacher Noah Bicknell, CAS ’00. “To us, that’s a real measure of success.” top |
