An Apple for This Teacher of Teachers : Veteran Principal Madeline Hunter Envisions a New Era of Educational Enlightenment

“Practically everyone knows there’s plenty wrong with our schools,” Madeline Hunter says. “The good news is that education is undergoing steady improvement precisely because we’re intensely analytical and critical of it.”

Hardly anyone is more analytical and critical--and supportive--than Hunter, a widely acclaimed teacher of teachers.

Hunter’s telephones ring constantly. Among the most frequent callers are school administrators eager to learn the latest, day by day, in terms of upgrading the educational experience: How to make good teachers, how to spur kids to learn faster, how to cure many of the ills of education.

‘Dial-a-Miracle Help’

“It might sound like they’re asking for dial-a-miracle help,” Hunter says, “but actually the calls are a healthy symptom of a new era of enlightenment.”

Tall and slim, with alert brown eyes and a grandmotherly empathy, Madeline Hunter, 70, is a pioneer of the new era.

“Education,” she said, “is at the breakthrough stage reached by medicine in another age--a time when scientists discovered it was germs and not evil spirits that caused trouble. We have identified cause-and-effect relationships in education. The evidence of what’s right and what’s wrong contains lots of surprises.”

A psychologist as well as an educator, Hunter served for more than 20 years as principal of the University Elementary School (known as UES) at UCLA, an experimental laboratory whose research findings sent shock waves through the educational establishment.

Among the findings at UES: The most common reasons given for school failure simply don’t stand up.

A Different Story

“For years,” Hunter said, “teachers, politicians and social workers have blamed low learning levels on everything from the bleak environment of the ghetto to broken homes to substandard IQs to malnutrition to poverty in general.”

But the findings gathered by Hunter and UES told a different story. “By changing nothing but the ability of the teacher to teach,” Hunter said, “we can bring about a more dramatic change in the success of a child in learning than through the manipulation of any other factor in his or her environment. We have yet to find a student who won’t learn.”

Three years ago Hunter gave up her post as UES principal to become a professor of education at UCLA. There she lectures to doctoral students, including school superintendents, principals, college professors and secondary teachers.

Additionally she has developed “Aide-ing in Education,” a videocassette program to train volunteer classroom aides for public schools, and under UCLA sponsorship she has worked on “Mastery Teaching,” a 20-tape videocassette series aimed at helping teachers to do their jobs better.

The great-granddaughter of a full-blooded Cherokee Indian, Madeline Cheek Hunter began solving educational puzzles as a schoolgirl in Los Angeles. When she took an IQ test in junior high, “I was graded one point lower than my best friend, and I nearly died of humiliation.

“But more importantly I was fascinated by the idea that a person’s intelligence could be tested merely by asking questions. I expressed so much curiosity about it, the school psychologist enlisted me to help score tests.

“I didn’t know how to spell the word psychologist, but decided I’d become one. When I told my friends, they said, ‘OK, read my palm.’ ”

Between classes at UCLA--where she earned degrees in psychology and education--she was hired as an assistant to a diagnostic psychologist. “I loved the responsibility so much,” Hunter said, “I ended up doing most of the work while she collected all the fees, but I didn’t care. She was grooming me for a career, and to me that’s what counted.”

At age 20 Hunter became a psychologist at Juvenile Hall, working with delinquents. “I kept asking myself, ‘Why is this or that kid out stealing hubcaps instead of attending school?’

“I discovered he was skipping classes because school had become a punishing place: He couldn’t read, and he was failing one subject after another. I knew I couldn’t change his family background--which often consisted of a father in prison, a mother out soliciting, a sister on drugs--but I was determined to teach him to read and do something useful with his life.”

In time Hunter became a school psychologist. Later she won promotion to principal and worked in schools ranging from Watts to Bel Air. “For quite a while,” she said, “I was bogged down at various schools in adminis-trivia: dealing with lost lunch boxes and mixed-up bus schedules. But eventually the lucky day arrived when I landed at UES.”

Along the way she met and married Robert Hunter, a now-retired Lockheed executive who worked on the high-flying U-2 spy plane and helped solve many problems in the United States missile program. They have a daughter, Cheryl, 38, a film editor; a son, Robin, 36, an elementary school principal; and two grandchildren.

At UES Hunter and her staff worked toward the goal of increasing the ability of teachers to teach. “Only 20 years ago,” she told an interviewer recently, “we were still confronted by a widespread myth that teachers are born, not made. I knew it was a myth because I had seen too many bumbling beginners--including me--turn into reasonably decent teachers.

“I’d also seen a lot of charismatic teachers, pied pipers who looked wonderful to the kids. The pied pipers managed to produce some of the happiest illiterates in the entire school. Charisma is great, but it’s neither necessary nor sufficient to be a good teacher.”

Components of Teaching

One key effort at UES, Hunter said, was aimed at identifying the components of successful teaching methods. “Consider an analogy with nutrition, which is both a science and an art. Any human, regardless of age, needs certain nutrients for health: protein, vitamins, minerals. The science part tells us you can’t get much nourishment on a diet of soft drinks and doughnuts.

“The art of nutrition is how you put the meal together. If you take turkey, mashed potatoes and green salad, shove it into a blender and whip it into a slush, you may have a nutritious meal but nobody’s going to eat it. So the art involves how you serve it up.

“At UES we identified a lot of the nutrients required for a successful school situation, to spur kids to learn. We worked with a cross section of youngsters, ages 3 to 12, carefully prescreened and brought in from many different economic and social backgrounds.

“We showed teachers what those learning nutrients are, how to put everything together in a nourishing meal. We made darned good cooks out of some and master chefs out of others.

“Just as research has identified protein’s role in the growth of muscles and bone, so we identified some basic principles that affect learning. We pulled these principles out of psychological literature and translated them into teacher talk.

“For example, a teacher might say, ‘George, how much is 12 times 12?’ Just as soon as she has singled out George, the rest of the class knows who the pigeon is, and they don’t even bother to listen. But let her say, ‘Everyone, get ready to answer the question: How much is 12 times 12?’ All the minds are in gear. The whole class is listening. Now the teacher can ask George for the answer, and everybody hears it.

The Critical Difference

“It’s a very simplistic example, but we’ve found conclusively it’s the kind of tactic that makes the critical difference between learning and and not learning.

“At another level we work on reinforcement. You and I will do what works well for us. If you can draw water by turning a lever at the kitchen sink, next time you want water you’ll turn the lever. But if you get an electric shock in the process, you’ll look for some other way of drawing water.

“Examine reinforcement in the classroom. For example, Harry wants attention, so he makes a smart remark. The teacher bawls him out, giving him plenty of attention, so he gets what he wanted.

“What the teacher should do in that situation is ignore him and continue to teach. Better yet, anticipate him. ‘Class, we’re going to be talking about aircraft today, and Harry, you know a lot about aircraft, so be sure to signal me when you can help me.’ This way the teacher elicits productive behavior from the student instead of inadvertently rewarding destructive behavior.”

Another major effort developed at UES was aimed at bringing medical research into the teaching process, and Hunter has continued to sharpen the effort. She said: “Teachers need to distinguish between benign stress that is growth-evoking, and malignant stress that results in hypertension, coronary arrest, arthritis.

“For example, if a teacher tells a child, ‘Your whole grade depends on this, so you better get busy,’ that child is probably going to fall apart under malignant stress.

“But if the teacher says, ‘Boy, you’ve already got the first paragraph done! I’ll bet you’re going to do better on this paper than you’ve ever done before,’ that child is probably going to do better because the teacher has given him confidence. Under benign stress he will stretch his competence in a healthy way. It makes a crucial difference.”

Another crucial difference occurs, Hunter said, when a teacher creates an environment where, right from the start, a youngster respects himself as a person who is worthy and competent. “A child doesn’t need to be loved at school--only at home--but he does need the feeling that he has choices about his life.

The Eager Approach

“A good teacher encourages him to approach the entire learning experience eagerly and aggressively. If the child is made afraid, he’s going to withdraw. But if the teacher expresses faith in his competence, the child’s attitude will be: ‘I see the problem is something new for me, but chances are I can deal with it.’ ”

In her lectures and seminars Hunter encourages not only teachers but principals and school district officials to take part in continuing staff development programs.

“You wouldn’t think of going to a doctor for treatment on his first day back from a five-year African safari where he had learned nothing and was hopelessly obsolete,” she said. “You wouldn’t think of going to an attorney who hadn’t kept up with the law. But in education we do have teachers who are stagnating because their school districts have failed to keep the teachers growing.

“Sad to say,” Hunter continued, “there are principals who do not know how to supervise or evaluate a teacher. Supervision refers to continuing the growth of the teacher. Evaluation refers to assigning a teacher to a category of either staying on or shipping out.

“The absence of supervision or evaluation means there are some completely inadequate teachers with whom no one has done anything. Now, obviously, a school is no better than the people in it--the teachers, supervisors, principals--and that means a lot of work has to be done on staff development.”

Hunter adds to her full days by regularly visiting schools and working with teachers at the classroom level. “One thing I keep trying to get across is, how to discipline with dignity. You see, no human can bear to lose dignity. If you humiliate kids, they won’t get mad, they’ll get even.

“One way to discipline with dignity can be summed up as control by proximity. If, for example, a kid is drawing a motorcycle, when he should be listening, the teacher can deal with it 90% of the time by simply standing next to him. He knows why the teacher is there, but nobody else knows, so the student hasn’t lost face. Or if two girls are talking about a birthday party or a date, just walking over and teaching from that part of the room will stop their talking.

“Another way to discipline with dignity is to use an example that involves the student’s name in a positive way. Suppose Bob is drawing that motorcycle while you are trying to teach multiplication. So you tell the class: ‘OK, Bob has played nine games and made five home runs in every game. How many total home runs? Bob, be my assistant teacher and call on somebody to answer.’

On a Positive Basis

“This engages him on a positive basis. It’s very different from saying, ‘Bob, put that away and pay attention,’ which only humiliates him publicly.

“My point is a teacher can be tougher than pig iron when it comes to discipline, but without sacrificing the student’s place in the world.

“Another way is to give a secret signal: just walk by the student and touch the paper he’s drawing on. Nothing has to be said; he knows that you know.”

Hunter also teaches other approaches to discipline with dignity. “One is to use a private reminder. For example, tell the class: ‘Everybody close your eyes and be thinking of a question you would ask about the chapter so far.’ And meantime you go over to the student who’s out of order and say, ‘I know you have to be having a hard time taking care of yourself. Can you handle this or would you like some help from me?’ This lets him make the choice.”

A variation is to correct an error without causing a loss of dignity. “If you ask a child, ‘what’s 5 times 9?’ and the child replies, ‘40,’ you can say ‘no’ and go to another student, but that first kid is going to be so humiliated he will never volunteer another answer.

“How much better to give a prompt and say, ‘You would be right if I’d asked 5 times 8, because 5 times 8 is 40.’ Or you could give a different prompt and say, ‘If you went to the store and bought 8 packs of nickel candy, that would be 40 cents, but I want you to buy an extra pack to keep for yourself, so you need one more nickel. How much would that be?’

“Now, 90% of the time the kid will come out with the right answer. You say, ‘Right, and I’m going to come back to that later, see if I can catch you.’ In this way you dignify the prompt and you hold the child accountable.”

Hunter has also given plenty of attention to the nature of homework, and she takes a characteristically enlightened view of it. “Homework should deal with something a student pretty much knows how to do, and its purpose should be to increase fluency and proficiency. Homework should not involve original learning, because the beginning is like wet cement: a mistake is very hard to correct.

“What I’m saying is against motherhood and apple pie, but in fact a lot of homework is just drivel. Teachers grade homework when they haven’t the foggiest idea of who did it, or how much help the student was given. It reminds me of a marvelous cartoon of a kid handing a paper to his dad and saying, ‘You flunked the homework assignment last night. But don’t feel badly--none of the other dads knew how to do it either.’

Cutting Down on Paper Work

“I tell teachers: instead of checking whether a student has done his homework, check whether he’s learned it. If you give 10 problems in algebra as homework, when the students come in next day check them on one or two similar but not identical problems.

“The real question is whether the student learned what the homework was designed to accomplish, and this can be checked quickly in class. This also has the virtue of cutting down on the blizzard of paper work that teachers have to deal with.”

Hunter also urges teachers to use transfer theory: “Give students examples they can relate to,” to help them grasp concepts and situations that might otherwise seem elusive or distant.

Hunter cites “Romeo and Juliet” to illustrate her approach. “I’d tell the class: ‘Suppose in high school you met a really neat kid you were dying to date, but you knew your parents would have a fit about it. What would your parents object to? They don’t know the neat kid, but they do know the family is of a different race, creed or color, or maybe on welfare.

“ ‘Well, if you really were crazy about that kid, but your parents wouldn’t let you date, you’d probably meet without telling your parents.

“ ‘OK, you’re going to read a story about exactly the same situation in old Italy.’

“The essence of transfer theory,” Hunter said, “is to hook into something the student already knows, and then to bring it forward to accelerate present or future learning.”

One subject Hunter teaches at the doctoral level to superintendents, principals and teachers is called “motivation and attribution theory.”

She said: “Most success is attributed to either native ability or to the competition’s deficiencies. For example, ‘I’m a great tennis player because I’m well coordinated,’ or ‘because my opponent was so terrible he made me look good.’

“But the only factor we completely control is effort. As distinct from the myth that, for example, so-and-so is a marvelous writer because he or she has a knack for it, people simply don’t look at the many hours the writer puts into listening, writing, revising, editing.

Roll Over Without Trying

“Unfortunately, many kids have learned that their effort doesn’t pay off, because they’ve been given jobs that were too difficult for them, or they’ve been told they don’t have the ability to do something, and consequently they just roll over without trying.

“We know, however, that effort is extremely important, and we also know that ‘feeling tone’ affects effort: most of us are motivated to do those things we find are pleasant, and to withdraw from those things that are unpleasant.

“How to apply this in a classroom? If a student is not putting forth effort, it’s OK to be a little bit unpleasant, to say, for example, ‘I can see you don’t feel like working now. That’s OK, you can finish it at noon, if your prefer.’

“That leaves the student in charge--he decides whether it’s going to be now or at noon, but there’s no question it’s going to be finished.

“Just as soon as he begins working, the teacher can come over and say, ‘You know, you’ve really got a good start on that.’ The pleasant feeling tone has been restored, and it’s one way to teach people to be successful.

“Another way is by using self and using novelty. Suppose a kid is not the least bit interested in, say, the religions of the Far East. I’d say, ‘You know, if you were Buddhist, you’d really believe in reincarnation, and that what you didn’t do to a satisfactory degree in this life you’d have to re-do in another. Suppose you were Buddhist. What would you have to re-do in your next life?’

“This gets kids to thinking. One girl said, ‘I’d sure have to wash a mountain of dishes again.’ Another said, ‘I’d sure have to re-do a lot of term papers.’

“The obvious lesson: by involving the student--because we’re all interested in ourselves--you can increase effort.”

Hunter has found endless ironies in the process of teaching teachers. “What I see over and over again,” she said, “is a ‘never use a preposition to end a sentence with’ syndrome.

“I’m especially sensitive to it because of an experience I had as an undergraduate: my psychology professor lectured for two solid hours to tell us about all the research that showed the typical attention span was 20 minutes!

“Many times at the graduate level I find that instructors actually violate theory while they are supposed to be teaching it. Just recently I saw a professor--who had been in one of my classes--deliver a lecture to teachers on the crucial importance of using diagrams. She talked for an hour and not once did she use a diagram.

Hadn’t Thought of It

“Afterward I asked her if she had a special reason for not doing precisely what she was telling the teachers to do. She confessed that she hadn’t thought of it.”

Hunter’s main frustration at the doctoral level is that superintendents, principals and teachers “want to memorize theory, and without incorporating it into their own behavior, or modeling it, they simply tell other teachers how to do certain things. It’s like the teacher who shouts, ‘Stop yelling at me!’ ”

Many in the educational process are undeniably excellent, but the question remains: how have people risen to become principals and superintendents of schools without knowing certain basic principles?

“That’s a question we are all asking,” Hunter said. “One explanation is that there are those--an excellent teacher or an excellent administrator--who have stumbled onto some of these methods without even knowing what was causing what.

“It’s almost like the medicine man who does a lot of singing and dancing and collecting gnats’ eyelashes by midnight, and then picks a quinine branch to stir the magic brew, and gives it to the malaria patient.”

Too much current teaching is done intuitively instead of deliberately, in Hunter’s opinion, “and intuition is just not that reliable. Many times I’ve wished for divine revelation and it hasn’t come. But specific knowledge you can pull up deliberately and consistently.

“Right now the ‘in’ term in education is ‘metacognition.’ It means that teaching should be running on two tracks--one, where you’re responding to the student, and two, where you’re watching yourself teach.

“For example, while you are speaking to the class, you see two kids talking to each other. The monitoring part of your brain wonders if they will stop or if you will have to stop them. Meantime, you keep on speaking to the class.

“To do your job effectively, you have to know good theory and put it into practice. So you have to think about your own thinking while you are thinking, and that’s what is called metacognition.”

Hunter encourages teachers to network and to coach each other, and especially to observe each other, “because if you’re watching, you can see a lot more than if you’re engaged in it.

“Occasionally,” Hunter said, “I meet a reluctant dragon who says, ‘Well, I’m a good teacher, why should I learn anything else?’

“And I reply: ‘You may be the best teacher in the school today, but you’re not going to be good very long if you do not continue to learn.’ ”