Educational screen & audio-visual guide (c1956-1971])

hy ROMAIN GIBSON Direetor of tlie Ford Foundation Research Project on the Use of Tapes in the Secondary School A teacher-monitor presides at a desk; a blackboard monitor takes the teacher's place at the board, and a recorder-monitor runs the machine as Mr. John Lindberg's class studies Spelling. tapes in the eighth grade to verify last year's findings. We are also attempting in these experiments to measure savings in teacher fatigue, cost to school boards, and the degree of supervision that is necessary while the tapes are in use. Two of the seventh grades are operating with the teacher leaving the room completely for the twenty minutes of spelling a day. Of course, the classes have been very carefully organized to be self-sufficient in the absence of the regular classroom teacher. .'\nd the teacher does exercise some control in that she glances quickly through the papers without checking each day on her return. She makes sure that all worksheets have been properly finished and that the work is neat. In the eighth grade several classes are pursuing their second year of Conversational Spanish turning to a reading program the second semester. An attempt is being made to evaluate what happens to the second year of language study when there is turnover in both students and teachers. Based on last semester's test scores it would appear that a good teacher with no previous Spanish experience does well with a group of better than average students even though some of these students lack the first year's training. Since a thorough review is given at the beginning of the second year, both the new teacher and the new students seem able to catch up. A teacher (untrained) who has been in the program a year seems to be able to do very well with a group of students of average ability. We have just started a class (average Mr. John Alden's Spanish class (Loveland School) studies the Lord's Prayer by tape. Visual aids are sometimes used in conjunction. Since the prayer is read by a native speaker, good pronunciation and intonation are assured. ability) under an untrained teacher with the material brought from a central source into the room via loudspeakers. This approximates teaching by radio except the material is on tape in the central office and can be sent to the room as directed by the teacher, thus fitting her schedule. In eighth grade spelling, also, the material is being piped into several rooms at once according to a prearranged schedule agreed upon by the various teachers involved. An office worker or a student starts the tape in the central office and stops the tape recorder at the end of the twenty minutes. A timer is used to signal the end of fifteen minutes and head phones allow exact monitoring so the machine can be stopped at exactly the right moment. In each of the various rooms using the tapes, a control beneath the loudspeakers (two to a room) allows adjustment of volume or the turning off of the speaker. The teachers are enthusiastic about this. All in all it appears that the "teach it by tape" approach is a veritable gold mine for the ordinary student, for the bright one who wishes to get ahead faster than the class, and for the slow who needs specially made remedial tapes. We have hardly scratched the surface at the ends of the curve as yet. Regularly accepted classroom techniques cannot always be used for tape presentation. We still don't have all the "know how" we need. But why bother at all with this new medium? Because it offers interesting possibilities in the teaching of slightly larger groups than we have been used to, because it may be able to spread good teaching by experts in their fields, because it can save the teacher the fatigue of repetition, because it appears that a teacher can successfully teach some subjects in which he or she is untrained, because there may be a saving when the cost of textbooks is weighed against the cost of tapes and skeleton manuals, and because it may be able to cater to the needs of the accelerated student and be able to give additional drill to the slow. EdScreen & AV Guide — April, )958 181