As she had her own school, she tried her method there, so she was able to see from first-hand the things that worked and the things that did not work. This experimental plan was the base of the Dalton method.
The main characteristic of this method is the freedom. If we are talking about freedom in education you might think of Freinet, but Dalton’s responsibility is a bit different. In Dalton Plan, students are given responsibility to choose the task, the space and fellows with whom they want to work. Therefore, in this method, students’ freedom is more guide, so it is different from the “complete freedom” that students have in a Freinet school.
Even if Helen Parkhurst created this method almost hundred years ago, her ideas are still being used in many schools across the world. One of this school is the Daltonschool de Bongerd, too. Even though Helen Parkhurst is the designer of this method, new ideas are being developed and added to the method.
Each Dalton school shares the same three pillars:
- Independence: teachers try to encourage student to solve by themselves their own problems, using resources or asking teachers or peers for help. The teachers give brief instructions on the task and then students choose the rest of the task.
- Cooperation: children are encouraged to work and play all together, at the same time they are developing social skills
- Responsibility: students and teachers make agreements to set students’ goal, so students need to plan what they are going to do, when and how. This responsibility is develop gradually.
In one of the visits to the schools, I went to De Bongerd. It is a Dalton school located in Oldenzaal. As Dalton school, it follows the method created by Helen Parkhurst. Helen Parkhurst was an American teacher who did not think that the current education in that time, 1919, was good enough for all the students in the education system. She saw a solution for teaching many children of different ages.
DE BONGERD