A conversation with Helen Purcell and Gary McSweeney. Helen has taught at the elementary, high school, and college undergraduate and graduate levels. She served as director of the Palo Alto Living Wisdom School until she retired in 2024.
Gary helped start the Palo Alto Living Wisdom TK-8 School in 1990. He taught middle school (grades six to eight) for twenty years.
Gary: I was deeply moved by an article in a local newspaper by a girl who had been president of the student body at Palo Alto High School, which has 2,000 students and is located across the street from Stanford University.
That article was based on her speech at the high school graduation. She described how she had played four sports, achieved a perfect 4.0 grade-point average, and received early acceptance at Stanford, and how she had hit the wall at the end of her senior year.
The article appeared at a time when there was public concern about a number of high school students who had committed suicide because they were overwhelmed by pressures to perform in and outside school, and agonized by a sense of the meaninglessness, superficiality, and heartlessness of it all.
Thinking about the girl’s experience, my feeling is that parents today are trying to motivate kids by holding out a fulfillment that will be built entirely on material success in some far-off imaginary golden future, but that it means very little to the kids right now, and that they are feeling utterly deprived of a sense of joyful purpose in their lives.
Helen: A core belief in Education for Life is that you can never force anyone to learn.
Q: There’s an feeling in education today that if your child isn’t learning, the best recourse is to pressure them to do better, because it’s the child’s fault.
Helen: Trying to browbeat kids into learning never works, and it’s horribly demotivating. The toll of school stress on kids’ health, happiness, and success is tragic. All the more so because there are extremely effective, proven, simple ways to make learning enticing, magnetic, engaging, and personally fulfilling for every child, so that they will enjoy success in school and be eager learners throughout their lives.
In our school, the teachers have no need to stand frowning over their students with ruler in hand, because we adapt the curriculum to the talents and readiness of the individual. In this way, we are able to get each child engaged and excited about learning.
As part of my interest in Education for Life and my efforts to understand why it works, I’ve been inspired by Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences, by Howard Gardner, a Harvard professor of education.
Gardner’s research showed that people are very diverse and unique when it comes to learning, and that each one will have unique blend of strengths and abilities. Of course, common sense tells us that it’s so, but Gardner was able to compile an objective body of evidence that our uniqueness is wired into our brains. He identified seven “intelligences” that are neurologically independent, and he’s since added several more.
The first intelligences he talks about are linguistic and mathematical/logical. These are the intelligences that standardized test such as the SAT and STAR tests are designed to measure, and they are the rational-linguistic intelligences that are highly valued in our society and schools today.
The other intelligences include spatial intelligence, musical intelligence, interpersonal intelligence, and intrapersonal intelligence.
After reading his book, I thought, “I’ll try this in my classroom.” It’s a particular beauty of EFL that the teachers are free to try ideas that will help their students.
When I introduced the students to the idea of multiple intelligences, they picked up on it right away. They found it liberating, because it was telling them: “You don’t have to be intelligent in every way. Each one of you will have your own ways of being intelligent.”
None of us have all of the intelligences. Gardner’s research tells us that we all have unique personal strengths for interfacing with the world, and that we can use those strengths to bolster the intelligences that may be less developed in us.
We’ve known for more than fifty years in our EFL schools that every child is absolutely unique, and that the best way to help them learn is by getting to know each child on a deep level so that we can help them use their unique blend of intelligences to be successful and happy in the classroom.
Students Can Learn to Lead with Their Strengths
At LWS, we ask, “What are this student’s particular strengths, and how can we help them apply those strengths to grow in every academic subject?”
In math or science, for example, if a student’s strengths are in language, the teachers will give them a textbook that is more linguistically oriented.
Gary: We get to know the students so well that we’re able to give each one a highly individualized math curriculum that’s based on their special strengths, and then you find that you can show them how to leverage those strengths to develop any weaker areas.
For example, you might give them problems that you know they can handle, to build their confidence and prepare them in small steps to succeed in tackling problems that would have stumped them if you hadn’t worked with them at their level, with their particular readiness and skills.
I can’t overemphasize the importance of building a relationship with the students. When they are receptive to what you’re saying because they know you’re on their side, you can help them much more effectively.
With kids who’ve recently enrolled and are new to my classroom, I may notice that they’re holding their shoulders “high and tight” in math class, but as the weeks pass I’ll see their shoulders relax, because they aren’t being judged by a harsh, impersonal “pass-or-fail”test. Instead, they’re coming over and asking me, “Can you help?” and I’ll spend as much time as it takes to help them master the concepts.
Q: It sounds like a race car that needs to be warmed up so it won’t break down at high speed. Helping the students where they are makes them feel cared-for and successful, so they start to enjoy learning. It may be slow going for a while, but they’ll soon be eager to race ahead and do more.
Helen: Some students will always be ahead, and others will be behind. And what are you going to do when there’s so much diversity? Will you force them all into the same mold? In EFL we wouldn’t dream of taking that path. No, you give each one exactly what they need at their level, and then in time – which will be individual – you’ll see them performing beautifully.
In EFL we teach a rigorous curriculum, but we’re constantly calibrating the lessons to make sure the student can be challenged and succeed at the forward edge of their understanding.
You’re making time for each student and arranging the curriculum so they can feel good about what they’re doing, because they’re having success experiences and understanding what they’re doing, and they aren’t just being force-fed a tasteless mess of instructions and spitting them out on a test. This is why people who visit the school are struck by how engaged and happy the kids are, and how much they’re enjoying their challenges.
Do EFL Students Take Tests?
There’s a book series called Authentic Assessment that presents an alternative to testing that offers a much more accurate, meaningful picture of each student’s academic progress.
We test our students often, because we need to ensure that they’ll be comfortable taking every kind of test when they enter high school. We don’t give them those experiences to assign grades, but to make sure they won’t be bewildered by midterms and finals when they enter high school and college.
It’s how we test that makes all the difference – and the difference is radical.
When I was in high school, we took tests that required us to spit out information that we were expected to memorize word for word. The problem with that approach is that I immediately forgot what I had memorized, so there was nothing the test measured that was reliable evidence that I had become a better student or person.
This is why, in our school, when we create objective tests we take great care to construct questions that are meaningful, relevant, and even fun, because humor is an amazing tool for learning; and then we assess the test results with a focus on helping the student achieve their best.
Testing Versus Assessment – Which Approach Yields More Accurate Results?
To assess a student’s progress, you need to observe the student as a person, and not only a mathematician, scientist, artist, or writer.
During the school year our teachers meet three times with the parents of each student. We find that it’s a wonderful way to create a partnership between the school and family.
The teacher might ask, “What are you saying to your son or daughter at home about this or that subject?” Or a parent might tell us something about the student that we wouldn’t normally be aware of at school.
“He was really upset about — .” “She was really stressed about — .” As soon as we hear it, we take immediate action to address what’s going on.
Q: So the parent-teacher conferences aren’t just the school wanting to convince the parents that they’re doing a good job. From what I’ve heard, it goes much deeper.
Helen: Yes. The core tool of the parent-teacher conferences is the student’s portfolio. We collect samples of the student’s work in a folder —in language arts, for example, I’ll ask the students to keep every draft of everything they write, because I want them to see how their writing has improved over time.
At the conference I’ll sit with the parents and show them the trajectory of the student’s improvement. We find that portfolio assessment gives us a very clear measure of the students’ progress, whereas letter grades leave too many questions unanswered.
What does it really mean that my daughter received an A? Did she actually learn something, or did she just “memorize-and-forget”? Did she improve her ability to learn? Did she become more enthusiastic, creative, and self-motivated? Or did she just study to the test and quickly forget what she had crammed?
Years ago, I heard about an amusing experiment that illustrated the deficiencies of letter grades. When the researchers asked teachers to grade the same packet of essays, the grades varied from 99% to 2%. When they asked the same teachers to grade the same essays several months later, some of the teachers who’d given A’s now gave F’s — a complete reversal! The study verified the meaninglessness of letter grades on essay tests, where grades are given subjectively.
In our school, we want our students to develop skills far beyond what we can measure with a letter grade, and then we want them to be able to look at their work and see how far they’ve come.
I teach language arts, and at the end of the year, I insist that they put several pieces in their portfolio that I feel are their best. They will be pieces that show how well they can write an essay, exercise high-level thinking, be creative, and engage the reader. When they leave us, they’ll have two or three fat portfolios of their best work.
When you give young people a stimulating curriculum, delivered by teachers who are genuinely caring and aware, you get a level of learning that is deep and enduring, and that gives the students experiences they’ll never forget.
We believe learning should be based on giving them experiences of success every day, with love, instead of subjecting them to the brutal judgments of an unrealistic, “keep up or else” competitive ranking machine.
Education for Life prepares the students to face the challenges they will encounter during and after high school and college, with confidence, enthusiasm, and joyful appreciation.
Education for Life demands a very high level of dedication and energy, because teaching in our schools is more than a “job” — it’s a calling and a mission. We’re creating a new template for education that we believe will spread far beyond our schools to benefit young people everywhere.