Norma Furger and Lois Alt

Lead Literacy Teacher; Educator and Retired Superintendent
Madison, WI

We sat down to chat with Norma and Lois together at the end of a conference in Wisconsin. They both caught our attention because of the passion they still bring to their work and their continued commitment across decades-long careers to the basic tenets of progressive education. They see purpose in keeping learners at the center of their work, not at the periphery. As we began to chat, we realized these two women weren’t just career educators but also legacy educators in their families. And, in sharing stories of generational influences of family educators upon them, they articulated an intergenerational philosophy of teaching and leading in school communities that we know from contemporary research are critical to solving  root causes of school-driven inequities. Lois and Norma understand the integrated power of relationships, culture, opportunity, engagement, and learning in creating equitable school communities. 

Back to the Future

When we think of "progressive education" over the years we often think about the radical opportunities new technologies might provide,. But “progressive education,” be it voiced by William Alcott in 1832, John Dewey in 1940,  John Holt in 1960, Neil Postman in 1970, or today's theorists, are speaking of something very old, and very precious - the way human children learn. Talking about the way children learn is very different from debating the way children are taught, one puts learning, and the human individual, at the center, the other puts the process and adult convenience at the center. In Wisconsin we found two educators who find 'antique' learning structures at the heart of their practice. The one room schoolhouses that still influence them were certainly not efficient child-processing plants, they were something else entirely…

For Norma Furger, with 32 years of classroom experience, her grandmother's work, deeply revealed itself as Norma read through those notes and lessons from the one-room schoolhouse, spoke of ways of building learning communities and fully including all. "Her one through eight students in her one-room schoolhouse in which one of the primary jobs of the kids was to get wood for the wood stove and to each bring a jar of soup to add to that stove so they had a warm lunch," Norma says, touching on the community nature of the school, as does the realization that schools back then could move with the rhythms of the community. "She also put in place things that help kids when they were absent because being in a farm community right the kids often had to stay back and do chores field work so she had systems in place to get kids caught up.” With this embedded knowledge Norma is both a veteran educator and a constant change agent within the Madison Metropolitan School District.

Problems of Our Own Making

Thus this contemporary educator understands that many of the issues we struggle with today have been of our own making. In that wooden Wisconsin schoolhouse all children were accepted 'as they came,' despite differences among parents and family needs, while the multiage nature of the one-room schoolhouse allowed those children to move forward at their own pace. By design, teachers created a culture of relationships among children across age groups because such a culture critically supported the community’s success. 

“I have often over the years reflected on why I became a teacher, how I happened to get to the space, and it was largely because my mother was a teacher. I grew up watching her in her one-room schoolhouse,” says Lois Alt, a retired superintendent now leading Wisconsin’s virtual education initiatives. “She taught in a one-room environment for several years before they gradually were merged into larger cities nearby, but I watched her in her interaction with those kids at various levels. I have a picture of my sister sitting at her desk in her one-room schoolhouse and just looking at that culture and how the culture of learning was  different then than it has evolved to be.”

Lois also finds inspiration in the kind of Universal Design for Learning inherent in the multiage, culturally responsive education of her mother’s time, while acknowledging the relative monoculture of schools back then. 

Lifelong Learning

“There were many lessons that I learned from my mother in her teaching and her postgraduate education. She got her master's degree when she was 60 years old. I started my doctorate when I was 50, so I figured I was ahead of the game,” Lois reflects. That willingness to never stop learning, “was important to me as I grew up to be a teacher and an administrator.”

Both Norma and Lois want educators to think far beyond the classroom and the school walls, something that was basic to the kind of community-reflective schools that existed before the creation of large districts. Says Lois, “I always wanted to see how teachers could take the experiences that they have in their classrooms and have a wider influence not just on the 25-30 kids in their classes but [to] have a wider influence across their environment.”

And yet Norma makes clear that the limitations of society in the past made things easier. As she speaks of learning “about students as individuals and not just [in relation to] content areas” being essential, she also notes, “I think a huge piece (today) is to embrace diversity in our communities.” She says that an “advantage that my grandmother had was that her students looked like her,” making it easier to fit her structures to children’s needs. “The challenge now is that we create environments in which all of our kids can see themselves and thrive.”

Toward a next century

Both Norma and Lois see learning agency in children as having played out in a variety of ways in the one-room school houses of the past. Whether it was the expectation of Norma’s grandmother that in her one-room helped with primary jobs. It would not have been unusual to find older students hauling in wood for the wood stove on frigid, sometimes below-zero, winter days in Wisconsin. Students were expected to each bring a jar of soup to add to that stove so they had a warm lunch. Older students were expected to help younger students learn their times tables, practice reading and writing, or recite poetry from memory. Students and Norma’s grandmother in the days of the one-room schoolhouse also had to adjust the way they used time. If daily chores on the farm or planting season interfered with school, the schedule had to be flexible based on when students could attend. Norma wonders as a result of her reflections on her grandmother’s teaching experiences how we might do a better job of adapting time to better support today’s learner needs. 

Lois also thinks about the experiences of students today, her five grandsons especially, in school. She is a believer in design thinking as a learning tool and often asks them about their “user experiences.” Do they just use textbooks all the time? Do they get to make seating choices in their classroom? Are they working on meaningful projects? Have they heard the word agency used when the teacher talks about their work? These kinds of questions reflect philosophy, values, and beliefs about learners and learning that puts them at the center of a teacher’s, a school’s, a district’s decision-making processes. Lois thinks that we need that kind of responsiveness to the diverse needs of learners in contemporary schools. 

Back to the Future of Learning 

We think a lot about those rural teachers who set in motion a different kind of learning in one-room schoolhouses than most children experience in today’s comprehensive public schools. Those teachers, in the absence of administrators doing walk-through and structured observations, without 3-inch binders of Board policies, and absent required sit and get professional development made it their work to support kids who were absent or came to school at different times of the day. The decisions made in that one room were all about accepting kids as they came. They expected children to be active. They knew that families’ lives outside of school came first. They set up every part of the day so that learning connected to their students’  personal lives. And, they helped the students whether six- or twelve-years old to own their learning environment. If it was cold, they made it warm, if they were hungry, they cooked. And they created the ultimate differentiation experience. Older kids helped younger students and became aspirational peers.  

We know these one-room school houses weren’t perfect. But they did set in motion a philosophy about teaching and learning that is substantively different than one that marginalized students at the expense of community, relationships, culture, and contextualized learning experiences. For Lois and Norma the need for change is obvious, and Lois talks of her constant questioning of educators about variety, agency, and cross-cultural comfort in their classrooms. “Students need to have more agency and they need to have more variety and more opportunities to step out of that 30 by 30 square foot classroom [where] they're sitting in desks in rows. Variety and that new way of design thinking and design teaching is critical.”

The challenge we see is how to make substantive changes to shift from schools that optimize standardization to schools that optimize learners. Making that happen in a school district- not just in a teacher’s classroom or one school out of ten in the district- is a redesign of today’s archaic education system that we believe is worth pursuing.