Editor's note: This is a sidebar to Monday's profile post about Daniel and Suzette Dean, a Tampa, Fla. couple whose private school is at the heart of their community development vision.
At Bible Truth school, Lizzie Bilogo-Nguema, 12, helps 3-year-old Delilah Prevot with math. The school features a lot of interaction between students of different ages.
The big girl scooched the little one gently back to the center of the chair, then pointed to the work sheet on the table. Today’s topic: kindergarten math. Can you count the elephants in the first clump, Lizzie, 12, asked Delilah, 3. Now in the second clump? Now can you add them? Beneath the rainbow of clasps in her braids, Delilah correctly counted the answers out loud.
“Good job. You got it,” Lizzie smiled. “Do you know how to write a 10?”
Scenes like this play out all the time at Bible Truth Ministries Academy. The tiny private school in Tampa, Fla. often goes out of its way to put students of different ages together and frequently to have older kids teach younger ones. That kind of multi-age, multi-grade set-up isn’t unheard of – it’s a fundamental part of Montessori schools, for example – but in the case of Bible Truth, the origin of the idea is noteworthy.
A think tank called the Evolution Institute recommended it. Bible Truth followed up. And the fact that the entities have a warm relationship is a sign that bridge-building is possible even in that tense place where schools, faith and science collide.
“We get so caught up in the vessel. It doesn’t matter to me” where good ideas come from, said Daniel Dean, who co-founded Bible Truth school with wife Suzette. “If it makes sense, it makes sense.”
“It starts with, what do they want for the children and the families? – which is what I want,” said Jerry Lieberman, who co-founded the institute and has known the Deans for seven years. “We both want them to have an excellent education, and we both want to remove obstacles that stand in their way.”
The school doesn’t teach evolution. Lieberman doesn’t dwell on it.
But as its name suggests, the little institute with a board full of top-notch scientists is big on it. Its mission is to use evolutionary science to solve real-world problems. In education, that translates, in its view, into classroom practices that echo the way children have adapted to learn – in mixed-group settings, with lots of physical movement, with an emphasis on self-directed play.
The group’s co-founder and president, David Sloan Wilson, an internationally respected evolutionary biologist, carved out “10 simple truths” about childhood education from an evolutionary perspective. A lot of it hinges on choice, community, cooperation. In the Binghamton, N.Y. school district a few years ago, the 10 points were converted into classroom practices and tested in a year-long program for at-risk 9th and 10th graders. The result: Students in the program outperformed their peers in a control group. They had less absenteeism, higher standardized test performance – and a 30-point jump in the scores behind school grades.
The institute is hoping to secure funding to test the program in other school districts, and in both public and private schools.
In the meantime, it’s been working informally with Bible Truth. (more…)
