Jerome Bruner must have had a time machine when he wrote The Process of Education in 1960, because nearly everything he predicts and advocates for has come true in the last 55 years. It must be amazing to look back over your entire career and say "I was right!" Bruner, who will be 100 years old on October 1, is a professor of psychology who taught at schools such as Harvard and Oxford.
Bruner was part of a 35-member conference in 1959 at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, at a time when the United States felt the need to revolutionize its teaching of science and math to compete with the Soviet Union. After the conference, Bruner wrote The Process of Education.
Reading The Process of Education is like getting in a time machine and going to a spot in educational history when people didn't spend much time thinking about curriculum or instruction. There were no standardized tests. And no brain research to understand how and why we learn. From this vantage point, Bruner writes of the purpose of education, makes predictions, asks questions, and points out areas requiring research.
Here are just a few of the things that have come true because of Bruner in the last 55 years:
• Spiral curriculum - Bruner believed that any subject could be taught in an intellectually honest way to a chid at any stage of development. Solving for x in math or composing in music in first grade? It's spiral curriculum - revisiting a topic over and over, each time in a deeper way.
• Standards-based grading/Personalization - "Ideally, schools should allow students to go ahead in different subjects as rapidly as they can ... The answer will probably lie in some modification or abolition of the system of grade levels in some subjects" (11).
• Predictive thinking - As a professor, Bruner knew the importance of predictions, hypotheses, and intuition in advancing knowledge. Every elementary literacy lesson includes prediction today.
• Heuristic process - a "nonrigorous method of achieving solutions of problems" (63). This is opposed to an algorithm, which is a step-by-step method. Guess what model reform math curriculums use today? Heuristic, open-ended problem solving and "math talk".
• Motivation in learning - Today, we talk all the time about what teachers do to engage students. An entire publishing business has sprung up around student engagement, and teachers are rightly evaluated on the level of student engagement they create. Bruner again.
• Differentiation - Bruner called aiming at the average student "inadequate" (70) and that materials must challenge superior students while not destroying the confidence of others. Bruner thought differentiation was the key to student motivation.
• Scaffolding - Bruner coined the term
• Increases in federal funding and investment in education - another correct prediction
• The devaluation of subjects not rewarded by the National Merit Scholarship - before standardized testing, Bruner predicted that subjects outside of science and math would suffer in the years ahead because students would strive for scholarships. Bruner desperately warned society not to let literature, history, and the arts suffer devaluation in schools.
• The role of technology - In a time of changing technology, Bruner said "the teacher constitutes the principal aid in the teaching process" (88) - not technological aids. Said quality curriculum cannot be dodged by purchasing the latest tech device (which to him was 16-mm film)
• Educational Risk-taking - Bruner says "To be so insecure that he dares not be caught in a mistake does not make a teacher a likely model of daring. If the teacher will not risk a shaky hypothesis, why should the student?" (90)
Find The Process of Education and read it - it's only 92 pages. It's in your library, probably not checked out for decades. For anyone trying to get back to the core of education, Bruner's book reminds you of a landscape when curriculum and instruction were idealistic new concepts before plagues of regulation and testing muddied the environment.
Bruner, Jerome. (1960). The Process of Education. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA.
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