Teacher-Pupil Planning

Teacher-pupil planning represented a widespread curricular-instructional practice of teachers who were attempting to embody general principles of progressive education and democracy in the classroom. Although teacher-pupil planning was never codified into a formal, instructional methodology, the practice was used at both the elementary, middle, and secondary school levels and, along with resource units and a fused core curriculum, proved quite popular among progressive high schools of the 1930s and 1940s. To view the activity as an example of the child-centered curriculum movement would be a disservice to the concept as would describing teacher-pupil planning as a component of the “activity curriculum.” Although all of these terms have been used to portray teacher-pupil planning, the practice stressed other concepts and was developed as a way to ...