Survey Data on Departmentalized Teaching in Elementary Schools

Abstract

The question of departmentalized teaching is an important controversial issue in elementary education. Departmental teaching is not a recent innova tion in elementary practice. It began toward the close of the eighteenth century at which time there came into prominence, particularly in the New England states, a type of organization known as the The chief characteristic of the departmental organization was the vertical division of the course into a reading and a writing school. Each of these units had its own master, its own room and set of studies, and a corps of assistants. The pupils attended each department alternately, chang ing from one to the other at the end of each half-day's session.2 Since the day of the school departmentalized teaching in the elementary grades has passed through a variety of stages, sometimes having disappeared almost entirely from practice (as was true between about 1850 and 1900), sometimes being highly praised, and sometimes condemned vigorously. The facts which are presented in this article were gathered during 1943-4 from 532 elementary schools located in forty-six states and the District of Columbia. The information sought on departmentalized teaching was called for in one portion of a 53-page printed questionnaire. At first it was thought that the checklist should be sufficiently comprehensive and detailed so that each school's practices could be identified and a fairly com plete picture given of the more specific procedures used with reference to each of the practices. It soon became evident that such detailed information would be impossible to obtain in a single study. The scope of the checklist was thus reduced to what was considered the minimum information con sistent with the purposes of the study. Even with these reductions, the