Dalton Plan

The Dalton Plan is an educational concept created by Helen Parkhurst. It is inspired by the intellectual ferment at the turn of the 20th century. Educational thinkers such as Maria Montessori and John Dewey influenced Parkhurst while she created the Dalton Plan. Their aim was to achieve a balance between a child's talent and the needs of the community.

The American teacher Helen Parkhurst (1886-1973) developed at the beginning of the twentieth century the Dalton Plan to reform the then current pedagogics and the then usual manner of classroom management. She wanted to break the teacher-centered lockstep teaching. During her first experiment, which she implemented in a small elementary school as a young teacher in 1904, she noticed that when students are given freedom for self-direction and self-pacing and to help one another, their motivation increases considerably and they learn a lot more. In a later experiment in 1911 and 1912 Parkhurst re-organized the education in a large school for nine to fourteen year-olds. Instead of each grade, each subject was appointed its own teacher and its own classroom. The subject teachers made assignments: they converted the subject matter for each grade into learning assignments. In this way, learning became the students’ own work; they could carry out their work independently, work at their own pace and plan their work themselves. The classroom turned into a laboratory, a place where students are working, furnished and equipped as work spaces, tailored to meet the requirements of specific subjects. Useful and attractive learning materials, instruments and reference books were put within the students’ reach. The benches were replaced by large tables to facilitate co-operation and group instruction. This second experiment formed the basis for the next experiments, those in Dalton and New York, from 1919 onwards. The only addition was the use of graphs, charts enabling students to keep track of their own progress in each subject. From now on it was called the Dalton Plan.

In 1921 en 1922 Parkhurst explained the theory of the Dalton Plan in a series of articles published in “The Times Educational Supplement” and in her book “Education on the Dalton Plan”. It can be reconstructed as follows. The Dalton Plan is an “efficiency measure”: “a simple and economic reorganization of the school” (Parkhurst, 1922, 46). Lockstep teaching is not efficient, because: it is the teacher who does all the work. The Dalton Plan “creates conditions which enable ... the learner to learn” (34). Learning is the same as experience: “Experience is the best and indeed the only real teacher” (152). The school has to provide for sufficient experience. This cannot be achieved by keeping students as passive recipients, separating them from one another, holding them in one place, requiring them to remain silent, making them learn lessons by heart and subjecting them to whole class recitation. We can provide for experience through the “liberation of the pupil” and the “socialization of the school” (46). In the Dalton Plan, freedom is the opportunity to do the schoolwork oneself, to organize it oneself (how where and when) and to carry it out at one’s own pace, particularly to do it undisturbed and to work with commitment and concentration. Self-activity brings about experience. Something similar applies in the Dalton Plan to interaction and co-operation. When students are permitted to interact and work freely with one another and with teachers, in varying groups, in varied locations, with varied resources and materials, they come into contact with one another, the teachers, the subject matter and the learning materials in different ways. This means more experience and consequently more learning.

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