Teachers' classroom styles are critical to making desegregation
of schools across socioeconomic lines work effectively, a Johns
Hopkins education researcher and sociologist has found. In a new
book, Stephen Plank, a researcher at Hopkins' Center for Social
Organization of Schools, concludes that teachers are as
important as the students themselves in promoting the
interaction of children from diverse economic and ethnic
backgrounds that economic desegregation is intended to promote.
Finding One's Place: Teaching Styles and Peer Relations in
Diverse Classrooms, published last month by Teacher's College
Press, follows students and teachers in 10 recently desegregated
LaCrosse, Wis., classrooms. Plank found that teachers with what
is considered a very traditional teaching style tended to create
stratified, hierarchal classrooms with little social interaction
among different groups. A traditional teaching style relies
heavily on lectures and whole class instruction, rather than on
frequently breaking up the class