G is for GROUP
An essay by Steve Seidel, TGS staff member
From An Educator’s Alphabet Book
Everything I needed to know about education...
I've often said, partially joking, but mostly seriously, that 'everything I needed to know about education (and so much of what I needed to know about life), I learned at The Group School.' The Group School (TGS) was where I first taught and where I learned I could be a teacher. I'll always love the people and the place for that.
In so many ways, my adult life was shaped by a set of coincidences that led to my co-teaching a summer theater workshop there, a six week volunteer gig that led to a decade of deeply compelling teaching and staff work at The Group School (1971-1981). There is much to say about what I learned at The Group School, the people I learned from, and the experiment that we were all involved in. Suffice to say, it was there that I really began to explore what it means to teach, how to teach, the place of the arts in the curriculum and the culture of a school, and the social and political dimensions of life in schools. In a sense, everything I've learned about teaching, learning, and making schools since my years there has been filtered through my experience during those ten years. Forty years after leaving TGS, I'm clear that, however imperfect it was, it was the best school I've ever taught in and one of the best I've ever seen. Its imperfections (and there were many!) were part of its strengths, not because of those imperfections, but because we never stopped working to make the school better. Not perfect, but better. It was always in the process of becoming, evolving, responding to new needs and emerging understandings, forever a work in progress.
What's in a name?
I always loved the school's name. In a recent conversation with Ali Harris, one of the founding students at The Group School, she pointed out a bit of history that I had not held onto, if I ever knew it. She said, "You have to remember that before there was The Group School, we were 'The Group.' " Indeed, the school grew out of relationships among teens in North Cambridge, many of whom were growing up in public housing. That was the real starting point—those relationships that were grounded in their neighborhood and the social realities of being working class in Cambridge at that time. The presence of these young people in the neighborhood, especially when they were hanging out behind a small local private school, was not always welcome. But, however loose, they were a group.
In time, those young people got to know some youth workers who had been hired to work with them. The youth workers asked the teens, some of whom were already having encounters with the police and truant officers, what they wanted to do that might feel better than just hanging out. It was 1969 and various ideas were floated, including the desire to have their own record store. This led to renting 'the storefront,' their first official space. And, if I have the story right, this is when they started to refer to themselves as 'the group.' In time, the storefront shut down and 'the group' began to talk about starting a school, one where they'd be respected, where they could have some control. In other words, their school. The Group School. And, miraculously, it came to be.
My Group School years
I wandered in during the summer of 1971 before the first fall as an official school, as this dream was taking shape and, in turn, began shaping me.
What feels small, yet profound, in Ali's reminder about the genesis of The Group School is that it all started with people, specific young people with particular experiences, frustrations, desires, and hopes; not the other way around, an institution created for some generalized notion of who it would serve. How often does that happen?
TGS was a radical experiment from the start. Not least, the commitment to being a democratic school set it apart from many alternative schools of its time and virtually all traditional schools, then and now. All decisions were made in community meetings or committees where students had a majority vote. Not all decisions worked out perfectly, but it would be hard to argue that we made many really bad decisions. The decision-making process was rough and tumble, lots of arguments, some real tensions, quite a bit of heat, but, as one graduate said decades later, "We yelled at each other and sometimes left in a huff, but the next day we were all back to figure it out and move forward. And, in the end, we were friends."
This experiment in giving students a major say in the creation of their school should be of interest to anyone engaged in education in any democratic society. It is hard to imagine a more powerful design for learning to participate in civic life than to give students a deciding vote in major decisions about their school. We learned many specific lessons, but the big lesson was that giving this power to students did not send everything to hell in a handbasket. Quite the opposite. Given real power and responsibility, the students rose to the occasion, acting passionately, thoughtfully, intelligently, and collectively, time after time.
My post-Group School years...
Finding my way after TGS was tough. I was turning 30 (which to my generation was the upper limit of trustworthiness), had been teaching for a decade, had two small children, and a very strong feeling that I had already had what could easily have been the best teaching experience I'd ever have. Looking ahead at the next decades was unsettling. It was just the start of Ronald Reagan's presidency. The United States was heading into a shit show of deeply unsettling proportions. We sensed what was ahead but I certainly did not imagine how it would lead, in fits and starts, to the political realities of 2025. The social movements of the 1960-70s, with the widespread creation of alternative institutions like The Group School, were sputtering. Indeed, our worried sense of what was coming and the consequences for alternative institutions led us to phase out The Group School, rather than try to keep it alive by compromising our principles in one way after another. (That's a story for another time. But an important one.)
I was worried and depressed.
In 1981, I had a job lined up to work as a Teaching Artist for the Theater Company of Boston in their long-running residency at South Boston High School, the site of Boston's most violent episodes in the saga of the Federal court-ordered desegregation (1974-1988) of the Boston Public Schools. Even before I started teaching there, it was clear that I was crossing to the other side, that I was no longer in a universe of alternatives. I was smack dab in the middle of everything I'd worked for a decade to create an alternative to—urban public schools that, despite the profound promise of public education, were not actually set up to support poor and working-class young people, especially youth of color, to succeed and thrive as learners, creators, workers, and contributing citizens. The next 8 years would teach me many lessons about the beauty and the beast of working in public schools.
In my experience, the beast came out on top.
Starting from 'the group'
At the start of my South Boston years, I wrestled with the possibility that my fear would come true, that I'd never again have the same remarkable teaching experiences I had at TGS. But what could I bring from that radical experiment into this very different educational setting or any others in which I might land? That was the question.
Perhaps it's only because it was my genesis story as an educator, but, even now, half a century later, starting from 'the group' feels right for so much about learning and teaching. Reflecting on what starting from 'the group' came to mean for my teaching and why I keep 'the group' in my back pocket when I go to teach, I realize how much of my work as a teacher focused on two related developments. First, the creation of a group with an identity from a collection of individuals. And, second, the emergence of a shared sense of desire within that group. Of course, the emergence of that desire is key to the creation of the group.
Collective dreams and a pedagogy of desire
Back in 1971, 'the group' didn't become 'The Group' until they shared a dream. Opening a storefront record shop was their first dream; starting a school, their second. Before they got to dreaming, they were just a group. But once they had a dream, they had a shared sense of purpose and, with that, the seeds of a collective identity. That's when they truly became a community bound by desire, commitment, and, in time, love. And then they needed a way to refer to their collective. That's when "The Group' was born.
Since that experience, I've seen this play out over and over. The richest soil for learning, it seems, is in communities, specifically in their collective dreams, hopes, needs, desires. When the collection of individuals assembled together finds something they want to create together, they are on their way to articulating a dream, a vision of what they hope to see, make, create. This could take the form of a performance (plays, dances, concerts, etc.), objects (robots, furniture, murals, books, etc.), new social or institutional structures (a school, a student council in a school, an alternative kind of library for sharing resources, a community museum, new approaches to discipline/accountability in their school, etc.). Whatever the dream, the collection of individuals in the classroom will likely soon come to realize three things and each will require the support of their teachers.
We need each other.
It will quickly become apparent that none of them can achieve this dream alone, that they need each other, that they must become a team, an ensemble, 'a group.' In that moment, a critical element of the teacher's role emerges—to make sure everyone is seen as having something to contribute. This won't happen instantly. It has to be revealed over time as new challenges present themselves.
We need to learn.
Simultaneously, they will likely recognize that they don't know all they need to know to realize their dream. At this moment, a new kind of curriculum emerges, radically distinct from the prescribed curriculum, as it is responsive, not to curriculum standards or other institutional assessments of what children 'need to know,' but to a pedagogy of desire that aims to teach what children 'want' to know and be able to do in order to create the things they envision. The teacher needs to help the group identify what they need to know as they encounter challenges, feel frustration, and try to solve problems. This is one of the places where a teacher's greater experience is especially essential. In some cases, the teacher can teach their students what they want to learn. At this moment, the teacher often becomes more a "curator of information," as Ko Umezaki, a musician and college professor, once described his work as a teacher, a kind of broker who helps students find the guidance, resources, and expertise they need.
We need to slow down and step back.
As appropriately action-oriented as many dreamers are, action without reflection can quickly become unfocused, almost mindless, especially when a group of individuals are trying to coordinate their efforts toward a single purpose. Dreams must be negotiated. I think the first act of the play should start with an explosion and you think it should start with whispering. We have to talk—and listen!--to each other, debate possibilities, interpretations, designs, as we refine our collective vision and sense of purpose. And we have to consider many elements and decisions along the way, including our timetable, the order of operations we'll follow, whether we are learning what we need to know and be able to do well enough to realize our dreams, and on and on.
Reflection on process, progress, and product are critical to getting anywhere. And reflection can be challenging, especially if it is not already a regular part of the culture of the classroom. Students need teachers to guide this work. I've long felt that the trick for the teacher is to do this with the lightest hand possible, using the least amount of presence and energy to guide the process. Alas, my hand was often too heavy—too insistent, too prescriptive, too formulaic. Why do I say that? Because too many times, I heard students ask "Reflect again?" But they didn't ask that when I introduced moments of reflection in direct response to their moments of exasperation, exhaustion, frustration, or confusion. Or when they needed to celebrate an achievement, however small or large.
Of course, on the first day in most classrooms, the assembled collection of individuals has yet to become a group and may be far from feeling these needs. They are at best a community in utero. Many features of a community can be seen in formation even before that community has been born. Sometimes the birth comes quickly; other times it is slow and long. It is never a given. All collections of individuals are in relationship to each other, but that hardly makes them a group.
One of the many beautiful things about being a theater teacher is that making plays with students requires a creative community and a creative community, almost by definition, has a dream. They want to bring something into the world that doesn't already exist, often a performance. With theater, the class does not usually become an ensemble until everyone has bought into the work of producing a particular play. This can take time, but once that buy-in has happened, the loose collection of individuals becomes a working collective with a vision of their own, though sometimes, initially, it's just to avoid humiliation. In time, if things go well, the vision will be to make a great production. In any case, two things become clear pretty quickly—it's going to take hard work and everyone has to be all in.
Engagement in the realization of collective dreams is a fantastic context for both individual and collective learning, fully exploiting the social dimensions of learning. Making plays, for example, forces everyone to push to their personal limits, learning everything they need to know in order to make their best contribution to a wonderful performance, but the group must also build collective knowledge and capacity in order to make that performance happen. The collective must be able to solve problems and do creative work that none of the individuals in the collective could do on their own.
Barbel Inhelder, the Swiss psychologist and collaborator with Jean Piaget, argued "If you want to get ahead, get a theory." This has proven true, in my experience. But I would also say that, in classrooms and other learning environments, if you want to get ahead, get a group. But not any group—a group with a purpose, a dream. It will fuel all kinds of learning, even through the inevitable hard parts, and keep everyone going when the going gets rough, which it always does when doing big projects and learning things that are hard to learn. This proved true at The Group School and was one of the most enduring things I learned about education from that experience.[extra return]
About the Author
Steve was a staff member at The Group School from the summer of 1970 until 1981. He taught theater throughout those years and was an advisor, a member of the Board of Directors, and the arts coordinator at different times over that decade. Since leaving TGS, Steve taught theater at South Boston High School and Roxbury Community College in the 1980s. He then worked for over 35 years at the Harvard Graduate School of Education as a researcher at Project Zero and as the faculty director of the Arts in Education Masters program. He retired from full-time work in 2022.
