In 1998, I worked as a tutor for a program at a public high school in New York City. The students I worked with were largely seniors and juniors. They were trying to pass the required courses and tests (New York uses the “Regents Competency Test”) in order to graduate. Most of the students were bright and motivated ... and had no prayer of graduation. They were simply too far behind to make up their lost ground in time.

I realized that many of them were suffering chiefly from the lack of certain basic skills and concepts (such as multiplication) that should have been acquired no later than the third grade. Without the basic building blocks, they were entirely unable to comprehend or master higher levels of academic achievement.

When I started my own tutoring program, I decided to focus on bringing basic skills to struggling elementary school students. The rationale was that an early intervention of this sort would enable future success.

How to most effectively help a group of elementary students, given the following adverse conditions:

1. Limited time.
2. Low budget.
3. A wide range of ages and skill levels.
4. No consistent prior preparation.
5. Inconsistent attendance.

The goal was for all of our students to be successful in school, even though they all were studying different things, from different teachers (who used different methods), in different classes, in different grades, in different schools.

The first step was to design a curriculum. Using a trigraph, I did a tripartite analysis of education. The results can be summarized in the following table:

Trigraph	Curriculum
Fundamental	Basics: The foundational skills and pieces of knowledge that are necessary for further studies (e.g. the multiplication tables).
Personal	Individualized Curricula: Studies geared towards a particular student, based on his or her personal interests.
Communal	Canon: The study of a (communally agreed-upon) set of exemplary achievements in art, literature, mathematics, science, etcetera.

This analysis provided some immediate insights about current issues in education:

1. The debate over reading lists.This is based on confusion between “Basics” and the canon. Since the basics are a foundation for all further study, they must be the same for everyone. The basics however, only include the most elementary skills and concepts and do not entail (for example) a certain reading list. The canon, on the other hand, is formed in reference to a community, and may vary from place to place as different people make different judgments.

2. The debate over instruction. This is based on the mistaken idea that any one approach is exclusive of the others. Designing a curriculum that is responsive to student's interests does not preclude them also learning the basics, or studying the canon. In fact, a balanced education must include all three.

Given the limitations of our program, and our need to work with a very diverse group, I decided to focus entirely on the “basics” portion of the curriculum. Every student needs to master these, no matter what they are studying. Accordingly, I designed a streamlined curricular outline, which only included basic skills. I placed these in the order they would need to be learned, and found or created materials for each objective.

The organizational structure was also designed on a tripartite model:

Trigraph	Personnel
Fundamental	The director, and volunteer administrators.
Personal	The students
Communal	The tutors (volunteers)

I wanted enough volunteers to ensure a one-to-one ratio at all times. Since most volunteers probably would not come every week, we needed to recruit more volunteers than students. The most difficult part would be adjusting for varying numbers of students.

To solve this problem, I made the categories mutable. If we had too many students, the most advanced would act as tutors. If we had too many volunteers, some would act as administrators.

The next thing to design was the processes. We had two processes, both based loosely upon the “Wind Cycle” (see the quadrograph for more information). Volunteers would receive a brief, but highly structured introduction to our curriculum, and how it was to be used. After that, they were largely left to their own devices.

For students, the process was similar, except that it reiterated many times. They were taught each new concept in a structured way. The testing, however, was informal, and required them to show that they had internalized the ideas. As a coda, they would demonstrate their new skills for the group.

Quadrograph (Wind Cycle)	Tutors	Students
Initial State: Chaos
Imposed Structure	Volunteer Training	Introduction of Concept
Commitment		Practice
Final State: Freedom	Independent tutoring	Test and demonstration

In early 1999, I began to meet with a group of students from the Ohio State University College of Education. We located space, bought or obtained materials, met with school officials and recruited volunteers. The program began in October and ran for sixteen weeks. We evaluated the program largely through observation. However, we also did a pre- and post-test of all students, and a pre- and post-survey of their teachers and parents to evaluate individual progress.

There were successes and failures in the program. Fortunately, both were in accord with theory.

Successes:

1. The first big success was the organizational structure, which performed exactly as predicted. Despite wide fluctuations in student and volunteer attendance, we were able to maintain a one-to-one ratio throughout. During a week in which the director (myself) was unable to attend, the administrative volunteers took up the slack easily, with no hitches.
2. The second success was our ability to incorporate academic diversity. Because of the individualized curricular structure, we were able to provide an appropriately challenging level of work for each student, regardless of preparation or ability.
3. The third success was our ability to include other types of diversity. Because we were tri-focused on the higher goal of success in education, and because we created our own structures, we incorporated students of different races, and volunteers of disparate ages, races and socioeconomic backgrounds with no difficulty or friction.
4. The fourth success was the efficiency of the program. Because it was tri-focused, the program was extremely streamlined. Although we eventually received a small grant, the basic program had no real costs beyond materials such as paper and pencils.

Failures:There were some weaknesses in our trigraph, but the more damaging failures were in our processes.

1. In retrospect, it was a mistake to try to isolate the “basics” part of the curriculum. It meant that our program had an unbalanced trigraph. As the program progressed, we began to compensate in various ways. The personal relationship between tutors and students became more important, as did the communal aspects of the group as a whole. We had some success integrating fundamental, personal and communal aspects of the experience at the end of the program. Individual students and tutors worked together to present their new skills to the larger community (parents, etcetera) in the format of a (academic) talent show.
2. The student process was not well fleshed-out. Also, the final step (test and demonstration) did not do a good job of translating from high-structure to low-structure. This mean that progression through the cycle did not proceed as quickly and smoothly as we had hoped.
3. The volunteer process was better defined in its initial stage, but had a damaging gap in the middle (see above table). Worse, the cycle used was not really appropriate. We should have used the “Fire Cycle” in order to culminate in self-reliance, rather than the Water Cycle (culminating in freedom). The volunteers who were most naturally comfortable with the end-state of tutorial freedom.
4. Largely because of the process failures, progress was slower than hoped, and a sense of frustration and fatigue set in near the end of the sixteen-week period.

Evaluation:

According to our own tests, every student made some progress, although the progress was far from uniform. Our pre- and post-evaluation with teachers was hampered by the fact that some teachers did not participate. We measured the best results for the student who was furthest behind (a seven-year old with diagnosed learning disabilities) and the student who was furthest ahead (an eleven-year old considered to have some behavioral problems). This was probably due to the program being designed to work well with students on the margins. We received uniformly positive and enthusiastic evaluations from all parents who were still with the program at the end (not every student completed the entire program).

Although the program was definitely helpful to the students, it did not entirely match our high expectations. However, it played a valuable role in confirming parts of [Christian Existential Humanist] administrative theory, and helping us to understand others.