Stafford pupils teach to learn with Phillips Collection help

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Teaching students to teach one another is a tried-and-true educational tenet. A few classes at Stafford Elementary School in Stafford, Va., these days go one further: teaching students how to teach their parents.

It's a double whammy bound to allow for strong retention of material being studied -- in this instance, the works of Paul Klee. However, art teacher Marce Miller is careful not to make such broad claims for just one part of an ongoing school agenda that applies the versatile artist's work across the curriculum.

"I can't sit here and give exact results," she says modestly. "I can't quantify this, but you can gauge the excitement level."

Stimulated by a weeklong immersion course for educators last summer at the Phillips Collection that involved three other Stafford Elementary teachers, Miss Miller invented Art Talks, a junior docent program developed in connection with the gallery's Mentor Teacher program.

The latter involves the museum directly in a teacher's methods and projects and eventually showcases students' work. Three schools are participants in this year's Mentor Teacher program, says Suzanne Wright, Phillips education head. They include the District's new City Collegiate Charter School and a school in Los Angeles. "They are all doing different things, but Stafford by far is the most extensive."

Miss Miller, 53, who recently was judged Stafford's Teacher of the Year, is preparing fourth- and fifth-grade students to lead family members March 10 on a tour of the Phillips. These young guides that day will act in the place of more experienced docents on the museum staff. The group of 21 fourth- and fifth-graders were selected from 37 applicants after a rigorous interview during which each one had to talk about a Klee painting and say why he thought he would make a good docent.

Early on, she told Art Talk students making puppets in a way that Paul Klee did for his only son that she didn't want the exercise to be making art "so much as talking about it and creating teachers." The Latin word for docent means "to teach," she told them.

The tutoring lessons are thorough enough so that one student recently found herself correcting her father's pronunciation of the artist's last name. "He thought it was pronounced like the word key," Miss Miller relates. His daughter then corrected him, saying the correct sound was closer to the word clay.

The program's long-range goal is to help students gain a sure appreciation of the role of art in their world, as well as the role of museums, and then apply those skills to other subjects.

"It is the concept of using an artist to add flavor and context to the classroom. In the second grade, they study ancient cultures of Egypt, and that suited perfectly because Paul Klee was influenced by a trip to Tunisia," she says.