The innovations of Robert H. Anderson live on today in schools, school districts and universities around the world. A complex set of new ideas and practices for school learning, teaching, and supervision forged a major shift in how schools are organized, students learn, and supervision occurs. The main idea was that people worked together in teams, leading to cooperation as a norm, and to systems thinking as a practice.
In 1949, Anderson was invited to lead and build a new school district in Illinois around the ideas he had pioneered in nongradedness, multi-aged grouping, team teaching, and clinical supervision. Hearing about the success of this new school district, Anderson was invited to join the faculty of the School of Education at Harvard University. While a professor at Harvard, this cluster of Nongradedness, Multi-Aged Grouping, Team Teaching and Clinical Supervision began to alter the face of school administration worldwide. Beginning with his pioneer work with John Goodlad in 1959 & 1963, The Nongraded Elementary School, he promoted a more developmental approach to school learning than the graded elementary schools since the days of Horace Mann in the mid-1800s. This book has been translated into Chinese, Italian, Spanish, and Hebrew. In 1993 Anderson and Barbara Pavan offered a practical update for teachers and administrators in their work” Nongradedness: Helping it to Happen.
Following John Dewey’s philosophy and practice, Anderson launched Team Teaching as a new form of school organization for students to experience a more natural learning environment in multi-aged classrooms. Workshops were designed for teams of teachers to work with students while other teacher-teams observed and gave feedback on the effects of these innovations on student learning. A new field of supervision emerged called Clinical Supervision, with a mission of teachers coaching and learning with and from each other, using a five-stage observation cycle. This package of a new form of schooling was now complete for learning, teaching, and professional development.
After 19 years at Harvard, Anderson’s Deanship at Texas Tech University promoted these same innovations for faculty development in the College of Education. After he retired from Texas Tech, he launched a funded not-for-profit corporation as President, called Pedamorphosis, Inc., with Karolyn Snyder as Vice President, to promote educational change and leadership development around the world. Its Wingspan Journal publication over the years included many articles from COPIS members who shared their research on new pathways to the supervision of teachers. Anderson also served as one of the founding Presidents of COPIS.
In 1986 (at the University of South Florida) with Karolyn Snyder, he wrote Managing Productive Schools: Toward and Ecology, which launched a new era of Team-Taught and Multi-Aged Grouping schooling that was grounded in Systems Thinking, which is the integration of collaborative work systems and services around a common purpose of student success. Anderson and Snyder also built over 15 years a 12,000-volume Educational Leadership Library at the University of South Florida, which is now housed at Mid Sweden University, under the oversight of Kristen Snyder. His scholarship generated 11 books, 36 Chapters, and hundreds of other kinds of publications.
Anderson’s Legacy lives on! In 2022 the Headmaster of a school in Florida shared with Snyder that without team teaching, and the integration of teams as the foundation for work, they never would have been able to achieve the high levels of success in teaching and learning throughout the COVID period. Another current example is that while the authors of a 2023 publication, Systems Thinking for Sustainable Schooling: A Mindshift for Educators to Lead and Achieve Quality Schools, co-edited by Karolyn Snyder and Kristen Snyder, were working together on the contents of the book, one author raised the question of how this book could be complete without something written by Robert Anderson, now deceased. A search led to an unpublished document Anderson wrote in 2006, called “The Beginning of Collaboration in Schools: Team Teaching and Multi-Aged Grouping”. With the editor’s permission, this work was included in the 2023 publication. The Robert H. Anderson legacy lives today!
Prepared by Karolyn J. Snyder