Laura Zirbes (April 26, 1884 in
Buffalo, New York – June 9, 1967 in
Columbus, Ohio
Columbus () is the state capital and the most populous city in the U.S. state of Ohio. With a 2020 census population of 905,748, it is the 14th-most populous city in the U.S., the second-most populous city in the Midwest, after Chicago, and t ...
) was an American educator, an important figure in education and
reading instruction
Reading is the process of taking in the sense or meaning of letters, symbols, etc., especially by sight or touch.
For educators and researchers, reading is a multifaceted process involving such areas as word recognition, orthography (spelling) ...
.
Career
Zirbes began her teaching career at an
elementary school
A primary school (in Ireland, the United Kingdom, Australia, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, and South Africa), junior school (in Australia), elementary school or grade school (in North America and the Philippines) is a school for primary ed ...
in
Cleveland from 1903 to 1919, and then went on to work at the experimental
Lincoln School at
Teachers College, Columbia University from 1920 until 1926.
She earned her
doctoral degree from
Columbia University in 1928. From 1928 she taught at
Ohio State University, until her retirement in 1954.
In all her teaching years combined, she taught for 61 years, including summer sessions until 1964.
During so many years of teaching, Zirbes experienced some of the most important issues affecting education in the United States throughout the twentieth century. In Cleveland, she taught a class of fifty-six fourth graders that were all children of immigrants. During her time at Columbia, she listened to
Edward L. Thorndike
Edward Lee Thorndike (August 31, 1874 – August 9, 1949) was an American psychologist who spent nearly his entire career at Teachers College, Columbia University. His work on comparative psychology and the learning process led to the theory of c ...
,
John Dewey
John Dewey (; October 20, 1859 – June 1, 1952) was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer whose ideas have been influential in education and social reform. He was one of the most prominent American scholars in the f ...
, and
William Bagley discuss the value of testing, and heard Bagley argue with
William Heard Kilpatrick about Kilpatrick’s Project method.
Zirbes coauthored many articles with
William S. Gray. Her dissertation made her one of the country’s experts on teaching children to read. She never really considered herself an expert at reading because she did not believe in isolating one subject from other subjects. Zirbes founded the laboratory school at Ohio State, this school continued under her influence for over thirty years. She believed children learned things best when their interest was high. Zirbes supported the child-centered approach only if the teacher had a good understanding of the skills they wanted the children to learn, and carefully lead their class in that direction. The next step in learning was to provide good learning experiences that would enlarge children’s
understanding and their
vocabulary.
Zirbes believed that numerous other elements contribute to learning. The first, that the lesson should be meaningful to the child, and second, that learning should be intrinsically motivating. The final two elements of learning, as Zirbes saw it, were that the lesson should stimulate thinking and lastly it should be integrated with other subjects. As Zirbes neared retirement, critics like
Arthur Bestor attacked her beliefs on education. Her answer to this criticism came in the form of a book, ''Spurs to Creative Teaching'' (1959).
Reference
{{DEFAULTSORT:Zirbes, Laura
20th-century American educators
1884 births
1967 deaths