Local lifetime educators Arthur Willis and Marcia Greenberg are now collaborative authors. They will sign their book, Heart of the Matter: The Role of Attitude in Teaching, this weekend at The Book House in Stuyvesant Plaza.

Willis and Greenberg’s premise is that learning and enjoying school are reciprocal events.

Willis gained 39 years of experience here in the United States, and in Switzerland, teaching social studies. Many of his years were spent at Clayton A. Bouton High School in Voorheesville.

Greenberg, who has a bachelor’s degree in European history from Mount Holyoke College and a master’s degree in special education from the University at Albany, has 30 years in the classroom — teaching emotionally-challenged students at St. Anne’s School in Albany; helping to create programs for developmentally-delayed infants and toddlers; tutoring all four core subjects at the secondary level; and helping establish a program for gifted elementary students.

Greenberg described Heart of the Matter as a "teaching memoir" written in a conversational tone.
"It’s about the attitude in teaching," Willis said. "It’s kind of a long effort that draws on our experience." Willis spent a year researching his topic, but he and Greenberg have been collaborating on this book for eight years and through five revisions.
"We were pretty effective," he said. "It’s our best shot" to share with educators how "to have an attitude toward students that is effective in teaching them and working with them," Willis said.
Willis was a co-founder of Leysin School in Switzerland in 1961, and he continued there until 1964. Since then, he said, he has attended many reunions with Leysin students who became successful adults. "They were excited," Willis said. His former students told him that their time at Leysin was the best period of their lives, he said.
"What was it we did that was so effective"" Willis asked.

Now retired, Willis said that he spent his last five years in the classroom trying to identify what approaches really worked with students. Heart of the Matter emerged from his 25-year acquaintance with Greenberg.
"It was a real partnership," Greenberg said. She wrote the two chapters on typology, or the cognitive ways of gathering and processing information. She and Willis take turns offering information throughout the book, she said.
"He’s the ‘philosopher.’ I’m the ‘psychologist,’ " Greenberg said.

The two of them examined teaching methods of many teachers over their long careers, Willis said.
"There’s a wide agreement among really fine teachers. The attitude they had is reflected in the distilled observations of this book," Willis said.
"Control is never a big factor for me. That became a no-brainer," he said. "Once you really see kids...they want to continue that experience [of being seen]. I didn’t throw a kid out for 36 years."

The approach

Willis and Greenberg’s book has two themes. The first proposes that there are four types of education, rather than the two that are currently taught in schools. Behavior and thought, or analytical abilities, are joined with sensibilities, or the feeling life, and awareness.
"Just plain awareness," Willis said. He said that awareness is the most important type of educational approach. Teachers should be aware and not project their own ideas or inferences upon students, he said.
"It means no judgment, just a state of perception," Willis said.
Sensibilities are also known as the humanities, and how students progress through their feeling life — "The first to be cut when there’s a pinch. All the arts," Willis said. Feelings are translated into thought, which then motivates behavior, he said.
"We don’t diminish any of the four," he said.

The second theme Willis and Greenberg discuss is fear, and what to do with fear. Willis said that when people experience fear, they revert to a justice response — rules and law and order — or a threatening response.

In the place of fear, Willis and Greenberg suggest alertness and attentiveness. Educators should be alert to students, and then move to attentiveness.
"As you become more attentive to students...[knowledge] is translated into an understanding of the individual," Willis said. If these methods are used, "burnout" will not occur, he said.
"Instead, it will be a very exciting career," he said.

The future

A conference book based on Heart of the Matter and written by Rachel Kramer Theodorou is due out by the end of the year. Theodorou is Willis’s niece and a "very fine elementary teacher" who teaches Master of Arts in Teaching students at Brandeis University in Boston, Mass., Willis said.

Heart of the Matter is applicable to "educators at-large, of any stripe, from kindergarten to graduate school," Willis said.
"I think we’re on such a wrong bend for this No Child Left Behind," Willis said of the federal act requiring high-stakes testing. He called the methods used in the national education program "paper-overloaded." The objective testing used with NCLB "doesn’t tell you a thing," Willis said.
He said that British A- and O-level exams are primarily essays, and that the American system is "a digression" into multiple-choice tests.
"We’re on a very wrong track to exciting learning. Exciting learning is a subjective experience, not objective. Through multiple-choice questions" I don’t think so," Willis said.
Willis and Greenberg have culled their knowledge to depict "how exciting education can really be, especially for educators," Willis said. "I’m 72 years old. This is my best shot at explaining how really good teaching comes about. I would love to see it influence policy. I would love to see it influence training."

Asked if readers should buy Heart of the Matter for every educator they know, Willis said, "I think you’ll like it. I really do."