10. HOW THE COURSE WAS RUN
This description is of the practice at Kakamega. The activities were introduced there to Form One in January 1967. The new students were introduced first, because it was considered likely that they would accept an unusual course without too many complaints.

Choosing the Groups
The timetable was arranged so that there were three teachers available for all Form One English classes and all three streams were timetabled simultaneously. English classes were arranged in groups of two and three periods. At this time the usual time allowed for English was 9 periods each of forty minutes a week. The reason for putting the streams together was to produce a social arrangement which the students could see was obviously different from the normal class. The attitude to learning we wanted to encourage might be easier to achieve if other things were different too.

While these students, about 108 in all, were still not quite aware of which class or dormitory they were in, they were put in groups of 6 and told these were their permanent working assignments at least for the next term. Before term began the teachers went through the class lists and made up the groups from the information available, which was only the mother tongue and school dormitory. The groups were mixed - two from each stream - but usually contained members of the same dormitory. This arrangement was to allow working together in the evening and to afford some solidarity against bullying (it was the custom for the older students to bully the younger ones). The mixing of students in one group from different streams was to prevent some of the exclusive quasi-tribal feelings which build up between social groups like school classes. All groups in the Kakamega English Block were carefully chosen by the teachers. One argument for this is that in working life people don't usually work with friends so that it is useful to learn how to work with people we have not chosen. It has been stated (but I can't find the reference) that friends don't work together as well as randomly chosen groups (probably they spend too much time socialising). They were told to sit round tables.

Each group was allocated a Tutor who normally supervised six groups in each year. (However when sometimes there was a temporary surplus of teachers the numbers of groups might be reduced).
The Form Two groups were selected with the benefit of more information. Those who were selected after a year of pre-Block teaching were selected according to end of year examination results and teachers' personal knowledge. Each group was to have a mix of abilities. Those who went into the Form Two Block in 1968 after a year of the Form One Block were selected even more carefully. Each group was to have a good speaker, a good writer and a good leader. The purpose was to avoid if possible a group with no-one of ability in it. Some groups, when chosen almost at random without sufficient information had proved to be slow at doing the work and required much teacher attention to give them ideas. Selecting a mixed group made them more inclined to be "self-starting" and less dependent on teacher's suggestions.