After the initial agreement, should one tribe member not participate fully, all work sometimes stops. Peer pressure, however, tends to mold them into a cooperating group. Each member's contribution to the total effort is emphasized constantly to stress the value of working effectively with others. As every teacher knows, learning how to work effectively with others is a big part of successful classroom participation. These projects, spread across our 600 acres of woodlands, teach long-term goals, the effects of working together, and most important, the art of compromise.
Afternoons also are a time for individual tutoring.
While the cooperative learning projects are taking place, each child leaves the group for two individual tutoring sessions which concentrate on that particular child's difficulties in coping with successful completion of normal school assignments. Each child is assigned an individual adult tutor who plans these sessions around the child's reported area of greatest academic difficult. Tremendous progress can be made since all available time is directed to that particular child's problems. Tutors must be highly trained in academic remediation and have available to them a wide variety of remediation materials that have been proven successful empirically in working with children at risk. Fortunately, these materials have become widely available recently.