Marva Collins' Way

Marva Collins offers a beacon of hope in the midst of America’s educational crises. In this work, Marva Collins recounts her successful teaching strategies and offers inspirational advice on how to motivate children to fulfill their potential. This 1990 updated edition contains a new epilogue for parents and teachers.

Teachers need nothing more than “books, a blackboard, and a pair of legs that will last the day,” Marva Collins told Dan Hurley in 50 Plus magazine. These three things were essentially all that Collins had when she opened the Westside Preparatory School in Chicago, Illinois, in 1975 with the $5,000 she had contributed to her pension fund. Disillusioned after teaching in the public school system for 16 years, Collins decided to leave and open a school that would welcome students who had been rejected by other schools and labeled disruptive and “unteachable.” She had seen too many children pass through an ineffective school system in which they were given impersonal teachers, some of whom came to school chemically impaired.

A firm believer in the value of a teacher’s time spent with a student, Collins rejected the notion that the way to solve the problems faced by U.S. schools was to spend more money. Collins also shunned the audiovisual aids so common in other classrooms because she believed that they created an unnecessary distance between the teacher and the student.