Brenda Engel

Senior Research Associate and Professor Emerita

In 1974, after a year of intensive planning on the part of a dedicated group of parents, teachers, and consultants, the Cambridge Alternative Public School opened as one of the first "open classroom" public schools in Boston. Having recently returned from a half-year in England, Brenda Engel participated in the year-long planning and subsequently became the school’s documentor/evaluator.  Brenda recalls that the pedagogy of the Alternative School, influenced by the British Primary School movement, was not firmly rooted in American education.  Its implementation was still long on theory and short on know-how.

Looking around, then, for useful ideas, Brenda attended a summer workshop with Patricia Carini at the Prospect School in North Bennington, Vermont.  Carini had been developing qualitative ways of looking at and documenting children’s work – ways which were congenial with “open education” practices.  Through the Prospect connection, Brenda heard about and then joined the North Dakota Study Group on Evaluation, attending their second annual conference at the University of Chicago. Many of the educators who would be important to her intellectually and professionally over the next 20 years were already, or became, members of that group including George Hein.

In 1976, George Hein invited Brenda to join him in making a proposal to evaluate programs coordinated by the Cultural Education Collaborative in Boston. The matrix Brenda devised for the initial cluster of evaluations would serve as a model for the methodology used in the future projects of what soon became the Program and Evaluation Research Group.

Though now retired in her capacity of PERG Co-Director, Brenda remains interested in the PERG community—staying in touch and occasionally attending meetings.