PEABODY JOURNAL OF EDUCATION, 71(1), 3-11

My Mentor: Robert M. Gagné

Bruce W. Tuckman

I am not likely to forget my first face-to-face encounter with the man who was to become my mentor, Bob Gagné. It took place in December of 1959 when I was an undergraduate psychology major in my senior year, and Bob was in charge of the graduate psychology program at Princeton University. Incidentally, to provide some historical perspective, Eisenhower was President of the United States, and you could buy a Coke for a dime.

I was interested in the field of human learning, and was doing a senior honors thesis on the role of cuing in what was then called programmed instruction. This reflected my strong practical interest in how people learned real information in real settings, not nonsense syllables in a laboratory. In my reading and literature reviewing, there was not that much to be found on this new and emerging field, but a name that did come up frequently was Robert M. Gagné, the man who would ultimately dub the area instructional psychology. Based on reading his ideas, I decided that Gagné was destined to become a “star” and was the man under whom I wanted to study. There and then, I became committed to having Bob Gagné as my graduate mentor.

A few months after making this determination, I found myself on a train heading south out of New York City’s Penn Station (the old one, not the one that currently sits beneath Madison Square Garden) en route to Princeton, NJ. It was Christmas break of my senior year, and I made an appointment to meet with my idol. It was “Mohammed going to the mountain,” so to speak, and I was very excited as I sat back and watched the new Jersey countryside rush by. (It was a lot prettier then than it is now.) At the Princton Junction station, I switched to a two-car train that must have been the prototype for the Toonville Trolley, for the short trip to Princeton. I felt like Zooey in Franny and Zooey (Salinger, 1961). My heart was hammering in my chest.

The Princeton station was across from the McCarter Theater, and only a short walk to Eno Hall, then the building that housed the Psychology department. The campus was deserted because everyone had departed for Christmas break, but there was one office in old Eno Hall in which a light was burning on that cold, gray December day.

Professor Robert M. Gagné was not at all what I had expected. He was a big man with a big round head, topped by sparse and rapidly disappearing tufts of hair. He wore a shaggy old sweater and strange looking shoes. He had a very loud and gruff voice, and his demeanor somehow made me think more of the farming towns of upstate New York, where I was currently attending school, than of staid old Princeton. (He did, in fact, grow up in the farming community of North Andover, MA, I later discovered.) He did not seem at all to fit his name; there was nothing French about him, certainly nothing that conjured up an “accent aigu.” A beret might have helped.

But he was direct, almost blunt you might say, and he was smart. As soon as my initial shock wore off, I could see he was “the man.” His questions cut right to the heart of things, and he treated me as an equal – which I surely was not. He also said he would take me on as his research assistant. When I arrived in September, I would work in his lab. My head was spinning so when I left that I remember nothing of the ride home.

My years at Princeton were greatly influenced by Bob Gagné’s presence and his ideas. His laboratory was in a cinder block building under Palmer Stadium, and it had some odd paraphernalia scattered within it. From his prior years in military laboratories studying psychomotor skills, he had brought various kinds of reaction time apparatus, one of which looked a bit like an airplane cockpit simulator. Those of us who worked in his lab would play with it from time to time, much to his consternation. Gagné, himself, had a strange love-hate relationship with things mechanical, as I was soon to learn. The lab also housed some famous illusions, left behind by its previous occupant, Hadley Cantril. One of them I remember distinctly – the distorted room. The room was built so that everything within it looked larger than it actually was. It had grown musty from disuse, giving it a macabre sort of look like something out of Tales from the Crypt (Cochran, 1979).

In the hallway, just outside the lab, stood a cigarette machine, and Gagné was a heavy smoker. Lucky Strike was his brand. Because he smoked a lot, it was not uncommon for him to run out of cigarettes, and then hasten to the cigarette machine for replacements. I distinctly remember running subjects one day and being interrupted by a loud noise coming from outside the lab. The clamor became so great that I could not proceed with what I was doing, and so went to investigate. What I found was Bob Gagné at war with the cigarette machine, shaking it furiously with both hands, face reddened, shouting epithets at the inanimate object of his difficulty. The machine, it seems, had swallowed his quarter (yes, cigarettes only cost a quarter in those days, and none of us knew they were lethal) and given him nothing in return. He was going to get either his cigarettes or his money or the machine would suffer the consequences. It was only after a lot of “shushing” that he calmed down enough to resolve to wait for the man who refilled the machine to show up to get his satisfaction. I will have more to say later about my mentor’s strange difficulties with both smoking and dealing with things mechanical.

However, all of these little anecdotes are really asides to the main event, working with the man. He was beginning to develop the idea of learning hierarchies, one of the essential features of his life’s work, and I believed he was really onto something. He was analyzing skills and knowledge into components, and he was doing it as a prerequisite to instruction. When you really think about it, you can see that he stood at the crossroads of psychology, the transition from behaviorism to cognitivism, from associationism to the emergence of schema theory and metacognition. He had been trained in the former, indeed had even developed a runway on which to test rats for his own dissertation, and was now drawn inextricably toward the light of what he called nonreproductive learning. He carried a lot of systematic and analytic quality of behaviorism into his study of human learning and problem solving, thus forcing a discipline of order and objectivity on his ideas. I think it was that order and objectivity that made his new approach so appealing.

I was there with him when he hammered out his early hierarchies. We would sit across a table, face to face, the master and the disciple, a huge sheet of paper between us, and fill in the boxes that would slowly become a hierarchy, be it for adding and subtracting fractions, or identifying the physical properties of a substance, or whatever else. But the disciple, it turned out, could be as prickly as the master, despite his youth and more limited knowledge. Fortunately, that was okay with the master or else there would have come an inevitable early parting. The master was always working from the top down, the disciple for proceeding from the bottom up; perhaps it was a result of the sides of the table on which we sat. We each had a different perspective. And we exchanged ideas with great intensity, one not afraid of offending the other, the other not afraid of intimidating the one. Often, all the other student assistants fled the lab while these sessions were in progress. But in the end, there on the paper between us, was a full blown hierarchy, artful in its complexity and good fit, and both combatants smiling and satisfied. He almost always won, as well he should have given his greater wisdom, but we both seemed better off as a result of the process. I know I was, for that was the way I learned. Spare the bludgeon and spoil the scholar, I always say. (One of those infamous hierarchies appears in Figure 1.)

It didn’t take long before we were discussing my own research ideas, which, needless to say, were offshoots of his. He wanted me to compete for a National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Predoctoral Fellowship, a prestigious award, although one not likely to make me “rich,” paying as it did less than $2,000 a year, the going rate at that time. The application required a research proposal, and he worked closely with me in its development. Despite the heavy workload his own creativity provoked, he was always generous in the time he gave me and the support that came with it. It was also easier for me to proceed with my own work than perhaps most graduate students because I had such a rich fount of ideas from which to draw, namely his. Not only were there the hierarchies begging for experimentation, but there was also his model of instruction and the learning processes that he proposed to underlie it, as well as his ideas about the importance of underlying cognitive prerequisites. With all this to draw from and with his help, writing the NIMH proposal was not too difficult. In fact, I was successful in obtaining the award.

Although I was then no longer Gagné’s research assistant, at least technically, I continued to work in his lab, and he continued to help me. Despite the fact that neither of us were the type of person who showed their feelings of affection, we had developed a strong connection. He was one of the few professional authority figures in my life for whom I had genuine respect, and from whom I knew I could learn. Under Gagné, my fierce sense of independence was strongly modulated by my recognition of the value of his counsel and the merit of his ideas. It would have been extremely difficult for someone without his strong self-assurance combined with an openness to others’ ideas to have functioned as my mentor, because I was like a “bucking bronco,” wanting to follow my own inclinations. I was not inclined to automatically submit to authority, a trait that occasionally caused me trouble at Princeton. I had one professor who was an admittedly out-of-date Gestalt psychologist, and I challenged his ideas openly (for which he graded me down). Gagné’s influence on me was based on my esteem for him and his work, and not on any authority needs that he might have. He showed no inclination to dominate others, only to convince them with his logic and creativity – which he typically did. It was a sad and disorienting day indeed when he told me he was leaving Princeton to become Director of Research for the American Institute for Research (AIR) in Pittsburgh. At the time he left, I was his only student, and I guess he must have felt that I had the necessary independence to finish up without him. It took three faculty members to replace his role in my life: one to provide the support and sense of security, one to help supply new ideas, and one to be a friend and answer even dumb questions. Bob Gagné was, for me, all three rolled into one.

But my story of mentorship does not end here, for I was privileged to have Bob Gagné in my life on subsequent occasions. After leaving Princeton with Ph.D. in hand, I went to Washington, DC to work in a Naval laboratory. Bob had been very involved with the University of Maryland Mathematics Project, a major curriculum development effort in the “new math.” This was at a time when scientists were beginning to get involved in the development of new curricula for the public schools, and Gagné’s ideas were particularly relevant to this effort. Because of time constraints, he was no longer able to continue with the work, and so he recommended me to replace him. It was a good feeling to know that he had that kind of confidence in me. I spent the next few years continuing with the work using ideas that we both shared.

The math involvement led to another role for me as Gagné’s understudy, if you will. Bob had been working with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) on the development of a major science curriculum for the elementary grades called Science-A Process Approach. This curriculum represented the application of his ideas to large-scale curriculum development. Units were structured by process rather than content, were designed essentially using hierarchies, and were built along the nine events of instruction. Gagné himself had written guidelines and manuals for the development of the “lessons.” The work was done by a mixture of scientists and science teachers during summers. Gagné had been present the first summer, but had other commitments for the second. So again, he recommended me, and I found myself in his place with the AAAS writing group the summer that followed.

If there was such a thing as “the Gagné Hat,” I suddenly found myself wearing it. It worked remarkably like the magic slippers provided to Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz (Baum, 1903). When I placed the hat on my head, my head grew larger, perhaps balder, and certainly more full of ideas. When the others saw I was wearing the hat, they listened, accepted, and occasionally even genuflected. I wore that hat from dawn to dusk, taking it off only at night because my wife was afraid my head might explode. It was a wonderful summer. I wrote objectives, constructed hierarchies, wrote lesson plans, and modeled everything I did so that others could see the Gagné ideas in action. I was sorry to see that summer come to an end.

By the third summer, the action on the project was winding down. The curriculum was almost completed, and would soon be published by the Xerox Corporation and play a major role in the schools in the decade to come. That third summer, after about 3 years apart, Bob Gagné and I were reunited. To be really honest, I found it hard to give up that hat, which he naturally wore. After all, it was his. I had the feeling then that the mentoring had been done. I was ready to define my own hat. Bob had gone from being mentor to being colleague.

But the story is still not over. Bob Gagné left AIR in Pittsburgh and joined the Educational Psychology faculty at Berkeley. He bought a house on a hill overlooking the East Bay and vowed each night at sunset never to leave. But there were a few things on which he did not reckon: the Free Speech movement and Arthur Jensen. The Free Speech movement was the first campus revolution by students; they sat in, took over buildings, and did pretty much what they wanted. Bob Gagné liked order and discipline. He respected those virtues; they helped him work. At Berkeley, they were disappearing. Chaos and confusion and feel-good culture were replacing them.

Then, Arthur Jensen, his colleague, published his research on racial differences in intelligence and all hell broke loose, not just in front of Sproul Hall (the main gathering place on campus), but in the very building where Gagné worked. Sunsets be damned! He could take no more. When in 1969, Florida State University (FSU) came calling, Bob and wife Pat packed up their belongings and their kids and moved to Tallahassee, a sleepy little North Florida town that doubled as the state capital. Bob spent the rest of his professional career at FSU, retiring in 1986.

Through one of life’s many quirks of fate, or perhaps the intelligence of the universe, my mentor and I were reunited in 1983, when I became Dean of the College of Education at Florida State. I bought a house not a half a mile from Bob’s, and had the opportunity to resume our friendship. Curiously now, I had become the authority figure whereas Bob was entering the twilight of his career. In many ways, it seemed like a role reversal and felt somewhat strange to me.

Just prior to coming to Tallahassee, but after accepting the job, the American Psychological Association (APA) had decided to honor Gagné for his career achievements. As his former student, I was asked to chair a symposium to reflect on his accomplishments, and to invite other former students and others who had been influenced by his work to join in the symposium as well. I gave a 15-minute public testimonial to Bob Gagné’s work at that APA meeting in Anaheim, and poor Bob sat in the front row and grew redder by the minute. Public accolades were not something with which he felt comfortable. He had always been a self-effacing, somewhat shy person in public, and success and recognition had not changed that. He was not much different from the man I had met in Eno Hall many years before.

And still the story is not over. After leaving the deanship, I remained at FSU, joining the Department of Educational Research, Bob Gagné’s old department. I spent 12 more years there. In the office next to me was Walt Wager who collaborated with Gagné on the third and fourth editions of Principles of Instructional Design, after Les Briggs, Gagné’s original coauthor, passed away. In the next office down was Bob Reiser, who collaborated with Gagné on Selecting Media for Instruction. Two offices down was Marcy Driscoll, who collaborated with Gagné on the second edition of Essentials of Learning for Instruction. Across from Marcy was Walt Dick, who worked in Gagné’s lab at Princeton as an undergraduate the first year I was there as Bob’s graduate research assistant, and who collaborated with him on his famous chapter on Instructional Psychology in Annual Review of Psychology (Gagné & Dick, 1982). On the back wall of our office suite hung a picture of Gagné accepting the Educational Technology Man of the Year Award in 1988, right next to a clock that Gagné himself made in his garage (and that, unlike its creator, unfortunately stops from time to time).

These former colleagues that were in the offices around me then all told Bob Gagné stories that both mirrored and rivaled my own. Walt Wager retold a story told to him by a student of the time Gagné lit a cigarette while teaching and then, thinking it had gone out, replaced it in the pack in his pocket. A student timidly raised his hand, and when called on, told Gagné that his pocket was on fire. Indeed smoke could be seen emanating from within. Bob harrumphed, and then snatched the smoking cigarette from his pocket and began to smoke it while continuing on with his lecture. Or the time he launched a telephone across the room in anger because it would not work right; another indication of his impatience with mechanical ineptitude. Early on, Gagné asked Wager about which Macintosh computer he should buy. Holding his breath knowing how frustrated Bob can get, Wager told him: “If you buy a Mac, you have to use the mouse.” From the other end of the phone came the sound of gnashing teeth.

But what these people talked about most is what they learned from Bob Gagné, from his spontaneous questions, irrepressible curiosity, and creative mind. He left a legacy at FSU of his work ethic, clear thinking, openness to new ideas, and willingness to help others.

The signs and associations and memories of my mentor surrounded me then. I found myself having to share my mentor with four other people, all of whom regard Bob Gagné as their mentor too. Bob Gagné designed the Instructional Systems Program in which they all worked; he gave it legitimacy; he put it on the map. He did as much and more for them as he did for me, but at a different point in his career. We are the living legacy of Bob Gagné the mentor.

Baum, F. L. (1903). The wizard of oz. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill.

Cochran, R. (1979). Tales from the crypt. New York:IC Comics

Gagné, R. M., Briggs, L. J., & Wagner, W. W. (1992). Principles of instructional design (4^th ed.). Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace.

Gagné, R. M., & Dick, W. (1982). Instructional psychology. Annual Review of Psychology, 34, 261-295.

Gagné, R. M., & Driscoll, M. P. (1988). Essentials of learning for instruction (2^nd ed.). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Gagné, R. M., Mayor, J. R., Garstens, H. L., & Paradise, N. E. (1962). Factors in acquiring knowledge of a mathematical task. Psychological Monographs,76(7, Whole No. 526).

Reiser, R. A., & Gagné, R. M. (1983). Selecting media for instruction (2^nd ed.). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Educational Technology Publications.

Salinger, J. D. (1961). Franny and Zooey. Boston: Little Brown.

TASK 1 TASK 2

Ia Ib

IIa IIb

Supplying other names for positive integers in statements of equality

Identifying and using the properties that must be assumed in asserting the truth of statements of equality in addition of integers

Stating and using the definition of addition of two positive integers

Stating and using the definition of addition of an integer and its additive inverse

IIIa IIIb

IVa IVb IVc IVd

Using the whole number 0 as the additive identity

Va Vb

Performing addition and subtraction of whole numbers

Using parentheses to group names for the same whole number

Figure 1. Hierarchy for adding in the “New Mathematics” (Gagné, Mayor, Garstens, & Paradise, 1962).