“It seems like sorcery,’’ said Vasiliy Bogin, a school official from Moscow, when he saw first graders at Public School 321 in Park Slope writing stories.

Mr. Bogin is the director of the New Humanitarian School, a private school in Moscow, who had come to New York to get a glimpse of how schools operate here.

On his visit Wednesday to P.S. 321, a school with an intense focus on reading and writing, he observed Melissa DiPinto leading a first-grade reading and writing workshop.

Six-year-olds were composing their own stories, some of them using phonetic spelling, others leaving out certain verbs or articles. Ms. DiPinto walked around the room, discussing each child’s work, and helped them break down the concept of telling a tale, emphasizing a phrase written on all their folders: plan, write, re-read.

Mr. Bogin darted from desk to desk, observing the conversations between teacher and students, videotaping some of what he saw.

“I am going to show the video to my workers and I’ll say, ‘Look here, they are 6-year-old children and they are writing these texts. Why are we not writing this text?' ’’ he said.

“My 6-year-old children cannot write so well,’’ he said.

Readers might recall Mr. Bogin from an article in The New York Times magazine in September about the children of Clifford Levy, the former New York Times Moscow bureau chief.

Mr. Levy wrote about his and his wife’s decision to send their children to a local Moscow school where all instruction was in Russian, rather than to an international school where English would be the dominant language and most of their classmates would be foreigners like them. The children were there for four years, before Mr. Levy was reassigned to New York.

Their children had attended P.S. 321 before going to Moscow, and now Mr. Bogin was here, accompanied by Mr. Levy's wife, Julie Dressner, to see how children are educated, and what his school might have in common with those in New York.

Mr. Bogin founded his progressive, experimental school shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Like many of his counterparts at New York City schools, Mr. Bogin emphasizes critical thinking.

“I didn’t want to be a person who is ordered and must obey the orders without any thinking,'' he told Mr. Levy. "I didn’t consider myself to be a person who repeats texts without any criticism or thinking or any alternatives.”

He also spends a lot of time evaluating teachers and their methods, at a time when teacher evaluations are a contentious topic in American schools.

In addition to Ms. DiPinto’s class, he also observed a fourth-grade reading and writing workshop, and heard the teacher, Alex Messer, lead his students in discussing books they were reading. He guided the students as they discussed what issues were dominant in the books, what lessons they could learn from them and what evidence they had to support what they thought of the characters’ actions.

Mr. Bogin marveled at the teaching skills he had observed, and later asked the principal of P.S. 321, Liz Phillips, whether it was difficult to attract teachers of the caliber of the two whose classes he had visited.

“We are fortunate because we are a school where people want to work in,’’ she told him. “It’s a desirable neighborhood so all of those things make it much easier for us. I also think we in general do a really good job in interviewing teachers. I care a lot less about what they know about education than who they are as a person, and their intellectual curiosity.’’

Mr. Bogin asked if they had their choice of applicants for each teacher vacancy.

“We can choose,’’ Ms. Phillips said. “That is not true of all schools, and it is one of the inequities of the system. If you are in a high-poverty school with a lot of struggling children, in a neighborhood that’s not considered so safe, or isn’t easy to get to through public transportation, you don’t have the same choices.’’

“So you are the best?’’ he asked her.

“We are one of them,’’ she said, laughing. “There are other great schools in the city, too. Actually there are many great schools in the city but we are certainly one of the more desirable schools.’’

In his whirlwind visit to New York, which lasted less then 48 hours, Mr. Bogin visited two public schools and met with a group of principals and other educators at Teachers College.

No visitor, of course, can be expected to understand New York’s sprawling public school system in even a dozen visits.

“Do you have much hierarchy here?’’ he asked at one point.

By the end of his day, however, he had at least gotten this point: "You have the same bureaucracy we do."

Throughout his day, Mr. Bogin was struck by the differences between the schools he visited and his own. P.S. 321, for example, has more than 1,400 students and 85 teachers, including those who teach special education, music and other special subjects. Mr. Bogin’s school has 150 or so students and 80 teachers. Each classroom has about 15 students, he said, and sometimes two or three teachers.

There are also enough teachers so that students can stay at the school through the evening if they want to work on school projects and receive supervised help.

Mr. Bogin also visited Bard High School Early College, which is operated by Bard College and the Department of Education. There, he learned about the core curriculum standards, and a roundtable discussion demonstrated the school's Writing & Thinking program. The group parsed phrases like "muscle memory'' and "text-based analysis.''

At Teachers College at Columbia University, one of the nation's premiere teaching colleges, Mr. Bogin attended a roundtable discussion with city and state education officials on the issue of principal evaluations, and on whether educators’ pay should be tied to professional evaluations and to their students’ test scores.

By the end of his long day, Mr. Bogin said it was clear that in New York, "there are a lot of people who want to make education better.''

He said he was struck by how confident many people were about expressing their views on how to do things in the classroom, while in Russia, he said, "a lot of teachers think they must do what the authorities want.''