Hello everyone!
I am writing from Washington, DC. at the end of a Summer of institutes and workshops in which as usual I have been learning as much from teachers as I was able to teach them.
One of these institutes was the Fifth Annual Allerton Park Institute which Lilian Katz and I teach together. This is always the highlight of the year for me. This year we added a brief day and a half for the return of former Allerton participants to share their project experiences with displays of children's work, slides, videos and narrative presentations. It was most enlightening and thought-provoking for all of us. Since then I have spent a few more days with Lilian and she and I have continued lively and stimulating discussions and arguments on our favorite topics!
I would like to comment on three of the topics discussed on PROJECTS-L since I last reviewed the activity here.
There have been excellent suggestions given for the management of open snack. I especially like the reminder that snack doesn’t have to be always open or always whole group.
It is important though for us to remember that however the teacher organizes any activity in the classroom there are implicit messages for the children about what the teacher values and what is expected of them. For example in the case of open snack:
....and I am sure you can think of other such messages.
The same kinds of implicit messages are there for the children in the way the project work is organized. A few weeks ago we discussed the difference between a project and a thematic unit. Children studying different animals in a thematic unit (each child or group in the class choosing an animal and each having to research what it eats, where it lives and how its young are born and raised, each child or group making a model of an animal and a diorama habitat, etc.) is very different from the project approach.
In the second phase of a project some children may choose a particular animal to find out about while others may compare different animals. Some children may make a model of an animal while others may design a habitat. By no means all children would be doing each of these things. Some children may do research on foods animals eat, others on habitats. Some may do no research using books or computers but consult in detail with those children who have, in order to make model animals or dioramas of habitats. These models can be full of detail showing how well they have understood what they learned from interviewing their classmates.
In a project the group of children can be seen as a large research team, each member contributing their strengths, special talents, interests and preferences to the other members of the class community so that everyone’s learning is enriched by the efforts of everyone else. (This paragraph may be read with ‘pairs’ or ‘small groups’ of children in the place of individual children).
Those children who prefer to do library or computer research have the responsibility to share their findings with those who prefer to make detailed constructions. These young researchers thus have the satisfaction of seeing how their work can contribute to activities carried out by classmates (e.g. a diorama made by an individual or a mural designed and carried or a small group) who haven’t the same facility with book research but enjoy and are very skillful at detailed representation in a model. In this way children are accountable to the whole community of learners for their contribution to the project and a mutual respect can be developed in children for the different abilities and achievement preferences of their classmates. And of course, a few children may do all of these things. Also a few activities may be contibuted to by all children.
This example is repeated in many ways in a classroom where the project approach is being effectively implemented in all its complexity. Early in the children’s experience of project work there may be a tendency for them to stick to what they prefer doing and to choose to do activities in which they know how to succeed easily. (Carol Dweck's research has shown how children play safe when their performance is being assessed, so systematic instruction tends to reward them for making this kind of choice). As they work this way in projects with their classmates, however, they can learn much about how other children confidently undertake the work which they themselves feel less inclined to try. By later in the school year all the children can be required to have experience in a wide variety of investigative activities, each child going well beyond those activities he or she at first felt most comfortable with.
The advantage here is that children learn from other children not only how to do things for themselves but they also learn the dispositions that accompany those more expert children's competence. They not only learn skills from the successful children but can also empathize with what it looks and feels like in a peer model to be competent and confident at those activities. Much more is likely to be learned from such modeling than from adult instruction. (NB: This does not mean that everything should be taught children by their peers! On the contrary, especially with older children, much must be learned by systematic instruction outside the context of a project.)
The project approach is about children learning to pursue an investigation in depth. Depth is achieved at the expense of coverage. You cannot have both. When each child has to do the same as the others the result is often coverage rather than depth... and equal coverage for each child can usually be more easily achieved by systematic instruction. However, when the children are doing different things, like members of a research team, there is coverage for the whole class while there is depth of understanding for each of the individual children in a few of the selected areas covered. Collective coverage but individual depth... a useful combination.
One big advantage of projects is that they show the teacher just how skillful and knowledgeable children can be when they are working with their strengths. Because the children do not do the same things they can take longer and achieve more in fewer pieces of work. This depth can help the children learn the same things indifferent ways (through different learning styles or different intelligences).
However, the children do learn many of the same things in good quality project work. They just learn it in different ways. What they learn in common can often by reduced to what is easily measured on tests and sometimes called ‘content knowledge.’ If there are games, quizzes and other self assessment strategies children can use in the third phase of the project they can all pass the same test on knowledge of basic facts on a given topic.
In the process of learning these basic facts, however, the children will have been learning many other things which are useful to responsible members of communities of learners in the way of dispositions and feelings as well as knowledge and skills. These other things cannot be measured by pencil and paper tests, even though they may profoundly affect a child’s ability to learn in the classroom. They can be recorded however in portfolios and other developmental records important for parent/teacher or teacher/teacher reporting on school achievement.
I have been delighted with the several very useful suggestions for computer use made by particpants in this discussion. It so beautifully illustrates the range of possible uses of the computer software already available and may encourage some of us to develop even more different kinds of programs for children to use in project work. The two most helpful types of computer use by young children in their project work are for investigation and representation.
Investigations can be made interactive with cds and internet sites which can be downloaded for children to explore in the classroom while not actually on-line. Additional notes can be added to any such site by the teacher using a program such as ‘Hotdog’ to customize parts of the hypertext for her own class. (I know this sounds daunting but it is not difficult and need not be time consuming if done a little at a time). Also flatbed scanners are getting better and cheaper so some children’s work, if especially informative, can be made available on the computer and annotated by the teacher (or the child him- or herself) for other children to use as a resource. Children can also learn to explore different kinds of graphic organizers through the software and to combine these with writing, drawing, numbers, measurements and other ways of representating information.
One topic I have not responded to in this review is that of teacher education programs. However, I appreciate the thought-provoking suggestions in Susan Henry’s message and look forward to reading any responses. I shall be back in Edmonton by the middle of the week and getting ready to teach my fall courses at the University of Alberta. I too, hope to do some work on collaborative design of rubrics with university students.
In the next few weeks I think it would be particularly interesting to hear about topics which teachers think are well suited to projects undertaken at the beginning of the school year. These can often be designed as mini projects which enable the teacher to get to know children through their strengths and interests and also enable the teacher to set expectations of the children for the use of the classroom as a workshop such as will be needed in the project work which will develop as the school year progresses.
Best wishes!
(August 15 '96)