Hello there everyone!
Yes it’s me, Sylvia Chard, back again with some thoughts about the beginning of the new school year.
I imagine many of you will be meeting new children this week or next week... Maybe they will not have done project work before so you may be teaching them some new ways of working. Perhaps you, yourself, have not done much teaching with projects before... so both you and the children may be feeling your way into this kind of work.
I have been talking to many teachers over the last few weeks. As we have talked about their plans for first projects of the year we have been thinking about some ideas for getting started. One good way to start is with a mini project... this may be some project work which does not go very far, just to get the children talking, representing what they know, and taking ownership of some work right from the very first day. This will mean carefully selecting the topic so that the children will not be dependent on you for the information they need as they pursue their investigations.
Remember the first phase of a project involves you, the teacher, in some ethnographic (or anthoropological) work, finding out what personal experiences the children have had and what they know about or how they explain these experiences? Well, one good way to begin the school year is to try out this kind of teacher role as a way of getting to know the children.
The following topics are of the kind which give the children the expertise, collectively at least:
In this way the children can more easily assume ownership of most of the investigation. These are all topics of which the children have personal knowledge and much of that experience will be unknown to you, the teacher. This has the advantage of putting you into the learning position and the children in the position of expert, at least in terms of the content. This is a big advantage for you. You will not be responsible for the content itself, only for orchestrating the assembly of that content into a whole class picture.
Candace asked about the webbing technique referred to by Barb in her account of a group of teachers preparing for the ballet project. I have written about a brainstorming and designing a topic web on pp. 34-35 in the first Practical Guide to the project approach and it is also described in the book, Engaging Children's Minds (Katz and Chard). This describes a kind of braistorming individually by teachers who can then come together to combine their ideas in a web. This makes for a rich sharing of possibilities allowing teachers to predict where the study of such a topic might lead the children in their investigations. It also enables them to find out the special interests and expertise of the staff in relation to the topic. Such preparation of teachers' own minds ahead of time can greatly facilitate the quality of the guidance they will be able to offer the children as the opportunities for investigation and representation arise.
Lilian wondered about the choice of topic. Barb's account of how the children responded to the new ballet tutus in the dress up area seems to have provided a starting point. Would I be right in guessing that the teachers (or one of them?) have a special interest in ballet, maybe also some expertise in dance? Also, I got the impression that these children have been back at school for a little while, so this was not the first week? Maybe, because of the location or kind of school some of the children take ballet or other dance lessons?
The disadvantage of such a specialized topic as 'ballet' may be that the children can be very dependent on the teachers for information, finding it hard to do independent research. Also the topic may not relate to anything in the children's daily lives at home, making it a special 'school' kind of thing, giving some children the idea that school is irrelevant to their real lives. This may be equally true of rain forests, deserts, or the ocean depending where the children live... best to choose a local river, hill, park, bluff or even just the paths and sidewalks right around the school to study (for younger children at least, pre-K - Grade 3).
The children can be encouraged to use all the representational strategies they can to share their experience and knowledge with you. As you learn about the children and their lives outside school you can be assessing their strengths, their ability to speak about their experience, draw, write, construct, role play, paint, make playdoh or clay people or objects, etc.. You will learn which children will be most willing to bring items into the classroom from home and which children seem to be most reticent. You will find out which children work well with their friends and who can set up little displays of shells, or rocks or vacation photos.
The children will find it easier to take ownership of their work and take responsibility for the quality of their representations if they know you really want to know what they would like to share with you and the other children in the class. They can learn about how you can advise them, make suggestions, and support their ideas (taking that 'guidance' rather than 'directing' role in this kind of work).
A brief study of any of the above topics for a week or two can tell you about: the children’s homes, yards, neighborhoods, modes of transportation, members of the family(youngest and oldest, at home or elsewhere), pets, travel, interests, hobbies, parents’ work, parents’ interests and hobbies, vacations, sports, visitors, special celebrations, etc. etc.
You can learn how well the children can talk, write, count, compare, order, draw, etc. You can see if any of the children can independently use a Venn diagram correctly to compare themselves and a friend, or parents and grandparents homes, or dogs and cats. You can see if anyone can do a survey of a selection of class members, who travelled and where, who has which kinds of pets or which kind of lunch box. All the children might contribute to a record of when everyone in the class has their birthdays. You can learn which children can represent their findings in a bar graph. You can see who can use a time line, who can measure the size of their yard in some way (paces, string or tape measure). You can find out who can draw a map of the way from their house to school. You can see which children can carry out field work, interviewing their parents to clarify questions which may be of interest to the class (i.e. how they feed the dog or the names of the trees in their yard).
At this stage in the term the purpose of having the children use as many representational strategies as they can is not to teach them. According to the age of the children they may have only a few or they may have many means of sharing their understandings. The purpose for the teacher is to see how well the children can do these things by themselves (with a little help when they request it or when they accept your suggestion). Your observation of the children will be especially informative if they have ownership of the content. Where they feel confident because they are the experts they will have the motivation to teach you and the other children what only they know so well. The representations have important functions for them, under these conditions, enabling them to share, to fill out the classroom group picture.
You will be able to keep samples of the children’s work (or copies, if they take them home after a few days) from the very beginning of the year. These will provide you with a good sample of early work for comparison with later achievement once the children have learned new levels of skill in these strategies.
Sometimes it is a good idea to find out from the teacher of the children the previous year if they are Grade 1 or higher, to see which representations they might have been able to use at the end of the previous year. maybe have a look at their last year's portfolios. You might also find out which children would be most likely to remember how to do different kinds of representation. Then you could perhaps prompt or remind them so that they could then model for or remind other children what they may have forgotten over the long vacation.
Other kinds of topics might be clothes, bags (knapsacks, sports bags, lunch boxes, etc.), or shoes or the school bus, or the school yard or the state flower, or classroom plants or pets depending on the age of the children. These kinds of topics can be focused and limited in scope at the beginning of the year although some of them could also provide starting points for major studies if they are undertaken later in the year.
The kinds of projects I have been referring to here allow you to set up the workshop context so important for project work in the classroom (see Practical Guide #1). Children in a good preschool classroom can learn to use the paint or the blocks for a time, then put their work aside to dry or label it with their name before moving on to the next thing, looking at a book or joining the children in the dramatic play area. We sometimes forget that older children can work this way too. It is perfectly possible for children at any grade in the elementary school to manage transitions between their activities by themselves or in pairs without asking the teacher’s permission. But they and the teacher need to know how this can be done efficiently, how the children can be accountable for their work.
There are prerequisite understandings the children must have if project work is to run smoothly and if you are to know what each child has been doing. The children must know what to do with any work product they have finished (where to put it for you to see later, or where if it is to be continued with another time, and how to account for what they have accomplished so that you know what they did during project work time). The children need to be able to access materials appropriately for their work. They have to understand about not wasting paper or glue or paint. They must also know how to put away things which they have been using and clean up after themselves so that other children can easily find what they need for work. During the first week of the school year, these procedures can be explained and your expectations clarified. Many reminders are usually needed in the early days, reminders (patient and firm ones) about all sorts of things!
The topic of assessment fits in here too. At the beginning of the school year teachers have to set up record keeping routines and strategies. Ongoing authentic assessment throughout the first week or two of project work will contribute a great deal to your understanding of children's strengths as well as of areas which need special care.
By the way, project work will only be part of what your children are doing. There will also be spontaneous play and/or systematic instruction and various other things according to their age and the nature of your program. Maybe the equivalent of two, three or five afternoons a week of project work, according to your plans?
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Ah well! I have clearly forgotten that this is an email message! I hope some of these ideas are as useful to you as some teachers I know have found them in their teaching. I’d better stop here and see if you have any questions or any other ideas.
All the best!
(August 23 '96)