Hi everyone, I’m just peeping out from behind the mountains of paper (of all colors, shapes and sizes) which avalanched down on me at one of the busiest term starts I’ve ever experienced!

Just a few specific responses to the interesting discussions which have been going on. Some of my comments may be too late this time around to be helpful maybe, but perhaps useful for your next project.

Shirley, "I really want them to become more independent," ...in a way we can turn this around... they already ARE independent, but maybe they are just not sure yet which aspects of their independence you, their teacher, are going to value. You have to set some expectations here. You cannot do this unless you have a good sense of what kinds of independence they can already show. Make a list of twenty things your children can do without your help. Get help with this if necessary from the teacher who had them last year or from the parents or your general knowledge of children at home at that age.

Much of our teaching is based on a deficit model of the child. We see children in terms of what they cannot yet do or do not yet know. In project work teachers need to build up a proficiency model of the child. We need to plan for children whom we know to be independently capable of a particular range of investigation and representation strategies.

A good way to begin thinking about what the children can do independently is to ask yourself what the children most want to do.

Talk and be heard by other children and the teacher in the whole class group?
Talk in pairs or small groups?
Draw?
Write?
Construct?

Have the children apply all these abilities to researching different aspects of the topic of study which is the focus of investigation in the project. In your case, you and the children together might have brainstormed their experiences and told stories to share these. The questions for individual children or pairs to follow up might most easily have emerged from their narratives.

Don’t be discouraged by ineffective group work so early in the school year with second grade. This a quite demanding kind of work is also best modelled first by one or two groups who emerge spontaneously during the first phase of the work to achieve a collaborative task (e.g. a map drawing or poster) and who tell the others about how they worked.

Shirley, your earlier comments suggested you also had similar concerns to Diane: Maybe these ideas could help you both...
Shirley: "They will need a lot of guidance. How much should I direct?"
Diane: "A comment & a question: To insure that some things are taught to the student -skills such as: measurement, recording, research, writing, etc. - I need to make sure that all the students have the opportunity to take part in some directed activities." (upper elementary class).

Yes, you do have to teach these things. However, these kinds of teaching events are not part of the project. They are occasions for systematic instruction designed to give children particular procedures or techniques to investigate questions or represent information. The project work, on the other hand, involves mainly the application of any investigation or representation procedures or techniques which the children ALREADY know. These may be strategies which the teacher has already taught the children either last week or last year! The project offers choices for the children of purposes which these procedures or techniques may serve. The purposes can be selected by the children from among a range of alternatives. These alternatives may be suggested either by the teacher or by the children themselves (as the children become more familiar with the possibilities within a project).

1. Drawing, pencil, pen, charcoal... maybe labelled, maybe coloured, maybe a sequence of drawings.
2. Writing a letter, report, poem, description, list, journal entry, etc. etc.
3. Comparing two or three places, objects, people... representing this in a Venn diagram.
4. Collecting data which could be represented in a bar chart (frequency data) or a pie chart (proportional data) in fractions or in percentages.
5. Making a map drawing (combination of map and drawings)
6. Making a time line or sequence chart or cycle diagram
7. Making a poster, a montage of related representations... combining, drawings, photos, specialized vocabulary, definitions, diagrams, captions, etc. etc.

Some or most of these investigation and representation techniques could be chosen from the list of those tested on your mandated tests.

"I think that's what makes it more difficult for some of us in the upper elementary to justify including projects in our curriculum --- the fear that the children will miss some of the things we need to make sure they need for mandated tests and school curriculum requirements."

In a project, the knowledge, facts, and information, can be engaged with at many different levels. It can be found out and represented in a variety of different ways. It can be learned directly or indirectly. It can be tested in many different ways which can in part be devised by students. Because students learn in different ways they can engage with the material to be learned in their own preferred ways so long as they understand the demands of the mandated tests and can be given self assessment strategies in relation to those demands.

"The question that's been bothering me a bit: I feel like what I'm doing is really a theme with a project as part of it leaves me a bit puzzled/concerned about how I hope to use project work this year. Comments? "

"A theme with a project as part of it" yes, it sounds that way to me from the way you write about it. For us the Project is the whole in-depth study. What maybe you might call ‘projects’ are what we would call ‘project work’, pieces of work which contribute to the whole study. It might help to think of your class as research team and yourself as the team leader. Each child will do a different piece of the research so that the collective knowledge of the whole class will be very rich and varied and contain considerable detail.

When you ask children to each do the same kind of research or to find out the same things you limit the overall amount of information which could be found out. You also limit the number of different ways that information can be seen by the children to be relevant or interesting. Also it is possible for you the teacher to know all the answers through this limitation of the content information. Then you might have difficulty being a good model learner for the children without simulating ignorance. When, on the other hand, you open up the possibilities you can model the dispositions of a genuinely interested learner and co-researcher alongside the children.

Where the children can find out a great deal more than the minimum they become interested in exchanging information. They want to share their knowledge with the whole class group where other children will have different information to share with them. The information can be combined in various ways so that there is also the repetition, overlap and redundancy which helps to ensure that all the children are more likely to learn the essential basic information required for the tests.

“Some other great news: I asked in my weekly newsletter for classroom help during project time and I got three volunteers. Isn't that wonderful? Now I am panicking about what they will do.”

This IS wonderful but I can well understand your feelings of panic!

Great advice from Sydney here.
Sue was also helpful in suggesting that the most help parents can be is being able to work alongside you helping children as they need support.

Some other thoughts:
A classroom where project work is going on is rather like a workshop setting. The children are working on their own, in parallel, in pairs cooperatively, or collaboratively in small groups. There is often a group working with the teacher on something which requires some focussed discussion, e.g. a scientific experiment.

It can be so helpful just to have a few more people in the room to whom the children can go to get advice, to run ideas past, to share what they have just found out, to ask for help reading a difficult passage in a book, etc. etc. The parents need help understanding these roles as they are different from the role often taken by volunteers in other parts of the program.

In a project it is important for children to have many human sounding boards to try out their ideas on. They can use each other but parents can fulfil this very well. They need to know ways to:

1. To encourage children to think further and to consider alternatives, e.g. "What other ways could you show that it is coming towards you?" "What other words could describe that idea?" or "Which part of the picture are you going to work on next?" (rather than "I think you should do a little more to your picture.")
2. Make suggestions, leaving the choice of taking up any particular suggestion to the child, e.g. "How about a green one, or maybe something a little less bright..."
3. Offer practical advice without insisting that it is followed, e.g. "You might want to try leaving the glue to dry a moment before joining the two surfaces"
4. Sometimes modelling: "I think I might draw it from this angle. From here I can see the red side really well and the green part is there too." Then doing some drawing alongside the child; drawing, or writing, or measuring, or note taking... Not for the child to copy but to model the process the child could be encouraged to use.
5. Very useful too is to help parents ask the children about what they are intending to do, e.g. "Can you tell me something about your writing? ..your picture? ..your diagram?.." "Which part do you need to work on next?" "How are you going to link up these two parts of the diagram? ...map? .." "Is this part separate from that one?" etc. etc.

There are also some things which may not be helpful or encouraging to children:

1. Taking the work out of the child’s hand and doing it for them.
2. Giving step by step instructions. (Except occasionally, and best done by the teacher)...
3. Insisting on a particular way of doing things. (Except when discussed with the teacher beforehand).

Candy gave a great description of what she was doing in her class and finishes:
"What I want to know does it sound like we are on the right track? I feel maybe I should be doing more? How am I going to get the children into doing different types of representation this first time? Do I use direct instruction?"

The last two questions I addressed above.
You definitely sound as if you are on the right track.
You feel as if you should be doing more? I wonder why. Maybe you feel the children are not achieving high enough standards in their work? And you don’t know quite how to address this problem with them?

Many teachers find that children do not work to the same standards when they CHOOSE their work and how they do it. This indicates the readjustment needed for them to learn to be self critical, to self-evaluate in project work. Much less self-evaluation is necessary if the teacher tells the children exactly how to do the work.

In project work standards can be modelled every day through showing exemplary work in various ways: in the group time, on the bulletin boards, collected in class books, etc.. The best work? ...the most interesting work, the most original work, the most informative work, the most economical work, the most clearly, attractively presented work... and whatever other standards are important to you can be modelled and discussed (and not all present in the same work! so you show a really creative idea which was sketchy and messy in its presentation but already impressive in its originality). Children can explain how they worked towards the high standards they achieved. This helps others see how to do likewise.

Barb, the butterfly garden visit sounded very interesting and full of potential for further investigation. How did it develop since last we heard?

Well, I think this is enough for now or my message will get too long!
I hope I shall not need to leave it so long before writing to the list next time. The beginning of my term has been a particularly busy one.

Keep us informed, keep your questions coming and keep offering your suggestions to others!

Good luck!

(Sept 20 '96)