Hello everyone,

I would like to comment on the following topics raised in the last few weeks’ discussion:

1. Portfolios; 2. Project or not? 3. Sunflower representation; & 4. ‘Election’ topic.

PORTFOLIOS. It seems to me to be very important to record how project work is telling you things about the children’s learning and achievement which you cannot learn from standardized tests nor from the way children work under systematic instruction.

For example, through project work you can learn about the following:

1. The children’s level of interest in applying basic skills, e.g.

-reading or writing for a purpose,

-identifying a need for calculation techniques to solve a problem,

-analysing a representation problem so that they can solve it with one

of the many strategies you have equipped them with over the

previous months and years of learning in school

2. The level of proficiency with which children apply those skills when working independently.

3. The children’s interest in new ideas, the development of intellectual curiosity, e.g.

-how often and how do children want to find out the answer to a

question which they pose for themselves

4. The children’s growing ability to work collaboratively with others, e.g.

-in pairs

-in threes

-alongside each other, etc.

5. children’s willingness to persist with solving a problem when the going gets tough, e.g.

-sticking two surfaces together

-finding information in an encyclopedia

-negotiating to solve a disagreement in collaboration with other children

etc. etc. ...

This is just the start of a list of outcomes teachers value because of their potential direct effect on children’s standards of achievement in school. Each school and each teacher can make their own list of things they can learn about children through the projects. Individual pieces of work and teachers’ dated comments on these work samples can provide the detailed documentation of individual children’s progress across the school year which is so helpful in communicating with parents.

WHAT IS/IS NOT A PROJECT? Is making a calendar each month for the classroom a project? Probably not if the definition of a project is ‘an in-depth study of a topic’. Though it sounds as though the kinds of things Ellen may have helped the children do to carry out this task could have been the kinds of things children would do in the context of a project.

Another example of a project which does not fit the three phase, short term study (4-8 week class project) idea, is that of “class jobs” introduced to this Listserv by Su. Henry on July 10 this year with reference to the book, I LEARN FROM CHILDREN by Caroline Pratt (originally published in 1948, now available from Harper and Row, N.Y.). However, this work clearly is a project.

The work Su’s children do contributes to the school or wider community. Su described a consumer magazine which her class published for the whole school throughout the year. She wrote, "This project has been tremendously rich, involving all kinds of math, science, reading, writing, researching, technology and it holds all kinds of possibilities!"

I also remember a class of children who studied trees intensively in the Fall as a project and then continued to work on their knowledge of trees periodically throughout the year, as individuals and groups of children they noted when different things happened to the trees (as they acquired buds, leaves, flowers, nesting sites for birds, ants, spiders, etc.). They continued with the trees project work all year (though intermittently, of course).

Perhaps teachers trying project work for the first time need to explore the potential of the approach through a ‘mini-project,’ a study of apples, or pumpkins, for example. Here they might find the three phase structure really helpful to enable them to check out the associated teaching strategies and techniques (see the planning chart on page 3 of the Second Practical Guide to the Project Approach). These strategies can be combined to deepen the experience of investigation for the children and enable them to use a wide variety of representational strategies. It seems that a larger scale project might then be attempted once a teacher has acquired confidence in children’s ability to shape the development of their work on an individual basis or through collaborating in a small group.

What about Ellen’s suggestion about a project on ‘reading?’ There are all sorts of possibilities here for a study of the kinds of reading people do and the various purposes there might be for reading, the different strategies readers use to read and to process or remember or apply what they read. By now you will have tried it, Ellen; let us know what happened! The practice of reading is studied by adult sociologists and the process of reading is studied by adult scientists, so it is certainly an area of human experience which is worthy of study. Perhaps especially now that reading may be seen to be at risk as a leisure pursuit as more visual and immediate forms of entertainment or information access become more available.

I think it might be easier to say what a project is not. I have tried this before on this list in an earlier review. Let me try a different tack here. I have just been talking with Lilian (Katz) about this and Lilian used a wonderful expression to convey what we feel a unit often is: a ‘bag of tricks.’ The teacher collects a set of activities related (more or less) to the topic and randomly offers these to children as things to do. They may even choose these activities but they do them because they sound like fun things to do.

The ‘bag of tricks’ approach is very different from the project approach. In a project the children carry out activities for specific purposes of their own. If they carry out an experiment or do a close observation or a survey it is because they are pursuing a question they wish to investigate. If they choose to make a labelled drawing, design a bar chart or graph, or present their findings in a venn diagram, it is because they are representing the results of their investigation for others to learn what they found out, to share their increased understanding. The representation both teaches others what they learned and consolidates their own learning. The teacher expects the children to be able to explain why they want to do or are doing something. If the activity is the teacher's the children cannot be expected to account for its purpose.

Lynda, how’s the grocery store project going? Can you share some of your kindergarten’s experiences with us?

SUNFLOWER REPRESENTATION. Thank you, Barb, for telling us more about how the Butterfly garden project developed. The sunflower representation had so many good project teaching and learning qualities to it. You really had the patience to let the children investigate the properties of tape as they solved the construction problems they encountered and you enabled Tim to emerge as a leader and enabled the class to have some say in what happened, e.g. the color of the stem. Have you photographs of the stages of the sunflower construction which might provide an illustrated account for the Projects web site?

THE ELECTION. I appreciated reading the range of good ideas posted around the exploration of this topic in a project. I would like to hear which ideas teachers tried for themselves on this topic. Upper elementary school children will certainly be aware of what is going on politically.

I have just returned from Meredith Hill Elementary School in Washington where the teachers worked on a ‘wetlands’ project. So many thought-provoking questions were raised as the teachers did the project at their own level. It is not easy to then translate our adult learning experiences and provide for children to learn this way in a classroom. However, without an understanding of what it means to learn this way, I believe it is almost impossible to apply the teaching strategies of the Project Approach. I hope these teachers will soon be willing to share their insights as they try out in their classrooms some of the ideas they explored this weekend. Good luck, Meredith Hill! ..and we’ll be watching your home page for stories.

Enough for now.

Have an interesting week of project work!

(Oct 11 '96)