The strategy known as KWL (which was designed to help children approach the reading of texts) is of questionable value in the context of a project. What seems to help teachers most for real world investigations through the project approach is EKWQ... which is rather more like a tongue twister than a mnemonic!

E is for EXPERIENCE
K is for KNOWLEDGE
W is for WONDER
Q is for QUESTIONS

In the first phase of a project the teacher takes the role of an ethnographer, someone who finds out about the experiences of a group of people and learns by various strategies how that group of people construe those experiences (knowledge).

Throughout the first week or more of a project, the children (learners) reflect on their experiences of the topic, share what they have experienced with the other members of the class. This sharing requires the children to first reflect on and represent their experiences in some way. They can tell stories, write, draw pictures, label drawings, make paintings or collages, make clay models, construct with blocks, role play, etc.

They can also research each other's experience through interviewing each other and doing surveys to find out about each other's experiences. This research of their classmates involves children in rehearsing interview techniques, taking notes, data collection and representation of the groups experience in graphs and charts of various kinds.

The teacher's role is to support the use of a variety of investigative and representational strategies. S/he also has a special responsibility to probe the children to reflect on their experiences and explain them. As children explain their experiences they develop theories about how and why things are the way they remember them. Up to this point in a project tremendous interest can be aroused in the topic because the children are the experts. They know what they have experienced and they reflect on what they know.

Throughout this process they wonder about the different experiences and explanations their classmates offer. The teacher's ethnographer role extends to coordinating the work produced so that the children can all become aware of what has been learned and can appreciate a collective baseline understanding which can be the foundation of the collaborative research process ahead of them in the second phase of the project.

The "wondering" is a by product of the growing interest the children experience in the topic of the project. Out of the wondering comes the desire to question. In these times of immediate electronically available answers to questions, the question itself is becoming increasingly important.