The last time I wrote about my middle schoolers' favorite trilogy The Hunger Games, we were writing reading journal entries together about it. This was my way of modeling with them what reading journal entries should look and sound like. This was a fine idea, but soon after, once I started reading the first book, myself, I was inspired to write my own journal entries to them, so they could see what kind of thinking happens as you move through a book, not just after you've finished.
These entries have been a real hit, and I think some of them have particularly enjoyed playing the more experienced reader as they read all my thoughts, observations, feelings and predictions. Here are some snippets:
Chapters 1-3
I'm finding myself trying to make sense of the world of this book. We don't find out until Chapter 3 that it is futuristic: Panem apparently rose out of the "ruins of North America", and it seems that it stretches across the whole continent, because the Capitol is where the Rockies used to be (West) and District 12, where Katniss lives, is where Appalachia used to be (East). But it sounds like things aren't terribly different, because District 12 is known for coal mining, just like Appalachia is known for mining today.
Student 1: I am going to have to disagree with you ... I think that it looks very different. My mental image is more everything seems a little more old-fashioned. Do you imagine District 12 to be very big? At first, I thought it was pretty small, but it's sort of hard to imagine how big a place is in a book because the author really only gives you a few places that the character goes. For example, Katniss goes to the town square, the mayor's house, Gale's house, the bread shop, and the Victors' village. Do you like Katniss?
Chapters 4-6
I'm trying to make sense of Katniss' protection of herself and distrust of so many others. Her obvious suspicion of her mother stands in such sharp contrast to her fond memories of her father, who taught her how to hunt. On p. 52, Katniss recalls that she was named after a plant that her father once pointed out to her in the forest. "I heard my father's voice joking, 'As long as you can find yourself, you'll never starve.'" I wonder if this line will have some figurative significance later on, because of the double meaning of "finding yourself."
Student 2: What seems amazing to me is that Katniss seems to have so many troubles, doubts and confusion about herself. Obviously (following stereotypical plot lines), the main character is supposed to be admirable, and I suppose she is, but she doesn't seem that way. I think a good story would support that uncertainty and eventually mend it through the course of it. I am anxious to see if, by the end, Katniss is more self-confident and solid, if she eventually comes to match her physical stance, emotionally.
Chapters 11-16
I've figured out one thing that is so successful about Collins' writing style - the end of every chapter brings some comment or event that presents something new and exciting to the story. Like at the end of Chapter 12: "It would be hard to miss the wall of fire descending on me." At this point, I'm realizing that I could just skip to the end of each chapter to see how the plot develops.
Chapters 17-25
Before reading these chapters fully, I skimmed to the end of each of them. And remarkable, I'm able to get a good picture of how the story progresses without feeling like I've missed too many important details.
Student 3: I understand your findings of those little "cliffhangers" that always seemed to be there in the first book. I hate to say it, but I think that book was the best for that technique. I have noticed that I have relentless bashed The Hunger Games in my letters. Some of these things were about the character, and about the lack of action [in the third book]. So I wonder, what exactly makes me want to read it? Maybe the pressure to find out what happens in the end, or just to see if it gets better. "Better" to me might be more action or someone dying to spice it up a little. Or to see the Capitol do something crazy. But this "better" is different for everyone.
What I notice as I continue to read their journals is that their entries are not necessarily changing according to what I've written in my own entries. But I do find their responses to my entries, and to my questions to their entries, to be ever more genuine, and not so much the kind of automatic writing students can fall into the habit of producing. Here I was, trying to figure out how to teach them how to write about their reading, when all I had to do was do what I wanted them to do, first.
Monday, April 25, 2011
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Fading through the story
My students are well on their way, learning and practicing their stories for class performances at lunch next week. Parallel to work in small Story Circles of four students each, we've had some all-class workshop time, exploring one's own body as a material for developing one's story for performance.
Some background, though: Reggio Emilia pedagogy utilizes a variety of artistic materials to encourage children to express and describe their ideas. This approach is grounded in the idea that children speak in a hundred languages, and the materials allow for more diverse expression, and deeper learning for both student and teacher.
So, being accustomed to artistic materials, I asked the children: What if you didn't have materials to work with, but instead, used your body as a material to make your story your own?
You could act out your story. The movement of your body could help you think of words that would be good.
I sort of agree, but acting is really different than movement. Acting is saying lines. While I am telling the story I would do the thing, the movement that goes with the story.
If your story has two perspectives you could go from one to the other. Like, Max and the beasts in my story, Where the Wild Things Are. You can switch off between perspectives.
How is your body going to help you do that?
It could help explain how they move. How they’re different from each other, and not the same.
I know that names put a color in my mind, so maybe you could put a movement with a name. You could think about what movement comes to your mind about a character, and then move like that character.
From there, we went to the workshop, exploring the perspective of familiar characters from stories I had told, as well as the characters of their stories. They went from the extreme of despair to the extreme of wonder as they walked, as a merchant, through the bitter cold up to a magnificent, magical castle. They went from being that merchant as he beheld the ugliest beast one could imagine to becoming that beast, and walking through the classroom as he would walk. They contemplated how the characters of their stories stand, walk, gesture, and express their thoughts on their face...
How was it? What did they learn?
It felt good. Just closing my eyes and imagining it, how the Beast looked and how he walked. It created a really good mental image in my mind. And I was able to act it out really well. I had a lot of space, so I could do whatever I needed to do. With materials, it’s different, because you can’t really change the way they look or move.
I think body motions really enhance the mental images for people.
It felt kind of strange to be transferring into those creatures. It was kind of fun to act out what the different creatures looked like, and maybe see what the merchant would look like, because I was also watching other people.
It felt like you were fading through the story, from one part of the story to the next.
As we gear up for our performances for each other next week, I gradually sense that these storytellers are actively making their stories their own. We talked about this early on - how necessary it is to learn a story, and then let go of the "original", so that one can develop one's own interpretation of the story. As they gather these experiences, I wonder what they are finding: How does a storyteller make a story their own? What materials are at hand and the most useful?
Some background, though: Reggio Emilia pedagogy utilizes a variety of artistic materials to encourage children to express and describe their ideas. This approach is grounded in the idea that children speak in a hundred languages, and the materials allow for more diverse expression, and deeper learning for both student and teacher.
So, being accustomed to artistic materials, I asked the children: What if you didn't have materials to work with, but instead, used your body as a material to make your story your own?
You could act out your story. The movement of your body could help you think of words that would be good.
I sort of agree, but acting is really different than movement. Acting is saying lines. While I am telling the story I would do the thing, the movement that goes with the story.
If your story has two perspectives you could go from one to the other. Like, Max and the beasts in my story, Where the Wild Things Are. You can switch off between perspectives.
How is your body going to help you do that?
It could help explain how they move. How they’re different from each other, and not the same.
I know that names put a color in my mind, so maybe you could put a movement with a name. You could think about what movement comes to your mind about a character, and then move like that character.
From there, we went to the workshop, exploring the perspective of familiar characters from stories I had told, as well as the characters of their stories. They went from the extreme of despair to the extreme of wonder as they walked, as a merchant, through the bitter cold up to a magnificent, magical castle. They went from being that merchant as he beheld the ugliest beast one could imagine to becoming that beast, and walking through the classroom as he would walk. They contemplated how the characters of their stories stand, walk, gesture, and express their thoughts on their face...
How was it? What did they learn?
It felt good. Just closing my eyes and imagining it, how the Beast looked and how he walked. It created a really good mental image in my mind. And I was able to act it out really well. I had a lot of space, so I could do whatever I needed to do. With materials, it’s different, because you can’t really change the way they look or move.
I think body motions really enhance the mental images for people.
It felt kind of strange to be transferring into those creatures. It was kind of fun to act out what the different creatures looked like, and maybe see what the merchant would look like, because I was also watching other people.
It felt like you were fading through the story, from one part of the story to the next.
As we gear up for our performances for each other next week, I gradually sense that these storytellers are actively making their stories their own. We talked about this early on - how necessary it is to learn a story, and then let go of the "original", so that one can develop one's own interpretation of the story. As they gather these experiences, I wonder what they are finding: How does a storyteller make a story their own? What materials are at hand and the most useful?
Friday, April 15, 2011
The Girl Who Fell From the Sky
This isn't an easy thing to write about. I read this book recently, and wondered whether it would be meaningful to my middle schoolers. I wasn't sure if they could take the graphic detail of a tragic accident scene, until they were telling me about all the details of The Hunger Games. I thought, if they can take children fighting each other to the death in futuristic societies, they can take a little horror from the real world.
Well ... it's not quite that simple. Having not taught this age group before, I was still piecing together the whole picture of what literature to bring in for them, and how, exactly, to read a book - there are multiple ways, of course - when considering it for a classroom setting.
I handed the book off to an eighth-grader, who reported back to me that she really enjoyed it, but wouldn't recommend it to just anyone in her class. She suggested I create a shelf of "mature reading", which would require parents' permission to read.
Simultaneously, a parent (who also happens to be a teacher) wondered to me whether she was being too overprotective in thinking that this book was not appropriate for middle school. I shared some of my thinking behind bringing the book in, and then went to consult with the student I mentioned above. That night, the parent emailed me with a more lengthy description of her thoughts and experiences with the book (which she had read).
I appreciated and learned a great deal from her approach to conversation with me. Never did I feel accused, never did she assert assumptions, never did I feel shamed for my decision. In fact, I noticed that, instead of directing the matter to me, directly, she reflected on her own assumptions first: Am I being too overprotective? That approach opened up the opportunity for me to reflect on my own assumptions, in return: Am I not being protective enough?
Our correspondence was not lengthy, but just enough for me to feel that I have a clearer picture of choosing literature for middle schoolers to read. Still not complete, but important gaps have been filled, and my questions for further pondering continue.
And yet, I feel like this experience was not primarily a lesson in choosing literature for students. It was, first and foremost, a lesson in living in community. As teachers, we play a role in our communities, but not to the exclusion of others' expertise. We look to parents for the understanding that only they can offer, the pieces of the bigger picture that only they can fill. And when we do, we must always be mindful of our assumptions, question ourselves before questioning others, and remember always to support each other in the valuable roles we have in our community together.
Sunday, April 10, 2011
How are mental images built?
I have started a unit on storytelling with our 2nd/3rd grade class, and we are already off on a roll. For myself, I am very interested in how the children can help me understand what difference telling a story makes from reading it - what the difference in experience is, and means for them. However, I know they will have questions of their own...
To begin our focus, I told the story of Beauty and the Beast, and asked the children to consider what stood out to them the most about the experience of hearing that story. They worked with drawing, writing, painting and watercolor to give voice to that response. What resulted was a beautiful array of images from the story. Many of them talked about the mental images they had of the story, a term they have used before in reading and writing. These images ranged, but a good chunk of them depicted either the Beast or the scene where Beauty's father first comes across the Beast's castle.
At first, I was a bit frustrated, because I thought they were responding too much to the story, and not enough to the experience. However, a conversation with a colleague made clear to me that the mental images were the most significant part of the experience. If I want to know more about the experience they were having, I must allow them to name the part of the experience they know, and then dive deeper into that.
So, our next step was to consider: How are mental images built? How do we make them in our minds, and what's happening for us as listeners as these mental images from a story come to us?
Here are some of the ideas different children expressed:
There are two ways - how the teller who tells the story describes what’s happening. If they actually say I walked into summer and all the leaves were this color, then it really gives a detailed image. It also depends on the person who’s making the actual mental image, because they need to listen to the person telling the story, otherwise they don’t get it.
For me, mental images could be called portable art, because, I mean, if you look around, you can always see something, and that’s an image, really. And I guess when you hear something that triggers it, but you don’t see anything that’s related to it, then you have to use your mind and the words kind of give it detail. You need to not use your hands, but use your mind, and use it in a different way than controlling your hands like in a painting or drawing or coloring, but in another way, to do it itself.
I think it’s millions of little shapes in your brain. When you hear something, your eyes may have seen it on TV or something, or they can just make it up. If they saw it, it’s easier to make the image, because they’ve already seen it, and already have a clear image of what it is. So I think it’s millions of little shapes coming together to fit into this one image.
Well, I think when you hear a word, for example, chicken pox, you think: What do chicken pox look like? And your mind thinks. Your mind is a separate being, but who does a lot of the thinking. You and your mind together - you’re the one who has to hear it, and then your mind helps you think about it.
As I read over these theories, I remember how complex the human brain is. My favorite part about the conversation I got to have with these students was that we were talking about something that brain scientists can't completely explain! The students were researching with me by reflecting on their experiences and noticing things about their own thinking.
Where to now?
Our next step, after studying our experience of listening to a story, is to move towards identifying a story we want to tell. I don't want to do anything with these thoughts on mental images quite yet, until the children move into the process of practicing how to make those same mental images possible for their audience. I wonder what else they will have to say then? How will mental images of the stories they tell help them make their stories their own??
Updates soon ...
To begin our focus, I told the story of Beauty and the Beast, and asked the children to consider what stood out to them the most about the experience of hearing that story. They worked with drawing, writing, painting and watercolor to give voice to that response. What resulted was a beautiful array of images from the story. Many of them talked about the mental images they had of the story, a term they have used before in reading and writing. These images ranged, but a good chunk of them depicted either the Beast or the scene where Beauty's father first comes across the Beast's castle.
At first, I was a bit frustrated, because I thought they were responding too much to the story, and not enough to the experience. However, a conversation with a colleague made clear to me that the mental images were the most significant part of the experience. If I want to know more about the experience they were having, I must allow them to name the part of the experience they know, and then dive deeper into that.
So, our next step was to consider: How are mental images built? How do we make them in our minds, and what's happening for us as listeners as these mental images from a story come to us?
Here are some of the ideas different children expressed:
There are two ways - how the teller who tells the story describes what’s happening. If they actually say I walked into summer and all the leaves were this color, then it really gives a detailed image. It also depends on the person who’s making the actual mental image, because they need to listen to the person telling the story, otherwise they don’t get it.
For me, mental images could be called portable art, because, I mean, if you look around, you can always see something, and that’s an image, really. And I guess when you hear something that triggers it, but you don’t see anything that’s related to it, then you have to use your mind and the words kind of give it detail. You need to not use your hands, but use your mind, and use it in a different way than controlling your hands like in a painting or drawing or coloring, but in another way, to do it itself.
I think it’s millions of little shapes in your brain. When you hear something, your eyes may have seen it on TV or something, or they can just make it up. If they saw it, it’s easier to make the image, because they’ve already seen it, and already have a clear image of what it is. So I think it’s millions of little shapes coming together to fit into this one image.
Well, I think when you hear a word, for example, chicken pox, you think: What do chicken pox look like? And your mind thinks. Your mind is a separate being, but who does a lot of the thinking. You and your mind together - you’re the one who has to hear it, and then your mind helps you think about it.
As I read over these theories, I remember how complex the human brain is. My favorite part about the conversation I got to have with these students was that we were talking about something that brain scientists can't completely explain! The students were researching with me by reflecting on their experiences and noticing things about their own thinking.
Where to now?
Our next step, after studying our experience of listening to a story, is to move towards identifying a story we want to tell. I don't want to do anything with these thoughts on mental images quite yet, until the children move into the process of practicing how to make those same mental images possible for their audience. I wonder what else they will have to say then? How will mental images of the stories they tell help them make their stories their own??
Updates soon ...
Thursday, April 7, 2011
What made you think that?
I got my first reading journal entries from my middle-schoolers this week. What a joy to read! Insightful thoughts and strong opinions, everything one would expect from well-read teenagers. Except, of course, any iota of evidence to back up their opinions.
As a result, our question of the day today was: What made you think that? I emphasized to them that for every opinion they offer, they must back it up, especially if they are trying to persuade someone who has not read the book to do so (or dissuade, as the case may be). How else are they going to know what you're talking about?
So, I put out a challenge to them: We would write a journal entry collaboratively about a book they had all read. The choice: The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins, which I, conveniently have not read. ("What?!" they gasped, and one of them immediately took a copy from the library shelf and shoved it into my hands. I guess I'll have to now.)
"Where do we start?" I asked.
"The Hunger Games is amazing!" sounded one student, exuberantly.
"It’s fascinating because it’s in the future," said another.
And then another, and another, and another. But - the golden question - what made you say that? Back and forth, they opined, and I challenged. It was the most fun I've had with teenagers in a long while. Here is the result of just five minutes:
The Hunger Games was amazing! It’s fascinating because it’s in the future. Technology has progressed, but we (humanity) are socially digressing. The Capitol is a totalitarian government at the center of 13 districts. It has initiated the “Hunger Games”, where children aged 12-18 fight each other to the death. Everyone must watch as a reminder that the Capitol is all-powerful. Also, the Capitol is keeping the districts in poverty by keeping resources for themselves. Despite these horrific conditions, technology has advanced to the point that animals are genetically engineered and surgeries are available to dye skin color. The irony of this situation is that despite this technology, common people in the districts cannot access it and are struggling too much to survive to even think about it.
We will continue next week. I'll keep you posted.
As a result, our question of the day today was: What made you think that? I emphasized to them that for every opinion they offer, they must back it up, especially if they are trying to persuade someone who has not read the book to do so (or dissuade, as the case may be). How else are they going to know what you're talking about?
So, I put out a challenge to them: We would write a journal entry collaboratively about a book they had all read. The choice: The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins, which I, conveniently have not read. ("What?!" they gasped, and one of them immediately took a copy from the library shelf and shoved it into my hands. I guess I'll have to now.)"Where do we start?" I asked.
"The Hunger Games is amazing!" sounded one student, exuberantly.
"It’s fascinating because it’s in the future," said another.
And then another, and another, and another. But - the golden question - what made you say that? Back and forth, they opined, and I challenged. It was the most fun I've had with teenagers in a long while. Here is the result of just five minutes:
The Hunger Games was amazing! It’s fascinating because it’s in the future. Technology has progressed, but we (humanity) are socially digressing. The Capitol is a totalitarian government at the center of 13 districts. It has initiated the “Hunger Games”, where children aged 12-18 fight each other to the death. Everyone must watch as a reminder that the Capitol is all-powerful. Also, the Capitol is keeping the districts in poverty by keeping resources for themselves. Despite these horrific conditions, technology has advanced to the point that animals are genetically engineered and surgeries are available to dye skin color. The irony of this situation is that despite this technology, common people in the districts cannot access it and are struggling too much to survive to even think about it.
We will continue next week. I'll keep you posted.
Friday, April 1, 2011
Karen Gallas, Imagination and Literacy
This book is officially changing my educator's mind. And I'm not even finished. There will be more parts to this as I continue reading.Karen Gallas is a teacher-researcher from Massachusetts who has written several books that float around the Charter colleagueship here. Several other teachers suggested I read it, so here I go. I now see why they were so encouraging.
For now, what a first read of this book has offered me is a completely new understanding of the vastness of the terms IMAGINATION and LITERACY. I realized I had gotten trapped in our common understanding of these terms, having forgotten how far-reaching they are, and completely losing sight of how fundamental they both are to ALL learning.
I will be very unprecise in my citations, simply because it's more important to me to flesh out my ideas, which I'm sure will blend with hers, and I'll lose track of the boundary. For now, allow me to get these ideas out, then on my second reading, I can provide a little bit more careful reflection.
First, IMAGINATION. Forming images in the mind. Is this not the fundamental essence of thought? I hold my glass of milk over an open floor and think of letting go. What will happen? I have a theory it will fall and milk will spill everywhere. How do I know? Most likely, I have seen it happen before. I've seen enough things fall and spill in my life, that just the sight of a glass of milk over an open floor triggers the image of what will happen if I let go. So it is that we can take what we know and create images of what is as of yet unknown to us, what has not yet happened, but could.
Second, LITERACY. Reading and writing, decoding and encoding. Is it only words and letters? Sounds and symbols. Gallas finally settles on "world-making", as she considers the many facets of literacy. Because literacy consists not only of words, but of discourse and vocabulary, which vary from discipline to discipline. Scientific literacy, for example, requires different learning than Spanish literacy. Each discipline step into is like a world of its own, with its own insider language. As we learn this language, and become literate in this discipline, we are making the world of that discipline a part of us and the way we see the world.
All of a sudden, the title Imagination and Literacy takes on a whole new meaning for me. Whereas I would have perhaps previously thought "Creativity and Language Arts", I now think "Images and Worlds in the Making", "Imagining and Internalizing", and "Imagining the World and Being in it" ...
The purpose of the book is to examine the role of imagination in early literacy. Already I am seeing so many connections to a project on storytelling I am planning, and I am sure I will have more write along those lines soon.
For now, how would you flesh out the concepts of IMAGINATION and LITERACY? What do they mean to you?
Thursday, March 17, 2011
This book is not a story
Things got rolling today with my middle school group. With the memory of To Kill a Mockingbird fresh in our minds from yesterday, I wanted to begin thinking about reading comprehension by thinking about how we make sense of any kind of story we're presented with, no matter the medium.
But, to start: my favorite provocation. I picked up a copy of Mockingbird and asked them: Is this a story?
Yes, they said, unanimously.
What if I told you I don't think it is?
Confusion. Outcry. Disgust on their faces.
Excellent.
Well, it's a novel, they said. It's fiction. It's a book, with pages and a cover.
Is a book a story? I asked.
No, it could be a dictionary.
A book is a physical thing, and the story is inside it. In the words and the pictures.
The story is more like thoughts or ideas. It's mental. It's what's being told, it's not the physical thing, the physical book.
And a book is different from a story because you can tell the story in a movie or in a picture.
You're thinking of different media through which we can communicate stories. But what is the story you're communicating? What is the story?
It's a series of events.
It's stuff that happens to people. Someone can imagine it, like in The BFG, or it can be something that really happened, like World War II.
Where does a story live? When I open up this book and read it, do I get the exact story Harper Lee had in mind for me to read?
Yes. No. Sort of. Everybody has a different interpretation of a story.
But it's still the same story. It's written down in the book! A story doesn't change just by reading it. You can read a story, or depict it in a picture, but it's still the same story. It's not a different interpretation. For example, Mockingbird was a book, and then it was depicted on stage. But it was still the same story.
So, you're saying you can depict a story without interpreting it?
Yes.
And depicting a story is simply recalling a series of events that happened.
Yes.
Is a series of events still a story if no one ever tells anyone about it?
Yes.
Unfortunately, I didn't have my audio recorder with me, so I am going off of some furious notes I was taking plus recollection. Regardless, some really rich questions from this discussion, and I am particularly intrigued by the two that came up at the end:
- Can you depict a story without interpreting it?
- Is a series of events still a story if no one is there to tell it?
I stopped them to transition to the next topic - how we understand the stories we read. It was imperative, though, to maintain my position: this book contains no story. Because, you see, if the story was part of the book, we wouldn't be able to access it. What is in the book? Symbols. Words. Code. It's just a code that someone translated their ideas into, for someone else to find. When that someone else comes along - that would be us, readers - the idea is constructed based on the code, albeit within the context of someone else's brain. Still, it is the human that is required to make any sense of it at all - without it, the code bears no meaning.
So, readers, that's what we do. We decode. We construct the ideas others have left in translation for us and hope that we might do them justice by understanding. How do we understand? That's called comprehension. How do we comprehend? We use a host of strategies to access the meaning of the many levels of the texts we read. Many of them are automatic to us at this point, but by making ourselves more aware of the strategies we use, the better we can use them, and the more likely we are to learn further strategies. The more strategies we practice, the more we comprehend. The more we comprehend, the better we understand. The more we understand, the more we can begin to feel a part of something bigger than just ourselves and think about who we are.
That’s why we read.
But, to start: my favorite provocation. I picked up a copy of Mockingbird and asked them: Is this a story?
Yes, they said, unanimously.
What if I told you I don't think it is?
Confusion. Outcry. Disgust on their faces.
Excellent.
Well, it's a novel, they said. It's fiction. It's a book, with pages and a cover.
Is a book a story? I asked.
No, it could be a dictionary.
A book is a physical thing, and the story is inside it. In the words and the pictures.
The story is more like thoughts or ideas. It's mental. It's what's being told, it's not the physical thing, the physical book.
And a book is different from a story because you can tell the story in a movie or in a picture.
You're thinking of different media through which we can communicate stories. But what is the story you're communicating? What is the story?
It's a series of events.
It's stuff that happens to people. Someone can imagine it, like in The BFG, or it can be something that really happened, like World War II.
Where does a story live? When I open up this book and read it, do I get the exact story Harper Lee had in mind for me to read?
Yes. No. Sort of. Everybody has a different interpretation of a story.
But it's still the same story. It's written down in the book! A story doesn't change just by reading it. You can read a story, or depict it in a picture, but it's still the same story. It's not a different interpretation. For example, Mockingbird was a book, and then it was depicted on stage. But it was still the same story.
So, you're saying you can depict a story without interpreting it?
Yes.
And depicting a story is simply recalling a series of events that happened.
Yes.
Is a series of events still a story if no one ever tells anyone about it?
Yes.
Unfortunately, I didn't have my audio recorder with me, so I am going off of some furious notes I was taking plus recollection. Regardless, some really rich questions from this discussion, and I am particularly intrigued by the two that came up at the end:
- Can you depict a story without interpreting it?
- Is a series of events still a story if no one is there to tell it?
I stopped them to transition to the next topic - how we understand the stories we read. It was imperative, though, to maintain my position: this book contains no story. Because, you see, if the story was part of the book, we wouldn't be able to access it. What is in the book? Symbols. Words. Code. It's just a code that someone translated their ideas into, for someone else to find. When that someone else comes along - that would be us, readers - the idea is constructed based on the code, albeit within the context of someone else's brain. Still, it is the human that is required to make any sense of it at all - without it, the code bears no meaning.
So, readers, that's what we do. We decode. We construct the ideas others have left in translation for us and hope that we might do them justice by understanding. How do we understand? That's called comprehension. How do we comprehend? We use a host of strategies to access the meaning of the many levels of the texts we read. Many of them are automatic to us at this point, but by making ourselves more aware of the strategies we use, the better we can use them, and the more likely we are to learn further strategies. The more strategies we practice, the more we comprehend. The more we comprehend, the better we understand. The more we understand, the more we can begin to feel a part of something bigger than just ourselves and think about who we are.
That’s why we read.
Thursday, March 3, 2011
"In charge" and "in control"
Today I am recalling something a colleague shared with us at the Charter before leaving the school for retirement. She left us with a challenge, I suppose you could call it, to work always toward an ideal classroom, in which "the teachers are in charge, but the students are in control of their learning." Not only would this take a significant load of a teachers' shoulders, but it would allow children more ownership of their learning, and be more actively involved in how their learning develops.
It's been nice these last few days to be doing some substitute work within the Charter, but in different classrooms than I'm usually in. I've been with the younger students in the preschool and pre-Kindergarten, which are a bit more loosely scheduled during the day. Play seems to have absolute rule, and it is always refreshing to watch them play for such extended spans of time.
In the back of my mind, I am reflecting on the project work I've observed recently, especially on the relationship between playfulness in project work and its extension into formal instruction. And I'm wondering about that oh so delicate balance between the two - when do teachers "take charge" and when do they let the children "take control"? I'm still making sense of that as I look around and prepare for some own mini-lessons and units of my own coming up.
For now, one thing makes a whole lot of sense: If students are to take more ownership of their learning, they must be given the opportunity to know themselves as learners, to follow their own choices, observe its consequences, and make meaning of everything they do. As Alfie Kohn says, "Children don't learn how to make decisions by following directions."
As I watch young children in their play, and think about the positive energy going into the project work in the older classroom, I have an immense amount of trust in walking that fine line between "in charge" and "in control". And that trust is helping me trust myself.
It's been nice these last few days to be doing some substitute work within the Charter, but in different classrooms than I'm usually in. I've been with the younger students in the preschool and pre-Kindergarten, which are a bit more loosely scheduled during the day. Play seems to have absolute rule, and it is always refreshing to watch them play for such extended spans of time.
In the back of my mind, I am reflecting on the project work I've observed recently, especially on the relationship between playfulness in project work and its extension into formal instruction. And I'm wondering about that oh so delicate balance between the two - when do teachers "take charge" and when do they let the children "take control"? I'm still making sense of that as I look around and prepare for some own mini-lessons and units of my own coming up.
For now, one thing makes a whole lot of sense: If students are to take more ownership of their learning, they must be given the opportunity to know themselves as learners, to follow their own choices, observe its consequences, and make meaning of everything they do. As Alfie Kohn says, "Children don't learn how to make decisions by following directions."
As I watch young children in their play, and think about the positive energy going into the project work in the older classroom, I have an immense amount of trust in walking that fine line between "in charge" and "in control". And that trust is helping me trust myself.
Monday, February 28, 2011
Project work
Project work is but one aspect of teaching at the Charter, and yet, at some point of the year, it appears to take over everything else. At least that's what's happening in our 2nd/3rd grade class.
At the beginning of the year, teachers are engaging the children in a variety of experiences, often directly related to the natural world and/or artistic materials and/or community issues ... it's very open-ended, it seems. At some point, teachers begin to identify potentials for project work and continue homing in on a topic by providing experiences and provocations that directly respond to children's observations of prior experiences. It is very much in the spirit of the "ball toss" metaphor that Reggio offers - teachers and students collaborate in the emergence of curriculum.
In our classroom, it is all about BUGS. Bugs are everywhere - dead ones, live ones, small ones, bugs with wings, bugs with shed skin, bugs with more legs than one can count, bugs that lay eggs, bugs that hatch from those eggs, bugs from home, bugs from the school meadow, bugs that other classes bring to us ... BUGS!
In response to a lot of dramatic play around bugs, the teacher of the class decided to engage the children in a game of writing a play about their bugs. One morning, out of nowhere, there appeared a green box on her desk, titled: "How to Make a Play". We were stunned! It was as if the game was made just for the class.
It was, of course. As the teacher began to explain the game to the children, I was remembering our conversation earlier about what parameters to put on the game to make sure it had enough structure and enough provocation for creativity.
Slowly, but surely, I am seeing what this ball toss implies for the teacher... I am seeing how playful, open-ended, and almost celebratory this project work time is, and yet, how deeply it reaches into children's thinking:
If there were no bugs, the earth might not survive.
Don't step on bugs, because they're living creatures like you. We're both living creatures.
Bugs are us, we are bugs - What we do to the bugs affects us, too.
To contract this open-ended session, the teacher went on, after the game (which was part of "Project Work" on the schedule) to begin Reading with a mini-lesson on inferences, based on a folktale about a bug. A few days later, in the midst of a poetry unit in Writing, a poem about stink bugs emerges on the easel. Project work is everywhere!
What did John Muir say? Something along the lines of: Tug on anything, and you will find it is connected to everything else. So, also, is the network of learning.
At the beginning of the year, teachers are engaging the children in a variety of experiences, often directly related to the natural world and/or artistic materials and/or community issues ... it's very open-ended, it seems. At some point, teachers begin to identify potentials for project work and continue homing in on a topic by providing experiences and provocations that directly respond to children's observations of prior experiences. It is very much in the spirit of the "ball toss" metaphor that Reggio offers - teachers and students collaborate in the emergence of curriculum.
In our classroom, it is all about BUGS. Bugs are everywhere - dead ones, live ones, small ones, bugs with wings, bugs with shed skin, bugs with more legs than one can count, bugs that lay eggs, bugs that hatch from those eggs, bugs from home, bugs from the school meadow, bugs that other classes bring to us ... BUGS!
In response to a lot of dramatic play around bugs, the teacher of the class decided to engage the children in a game of writing a play about their bugs. One morning, out of nowhere, there appeared a green box on her desk, titled: "How to Make a Play". We were stunned! It was as if the game was made just for the class.
It was, of course. As the teacher began to explain the game to the children, I was remembering our conversation earlier about what parameters to put on the game to make sure it had enough structure and enough provocation for creativity.
Slowly, but surely, I am seeing what this ball toss implies for the teacher... I am seeing how playful, open-ended, and almost celebratory this project work time is, and yet, how deeply it reaches into children's thinking:
If there were no bugs, the earth might not survive.
Don't step on bugs, because they're living creatures like you. We're both living creatures.
Bugs are us, we are bugs - What we do to the bugs affects us, too.
To contract this open-ended session, the teacher went on, after the game (which was part of "Project Work" on the schedule) to begin Reading with a mini-lesson on inferences, based on a folktale about a bug. A few days later, in the midst of a poetry unit in Writing, a poem about stink bugs emerges on the easel. Project work is everywhere!
What did John Muir say? Something along the lines of: Tug on anything, and you will find it is connected to everything else. So, also, is the network of learning.
Thursday, February 17, 2011
Changing Educational Paradigms
This is one of those videos / lectures that you need to listen to more than once. You need to listen to it twice, three times, four times, maybe even five times before you really comprehend what the speaker is trying to get across to you. This is the kind of talk that goes much further than "a good idea" and reaches much deeper than "oh, that's just what I would say." At least for me, watching Ken Robinson's TED talk on Changing Educational Paradigms - for the fifth time, now - shook something inside me so hard, that something I hadn't really noticed for a long time came out.
This talk is about changing educational paradigms, which means changing our ideas about why and how we learn, and, therefore, why and how we teach. It traces the origins of our current educational system to intellectual and economic eras that are long-gone and, while a significant part of our history, in great need of updating to today's realities.
What is so significant about this talk for me is that it reminds me there is still a piece of that old paradigm inside me. Watching RSAnimate's superb illustration of the ideas Ken Robinson presents, I remember instances of that paradigm in action from my own schooling experience. I remember how academic knowledge was what made me smart, and how learning was divided into separate disciplines with separate departments of teachers. I remember the expectation that I would get good grades, so that I could go to a good college, so that I could ... what, exactly?
This is not to say that I regret my education - I was extremely lucky to have insightful teachers and supportive parents. I enjoyed my classes, because I enjoyed learning, just by itself, so it was no great struggle for me to get the good grades I wanted. And I went to a good college because I wanted to explore the academic community further, to meet scholars, and, perhaps, become one, myself. But it has taken this long - 10 years after graduating from my schooling - to realize that the journey of my education was never for the sake of my "achievement" - that is, an external evaluation of my learning - but for the sake of my learning as I would evaluate it.
Even in the midst of my internship at the Charter, I can feel a heartbeat of that old paradigm, asking me what I'm going to have to show for myself at the end of this, and whether I'm really doing what's expected. The biggest gift the Charter community has offered me is a kind of Get Out of Jail Free card, which allows me not to think as much about those questions, and more about the deeper questions that drive my learning forward. By staying true to myself as a learner, I will naturally come to whatever it is I'll have to show for myself at the end, because it will have come from me, and it will mean something to me.
It is no easy task to battle this old paradigm within me. It's actually pretty painful to think that I might very well have to kill it at some point: kill it, bury it, mourn it, and then - and only then - truly and completely embark into a new paradigm. But how do I kill something that is a part of who I am, and that is a part of my story? That is what is so painful for me, so painful about any paradigm shift. No wonder such shifts have rarely passed without bloodshed. And don't think there aren't real and formidable tensions in the world of education between paradigms.
I just never thought there could be such violence inside myself at the same time.
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
Currere mappa?
As I continue thinking about curriculum mapping (CM) this week, I'm wondering about the analogies and metaphors used to define and explore CM, what do the etymologies of the words "curriculum" and "map" offer to our understanding of the concept of curriculum mapping?
Whenever I want to get inside the meaning of a word, I always go back to its origins. Often, the richest metaphors of meaning come from the words, from which today's language is originally derived. So, here we go.
From www.etymonline.com:
CURRICULUM
from Modern Latin transferred use of classical Latin curriculum "a running, course, career" (also "a fast chariot, racing car"), from currere "to run, move quickly" (same origins as current)
MAP
shortening of Middle English mapemounde "map of the world" (late 14c.), from Medieval Latin mappa mundi "map of the world," first element from Latin mappa "napkin, cloth" (on which maps were drawn). The verb map is first attested 1580s; "to put (something) on the map".
It's fascinating to consider these two etymologies, especially when one considers them together. When people think of curriculum, yes, we think of a course, but a course of study. The idea of a race course, reminds me of the time crunch so many teachers feel when trying to fit a course of study into a 9-month school year. But it also makes me wonder if we can understand a fast-moving course of study as the journey that we take as a classroom community, no matter what the content. I feel like we forget that it's not the content of curriculum that is moving through the year - we are. We're the ones moving through the experiences of life, constructing an understanding of the world as we interact with each other, with text, and with our observations. This is, indeed, a fast-moving process, hard to capture in the moment, and yet, perhaps the very essence of our schooling experience.
How fitting, then, that map comes from the cloth, on which our geographical understanding of the world was recorded and depicted. The first maps were not constructed with the purpose of determining what course of travel was to be taken, but to record the courses of discovery that had already been taken. Lewis and Clark, for example, mapped their route and their surroundings as they went, because they had no idea what the Louisiana Territory held. I wonder if teachers can consider themselves in a similar position: instead of mapping a route through known territory, mapping what they notice and encounter in places they haven't been before.
Combined, the origins of curriculum mapping might be currere mappa. To run on a cloth. Hmm, not entirely satisfying. But what if we thought of it as a clue to humans' early cognizance of representing one's journey to the world? What if "running on a cloth" meant reflecting on our journey by abstractly - symbolically - watching ourselves run the course of our lives in a way that allows us to make sense of where we're running to, where we're running from, and what surroundings we interact with in the process? All of this seems to support the idea that curriculum mapping is not the mapping of a journey-to-be, but of a journey as it continues to unfold, day by day, experience by experience.
Whenever I want to get inside the meaning of a word, I always go back to its origins. Often, the richest metaphors of meaning come from the words, from which today's language is originally derived. So, here we go.
From www.etymonline.com:
CURRICULUM
from Modern Latin transferred use of classical Latin curriculum "a running, course, career" (also "a fast chariot, racing car"), from currere "to run, move quickly" (same origins as current)
MAP
shortening of Middle English mapemounde "map of the world" (late 14c.), from Medieval Latin mappa mundi "map of the world," first element from Latin mappa "napkin, cloth" (on which maps were drawn). The verb map is first attested 1580s; "to put (something) on the map".
It's fascinating to consider these two etymologies, especially when one considers them together. When people think of curriculum, yes, we think of a course, but a course of study. The idea of a race course, reminds me of the time crunch so many teachers feel when trying to fit a course of study into a 9-month school year. But it also makes me wonder if we can understand a fast-moving course of study as the journey that we take as a classroom community, no matter what the content. I feel like we forget that it's not the content of curriculum that is moving through the year - we are. We're the ones moving through the experiences of life, constructing an understanding of the world as we interact with each other, with text, and with our observations. This is, indeed, a fast-moving process, hard to capture in the moment, and yet, perhaps the very essence of our schooling experience.
How fitting, then, that map comes from the cloth, on which our geographical understanding of the world was recorded and depicted. The first maps were not constructed with the purpose of determining what course of travel was to be taken, but to record the courses of discovery that had already been taken. Lewis and Clark, for example, mapped their route and their surroundings as they went, because they had no idea what the Louisiana Territory held. I wonder if teachers can consider themselves in a similar position: instead of mapping a route through known territory, mapping what they notice and encounter in places they haven't been before.
Combined, the origins of curriculum mapping might be currere mappa. To run on a cloth. Hmm, not entirely satisfying. But what if we thought of it as a clue to humans' early cognizance of representing one's journey to the world? What if "running on a cloth" meant reflecting on our journey by abstractly - symbolically - watching ourselves run the course of our lives in a way that allows us to make sense of where we're running to, where we're running from, and what surroundings we interact with in the process? All of this seems to support the idea that curriculum mapping is not the mapping of a journey-to-be, but of a journey as it continues to unfold, day by day, experience by experience.
Monday, February 7, 2011
Curriculum mapping: Responses
Curriculum mapping (CM) is, as you see in my last post, a very complex process of thinking and communicating. Between comparisons to tool belts and medical meetings, it also varies greatly in interpretation once implemented. So I have to ask myself at this point - what do I think of it? What do my colleagues at the Charter think? What does CM really mean for the practice of teaching?
Let me start, perhaps, with the analogies. The first one in Getting Results compares CM to a tool belt that the teacher wears, armed with the hammer of content that nails in the necessary standards with drilling questions and screwdrivers that (how?) turn content into knowledge. I have to be upfront and say I'm not at all enamored by this comparison. To me, this image only maintains traditional notions of knowledge as external from students' bodies and minds, and of curriculum as an objective on the part of the teacher to get as much knowledge from the outside into the students. Apparently with drills and screwdrivers. That sounds worse than the dentist to me.
Jacobs' comparison to medical care is a bit more intriguing to me. (I have two parents in health care who always wonder at how, of the four children between them, none has come close to going into health care. I've realized over time that, as an educator, I may have come the closest.) In schools, as in the world of medicine, "decisions must be made among the actual people who are going to attend to the patient's [student's] needs." She present CM as a hub for cumulative decision making among teachers, demanding a reorganization of teacher meetings around what students need to successfully navigate and reach each benchmark along the way to fulfilling learning standards. I can go further with this analogy, but am left wondering: I can see how such demands of CM can help re-focus teachers on the fact that they teach children before curriculum, but I don't see how CM is making it possible for the day-to-day curriculum to serve and engage the children more directly in their learning.
I think this is a crucial break point between the Charter and other public schools, as far as I can tell. CM may help teachers re-think what and how they are teaching, but it seems to be primarily a tool for a learning community of teachers, not for collaborative learning among teachers and their students.
When we met today at the Charter with Louise to discuss our impressions of CM, our own analogies emerged, gradually wrapping closer and closer around an examination of what purpose maps have in the context of a classroom.
I feel the need to check in with myself about how project questions are evolving. I'm looking for some kind of binder, for example, or some way of organizing how a project evolves.
But the map is not there to prevent us from getting lost. Getting lost is an important part of the process.
Maybe it's not getting lost, but being alive and creative and immersed in what's going on in the classroom.
But I feel the need for something that helps name what you're doing, so that you're understanding it as you're living it.
If we think of it like hiking, the map is the thing we use to keep from getting lost, but when you have that third thing - the magic of emergent curriculum in the moment - you feel you can take the risk of the path that is not on the map.
But there are two kinds of "lost" - there's getting lost in wonder and challenge, and there's also an unproductive lost.
Within this analogy, I began wondering whether mapping is an activity in which we plan curriculum from a preconceived guide - like planning a hiking route according to a map of the area - or as the process of making the map for a piece of uncharted terrain. The question is, then, who is making the map?
As the session continued, I began to realize that the greatest challenge CM faces us with at the Charter is that it is an idea that was conceptualized in a paradigm - the paradigm - that we are trying to move away from. However, in this challenge lies its greatest potential: as one of my colleagues commented:
I feel like, in the work that we are doing, because we represent a paradigm shift in our fundamental ideas about education, we are mapping in this new paradigm, moving from the concept of external knowledge to internal knowledge - once we shift our concept of knowledge, we shift everything else, including planning, assessment, etc. We have to bring people all the way there, including ourselves.
I left our day together with Louise re-grounded, to continue the analogy, in the terrain I find myself on here at the Charter. I have to believe that, because we are mapping within a new paradigm, we are, indeed, the map-makers of our curricula; indeed, we are re-imagining what curriculum can be. Yet, even though I would never have imagined taking on such a task, I know I am not alone. All of us here are making our maps - sometimes with each other, mostly with our students, and always in a communal sense of adventure across the school.
Finally, I wonder if we didn't begin to uncover one of the secrets of this new paradigm today. My colleague above described "moving form the concept of external knowledge to internal knowledge", which relates back to my lack of satisfaction with the analogy of the tool belt. If we choose to take on curriculum mapping in an educational paradigm, in which knowledge comes first from within the individual, and grows through experience with the world and exchange in community, then our first lesson seems to be this: Not only are we the map-makers, notating our observations of unknown ground, we - with our students - are imagining the terrain into being to begin with.
Let me start, perhaps, with the analogies. The first one in Getting Results compares CM to a tool belt that the teacher wears, armed with the hammer of content that nails in the necessary standards with drilling questions and screwdrivers that (how?) turn content into knowledge. I have to be upfront and say I'm not at all enamored by this comparison. To me, this image only maintains traditional notions of knowledge as external from students' bodies and minds, and of curriculum as an objective on the part of the teacher to get as much knowledge from the outside into the students. Apparently with drills and screwdrivers. That sounds worse than the dentist to me.
Jacobs' comparison to medical care is a bit more intriguing to me. (I have two parents in health care who always wonder at how, of the four children between them, none has come close to going into health care. I've realized over time that, as an educator, I may have come the closest.) In schools, as in the world of medicine, "decisions must be made among the actual people who are going to attend to the patient's [student's] needs." She present CM as a hub for cumulative decision making among teachers, demanding a reorganization of teacher meetings around what students need to successfully navigate and reach each benchmark along the way to fulfilling learning standards. I can go further with this analogy, but am left wondering: I can see how such demands of CM can help re-focus teachers on the fact that they teach children before curriculum, but I don't see how CM is making it possible for the day-to-day curriculum to serve and engage the children more directly in their learning.
I think this is a crucial break point between the Charter and other public schools, as far as I can tell. CM may help teachers re-think what and how they are teaching, but it seems to be primarily a tool for a learning community of teachers, not for collaborative learning among teachers and their students.
When we met today at the Charter with Louise to discuss our impressions of CM, our own analogies emerged, gradually wrapping closer and closer around an examination of what purpose maps have in the context of a classroom.
I feel the need to check in with myself about how project questions are evolving. I'm looking for some kind of binder, for example, or some way of organizing how a project evolves.
But the map is not there to prevent us from getting lost. Getting lost is an important part of the process.
Maybe it's not getting lost, but being alive and creative and immersed in what's going on in the classroom.
But I feel the need for something that helps name what you're doing, so that you're understanding it as you're living it.
If we think of it like hiking, the map is the thing we use to keep from getting lost, but when you have that third thing - the magic of emergent curriculum in the moment - you feel you can take the risk of the path that is not on the map.
But there are two kinds of "lost" - there's getting lost in wonder and challenge, and there's also an unproductive lost.
Within this analogy, I began wondering whether mapping is an activity in which we plan curriculum from a preconceived guide - like planning a hiking route according to a map of the area - or as the process of making the map for a piece of uncharted terrain. The question is, then, who is making the map?
As the session continued, I began to realize that the greatest challenge CM faces us with at the Charter is that it is an idea that was conceptualized in a paradigm - the paradigm - that we are trying to move away from. However, in this challenge lies its greatest potential: as one of my colleagues commented:
I feel like, in the work that we are doing, because we represent a paradigm shift in our fundamental ideas about education, we are mapping in this new paradigm, moving from the concept of external knowledge to internal knowledge - once we shift our concept of knowledge, we shift everything else, including planning, assessment, etc. We have to bring people all the way there, including ourselves.
I left our day together with Louise re-grounded, to continue the analogy, in the terrain I find myself on here at the Charter. I have to believe that, because we are mapping within a new paradigm, we are, indeed, the map-makers of our curricula; indeed, we are re-imagining what curriculum can be. Yet, even though I would never have imagined taking on such a task, I know I am not alone. All of us here are making our maps - sometimes with each other, mostly with our students, and always in a communal sense of adventure across the school.
Finally, I wonder if we didn't begin to uncover one of the secrets of this new paradigm today. My colleague above described "moving form the concept of external knowledge to internal knowledge", which relates back to my lack of satisfaction with the analogy of the tool belt. If we choose to take on curriculum mapping in an educational paradigm, in which knowledge comes first from within the individual, and grows through experience with the world and exchange in community, then our first lesson seems to be this: Not only are we the map-makers, notating our observations of unknown ground, we - with our students - are imagining the terrain into being to begin with.
Curriculum mapping: What is it?
Today's opening professional development with Louise on curriculum mapping was so rich, but I realize it will take a two separate posts to explain it all! So I'm starting with what I've learned - albeit, in a very quick inquiry - about the concept of curriculum mapping (CM).
After our conversation today, I noticed a book on the library shelf on CM: Getting Results with Curriculum Mapping (2004), edited by Heidi Hayes Jacobs. Jacobs, I believe, wrote the first definitive work on CM, called Mapping the Big Picture (1997), and is now the Director of Curriculum 21, a company that teaches, coaches, and supports schools and districts in implementing curriculum mapping.
After a brief read of the book, and some Internet research, the impression I get is that CM is a re-imagining of the purpose of state standards and benchmarks for learning. Currently, teachers look at what students are expected to know of their specialty, and derive their curriculum accordingly - either in grade-level teams, department-based teams, or as individuals. CM seems to prod teachers to think more collaboratively about the standards as a trajectory of learning rather than a fragmented series of topics to learn. As a result, they can better understand how their specialty (grade level and/or subject) fits into the larger arc of a student's journey acquiring necessary skills and knowledge.
The “work” of CM is layered. Teachers must first identify as a collective learning community, across grade levels and subject departments. They must come to consensus within their specialties as to what requires consistency and what requires flexibility in each subject area. As a result of this deliberation, schools and districts achieve an “essential” map, a skeleton, perhaps, for the curriculum of each grade level and subject area to be built upon.
CM yields no finished product, but rather, an established culture of communication among teachers. With the help of technology, teachers enter their broad plans for a year’s worth of curriculum into a database, which can be accessed by all other teachers involved. Categories of information on each unit include:
Essential Questions: overarching questions that guide instruction and provide connections to big ideas beyond the classroom
Content: broad topic of study, including major subcategories and underlying concepts
Skills: required for mastery of big ideas, including demonstration of knowledge and generally critical skills
Assessments: evidence of understanding of big ideas, usually based in product or performance, with flexibility for varying expressions of understanding
Activities: support the learning of skills
Resources: print materials, field trips, audio/visual media, and teacher resources
Once units are entered into the database, the information they provide becomes fluid, accessible to everyone. At this point, rather than continuing making curriculum decisions by grade level or department team, teachers can meet in “vertical” (in groups of K-2 teachers, for example) and “cross-disciplinary” teams to look at student performance data and determine how the curriculum can be adjusted to better meet their needs. And that is the real crux of CM: the point of curriculum is to ensure that the needs of students are met in the trajectory of their K-12 education. When Jacobs writes about the imaginary student present at each teacher meeting, meant to keep conversation focused on the students, I remember a colleague of mine who continually reminded me, “We don’t teach curriculum, we teach students.” Though it takes an immense amount of work to implement CM, Jacobs considers it a necessary adjustment to the current paradigm of curriculum planning and decision-making.
Getting Results consists of several chapters by varying educators and administrators who report on how CM has been implemented in their schools, and what they have found in the process. Each examines CM from a different perspective: a whole school district, an independent school, the principal's role, necessary technology, etc. Jacobs writes a few chapters, herself, providing some synthesis and overarching ideas and questions involved in the process of institutionalizing CM.
Two interesting analogies caught my eye in this book. The first compared CM to a tool belt, complete with the following one-to-one comparison (p.11):
... [C]urriculum mapping is like a tool belt because it contains or holds information about what a teacher really teaches:
The belt is the calendar that organizes the tools
The belt buckle allows for adjustable pacing through the school year
The content hammers in the standards - the nails
The mapping tool drills in essential questions for authentic probing and learning
The pliers (skills) hold the content, standards, and assessments together
The screwdriver turns content into knowledge
The measuring tape can be used to assess student buildings (products)
The other analogy is offered by Jacobs in the last chapter of the book (p.131):
If a patient is admitted to the hospital for surgery, who among the professionals should meet to give the best possible care? Who should meet to work toward ultimate recovery and health? The best interest of the patient is served when the surgeon works with the chain of care - from the internal medicine physician, to the receiving nurse, to the anesthesiologist... In short, decisions must be made among the actual people who are going to attend to the patient’s needs.
So must teachers organize themselves when making curriculum decisions: not around subject area or grade level, but around the students they teach. This suggestion reminds me of my work in schools in Germany, where students are organized into classes, based in one classroom, while teachers roam from one classroom to another to do their teaching. Each teacher still has his/her specialty, but is responsible, for example, for teaching that subject in classes 10a, 7b, and 5c. (Numbers correspond to grade level, the letters to sections) I’m not entirely aware if German teachers meet together to make curriculum decisions, but I can imagine that such a school set-up would make such decision-making, as Jacobs is suggesting, possible.
What I hear Jacobs saying is that we are currently so focused on the crisis of education, we’ve become too focused on the content we are teaching, and lost sight of the students. I might argue that this has long been the case, how public education was designed from the beginning. But more of my response in later posts. I found a very helpful video on YouTube of an interview with Jacobs that continues with this analogy further: click here to view. She presents a hypothetical situation, in which she imagines a student’s history of learning traveling with her the way a patient’s medical history travels. No matter where that patient is being cared for, his caregivers can access the most important information about his allergies, past surgeries, medications, etc. Likewise, teachers could also have access to the curriculum each of their students has already experienced, including big ideas and critical skills, so that they can properly build on prior learning.
Finally, I’ll briefly summarize with a third analogy, taken from the name of curriculum mapping, itself. Curriculum comes from the Latin for “course”, as in a path to walk. In this way, curriculum mapping intends for teachers to create a map to help them guide students across the terrain of their learning. Because students are being held accountable to the same standards of learning, it is important that teachers come to a consensus about important benchmarks along the way (benchmarks also being a term commonly used in the language of educational standards). Each student may walk their own path and build their own collection of experiences in their education, but teachers must work together to assure that each path hits the necessary benchmarks, so that all students end their K-12 journey with an equitable collection of valuable learning experiences.
Other useful links:
Heidi Hayes Jacobs on Critical Transformations
Curriculum mapping overview (Powerpoint)
After our conversation today, I noticed a book on the library shelf on CM: Getting Results with Curriculum Mapping (2004), edited by Heidi Hayes Jacobs. Jacobs, I believe, wrote the first definitive work on CM, called Mapping the Big Picture (1997), and is now the Director of Curriculum 21, a company that teaches, coaches, and supports schools and districts in implementing curriculum mapping.
After a brief read of the book, and some Internet research, the impression I get is that CM is a re-imagining of the purpose of state standards and benchmarks for learning. Currently, teachers look at what students are expected to know of their specialty, and derive their curriculum accordingly - either in grade-level teams, department-based teams, or as individuals. CM seems to prod teachers to think more collaboratively about the standards as a trajectory of learning rather than a fragmented series of topics to learn. As a result, they can better understand how their specialty (grade level and/or subject) fits into the larger arc of a student's journey acquiring necessary skills and knowledge.
The “work” of CM is layered. Teachers must first identify as a collective learning community, across grade levels and subject departments. They must come to consensus within their specialties as to what requires consistency and what requires flexibility in each subject area. As a result of this deliberation, schools and districts achieve an “essential” map, a skeleton, perhaps, for the curriculum of each grade level and subject area to be built upon.
CM yields no finished product, but rather, an established culture of communication among teachers. With the help of technology, teachers enter their broad plans for a year’s worth of curriculum into a database, which can be accessed by all other teachers involved. Categories of information on each unit include:
Essential Questions: overarching questions that guide instruction and provide connections to big ideas beyond the classroom
Content: broad topic of study, including major subcategories and underlying concepts
Skills: required for mastery of big ideas, including demonstration of knowledge and generally critical skills
Assessments: evidence of understanding of big ideas, usually based in product or performance, with flexibility for varying expressions of understanding
Activities: support the learning of skills
Resources: print materials, field trips, audio/visual media, and teacher resources
Once units are entered into the database, the information they provide becomes fluid, accessible to everyone. At this point, rather than continuing making curriculum decisions by grade level or department team, teachers can meet in “vertical” (in groups of K-2 teachers, for example) and “cross-disciplinary” teams to look at student performance data and determine how the curriculum can be adjusted to better meet their needs. And that is the real crux of CM: the point of curriculum is to ensure that the needs of students are met in the trajectory of their K-12 education. When Jacobs writes about the imaginary student present at each teacher meeting, meant to keep conversation focused on the students, I remember a colleague of mine who continually reminded me, “We don’t teach curriculum, we teach students.” Though it takes an immense amount of work to implement CM, Jacobs considers it a necessary adjustment to the current paradigm of curriculum planning and decision-making.
Getting Results consists of several chapters by varying educators and administrators who report on how CM has been implemented in their schools, and what they have found in the process. Each examines CM from a different perspective: a whole school district, an independent school, the principal's role, necessary technology, etc. Jacobs writes a few chapters, herself, providing some synthesis and overarching ideas and questions involved in the process of institutionalizing CM.
Two interesting analogies caught my eye in this book. The first compared CM to a tool belt, complete with the following one-to-one comparison (p.11):
... [C]urriculum mapping is like a tool belt because it contains or holds information about what a teacher really teaches:
The belt is the calendar that organizes the tools
The belt buckle allows for adjustable pacing through the school year
The content hammers in the standards - the nails
The mapping tool drills in essential questions for authentic probing and learning
The pliers (skills) hold the content, standards, and assessments together
The screwdriver turns content into knowledge
The measuring tape can be used to assess student buildings (products)
The other analogy is offered by Jacobs in the last chapter of the book (p.131):
If a patient is admitted to the hospital for surgery, who among the professionals should meet to give the best possible care? Who should meet to work toward ultimate recovery and health? The best interest of the patient is served when the surgeon works with the chain of care - from the internal medicine physician, to the receiving nurse, to the anesthesiologist... In short, decisions must be made among the actual people who are going to attend to the patient’s needs.
So must teachers organize themselves when making curriculum decisions: not around subject area or grade level, but around the students they teach. This suggestion reminds me of my work in schools in Germany, where students are organized into classes, based in one classroom, while teachers roam from one classroom to another to do their teaching. Each teacher still has his/her specialty, but is responsible, for example, for teaching that subject in classes 10a, 7b, and 5c. (Numbers correspond to grade level, the letters to sections) I’m not entirely aware if German teachers meet together to make curriculum decisions, but I can imagine that such a school set-up would make such decision-making, as Jacobs is suggesting, possible.
She continues her analogy: One place where there is no opportunity to for thoughtful planning and preparation is the emergency room, where medical personnel know almost nothing about the prior record or experience of each arriving patient. There is an urgent, anxious tone to the set of decisions that must be made quickly without benefit of a strong understanding of the patient’s experience. Sometimes it seems as if we give an emergency room education, because we have so little good information about our learners.
What I hear Jacobs saying is that we are currently so focused on the crisis of education, we’ve become too focused on the content we are teaching, and lost sight of the students. I might argue that this has long been the case, how public education was designed from the beginning. But more of my response in later posts. I found a very helpful video on YouTube of an interview with Jacobs that continues with this analogy further: click here to view. She presents a hypothetical situation, in which she imagines a student’s history of learning traveling with her the way a patient’s medical history travels. No matter where that patient is being cared for, his caregivers can access the most important information about his allergies, past surgeries, medications, etc. Likewise, teachers could also have access to the curriculum each of their students has already experienced, including big ideas and critical skills, so that they can properly build on prior learning.
Finally, I’ll briefly summarize with a third analogy, taken from the name of curriculum mapping, itself. Curriculum comes from the Latin for “course”, as in a path to walk. In this way, curriculum mapping intends for teachers to create a map to help them guide students across the terrain of their learning. Because students are being held accountable to the same standards of learning, it is important that teachers come to a consensus about important benchmarks along the way (benchmarks also being a term commonly used in the language of educational standards). Each student may walk their own path and build their own collection of experiences in their education, but teachers must work together to assure that each path hits the necessary benchmarks, so that all students end their K-12 journey with an equitable collection of valuable learning experiences.
Other useful links:
Heidi Hayes Jacobs on Critical Transformations
Curriculum mapping overview (Powerpoint)
Open House
This week is Open House at the Charter School. This means that upwards of 100 teachers will be with us for part of the week, observing classes, learning about Reggio Emilia and inquiry-based learning, and exchanging their reflections on their own work with each other. While certainly stressful on the Charter teachers and students, it is sure to be an invaluable opportunity to come together in community with fellow colleagues who are chewing on the same questions I am, perhaps.
It also means Louise Cadwell is with us, leading workshops and lecturing on Reggio Emilia, curriculum mapping, and incorporating "21st century skills", as she calls them, into today's teaching and learning. She is the recent founder of Cadwell Collaborative, a consulting service for educators and schools interested in implementing curricula that support 21st century skills, including sustainability education. She’s also well-known within the Reggio community for two books based on her work in the original Reggio Emilia schools: Bringing Reggio Emilia Home and Bringing Learning to Life.
I'm looking forward to blogging about the week as it progresses. It will take a number of posts, I’m sure to sort out all of my experiences, reflections, and studies.
It also means Louise Cadwell is with us, leading workshops and lecturing on Reggio Emilia, curriculum mapping, and incorporating "21st century skills", as she calls them, into today's teaching and learning. She is the recent founder of Cadwell Collaborative, a consulting service for educators and schools interested in implementing curricula that support 21st century skills, including sustainability education. She’s also well-known within the Reggio community for two books based on her work in the original Reggio Emilia schools: Bringing Reggio Emilia Home and Bringing Learning to Life.
I'm looking forward to blogging about the week as it progresses. It will take a number of posts, I’m sure to sort out all of my experiences, reflections, and studies.
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Music Explore
Most of my students know me as a storyteller, a passion I’ve made no secret of. But this passion came about partially because the children kept asking for them. Stories are so innate to human communication, I wonder how I could be a teacher without recognizing myself as a storyteller?! Another fundamental genre, you might call it, of human expression, culture, and creativity, is music.My mother says I was singing before I learned to talk. Throughout my school years, I studied four instruments, and that doesn't include the instruments I played for fun and experimentation, or the creative endeavors I've taken on as an adult. An entire corner of my small studio apartment is devoted to displaying and storing a variety of instruments, and believe me, they do not get dusty.
So why have I not brought this passion into the classroom? When this question struck me, my gut reaction was: It never seemed to fit. Whether in a curriculum-based classroom or not, there was rarely an overt opportunity for it. When I thought about this question further, within the context of emergent curriculum, where I'm beginning to make my pedagogical home, I realized that I'm focused on the passions, interests, and curiosities children bring with them into the community. So focused, in fact, that I forget what passions I, as the teacher, bring to the community. Children bring so much joy and excitement about what they experience outside the classroom, and we wish to honor that experience as part of their learning - why not honor our experience outside the classroom as part of our teaching?
So, in came the instruments last week: guitar, banjo, tamborine, bodhran, and washboard.
At first, everyone was hands on. Ulee and Bilal couldn’t seem to keep their hands on an instrument for a few seconds before being taken with another instrument next to it. Ulee started by strumming the banjo, still in the case, Bilal played the bodhran (pronounced “BOH-run”, a kind of Irish drum), Kerrick and Tessa examined the guitar, and each instrument was passed around for everyone to explore.
There were also plenty of observations and wonderings to be made by the children. The banjo held the greatest intrigue. Charlie said, “It looks like they started out wanting to make a drum, but then they changed their minds and wanted to make a guitar instead.” Others wondered what the material was on the banjo that looked like the head of a drum.
Ulee: It looks like hard plastic.
Bilal: Or maybe really thick paper.
Manuel: I think it’s cow bones that were made hollow. Or just hollow-sounding plastic.
Kelsey: It looks like a drum I have at home. It’s made out of animal skin.
Eventually, I picked up my guitar and started playing and singing a song, inviting everyone to play with me on another instrument. Kelsey played her flute: “I was playing all sorts of notes on my flute, but then I stuck to two notes, because I knew they sounded good with what you were playing.” Manuel tried different strokes on the head and the rim of the bodhran. Charlie tried playing the bodhran and the tamborine at the same time.
Everyone got a chance to play all the instruments they wanted. The guitar and banjo were certainly the most popular, and elicited the most observations and reflections.
Kerrick: We don’t usually interact with instruments.
Isaac: Can I strum the guitar with a block? What does that sound like?
Charlie: Look, you can play a guitar and a drum on the banjo at the same time! (strum - hit - strum - hit)
Manuel: I love how you can change the song [chords], ‘cause I really love this one (strums). I’m so excited, because I love music. It feels like I’m in a real band, like The Beatles. I’m pretty much a Beatle, you know, because my mom says I look like them.
Tessa: I’ve never really played a guitar or a banjo. I wish I had one of my own.
Kerrick expressed curiosity about the pins at the end of the neck of the guitar. He turned them and found that it changed the notes of the strings, making them higher or lower.’’
And so has the curiosity, wonder, and experimentation continued several days now. Being so close to my last day at this school, a more in-depth investigation is - unfortunately - not possible. However, it was entirely worth it to me to begin thinking about how a teacher’s interest can be provocation enough to invite children’s curiosities and wonderings. It reminded me to consider my own everyday experiences outside the classroom as equally as valuable to the classroom environment as those of the children. Just as I am teacher everywhere - in and outside the classroom - so am I the entire individual I am, everywhere, in the world, and in the classroom
Thursday, January 13, 2011
What is a story? Part 2
Remember the story about Anansi, and about Nyame, the Sky God who gave him all the stories of the world? I wrote last November about some students ideas of what, exactly, Nyame gave to Anansi when he passed on all those stories. There was talk of bubbles full of pictures, shelves of books, and white stuff like from the brain of Professor Slughorn (from Harry Potter), just to name a few.
Today I was at a local elementary school telling stories, and of course, couldn't resist asking the question again. What do you think Nyame actually gave Anansi? Here are a few ideas from today:
He told him all the stories, because he couldn't give them to him.
Books.
You can't do imagination - it's nothing, so I think he gave him books.
He told him t he stories and Anansi brought them down in his mind to his friends.
Nyame gave Anansi books from his house. I don't know what kind of house ... oh, I know! The library!
It's always fascinating to me, when I ask this question, to see who leans more toward the idea of books versus the idea of telling the stories or transferring knowledge of them from one mind to the next. It makes me wonder where these connections - this schema for stories - comes from. From print-centered literacy curriculum? From our print-based culture of communication? From different learning styles (aural, visual, etc)?
I think about what stories are all the time - I'm a storyteller, after all - but I'm still stuck with this challenge of offering such a concrete definition or picture of it. It's like asking me what air looks like. I breathe it everyday, it is so crucial to my very existence, and downright miraculous ... and yet, so elusive in the concreteness of our perception of the world.
Today I was at a local elementary school telling stories, and of course, couldn't resist asking the question again. What do you think Nyame actually gave Anansi? Here are a few ideas from today:
He told him all the stories, because he couldn't give them to him.
Books.
You can't do imagination - it's nothing, so I think he gave him books.
He told him t he stories and Anansi brought them down in his mind to his friends.
Nyame gave Anansi books from his house. I don't know what kind of house ... oh, I know! The library!
It's always fascinating to me, when I ask this question, to see who leans more toward the idea of books versus the idea of telling the stories or transferring knowledge of them from one mind to the next. It makes me wonder where these connections - this schema for stories - comes from. From print-centered literacy curriculum? From our print-based culture of communication? From different learning styles (aural, visual, etc)?
I think about what stories are all the time - I'm a storyteller, after all - but I'm still stuck with this challenge of offering such a concrete definition or picture of it. It's like asking me what air looks like. I breathe it everyday, it is so crucial to my very existence, and downright miraculous ... and yet, so elusive in the concreteness of our perception of the world.
Saturday, December 4, 2010
Where do your ideas come from?
Avery: Manuel, where do your ideas come from?
Manuel: From my imagination. In my brain. Like pictures in my mind.
Avery: Where do the pictures come from?
Manuel: From the TVs in my brain.
Avery: Where did the TVs come from?
Manuel: From the mechanical people in my mind. They build the TVs in my mind. And the airplanes.
Avery: What are the airplanes for?
Manuel: They fly out of my brain to get more ideas.
Manuel: From my imagination. In my brain. Like pictures in my mind.
Avery: Where do the pictures come from?
Manuel: From the TVs in my brain.
Avery: Where did the TVs come from?
Manuel: From the mechanical people in my mind. They build the TVs in my mind. And the airplanes.
Avery: What are the airplanes for?
Manuel: They fly out of my brain to get more ideas.
Monday, November 15, 2010
What is a story?
There is a story of how Anansi (a well-known trickster figure in West African stories) brought all the stories of the world down to earth. There are several versions published, the most famous of which is probably "A Story, A Story" by Gail E. Haley. I tell a version based on how the story is recorded in a book called "Family of Earth and Sky", edited by John Elder and Hertha D. Wong.
I've always enjoyed telling this story, and have told it many times. However, I will never tell this story the same way again after one of my students, Isaac, asked a question at the end.
Briefly, in the story I tell, Anansi appeals to the Sky God, who originally had all the stories, who tells him he needs to bring him three animals. Anansi goes and manages to trick them all into being caught, takes them up to the Sky God ...
The Sky God was astounded to see that Anansi had, indeed, fulfilled all of the tasks he had assigned. With a heavy heart, the Sky God gave Anansi all the stories of the world. Anansi took them back down to earth to share with all the animals and people. And last I heard, he is still telling them today.
Isaac: So what did the Sky God give him anyway? Like, books or something?
I caught myself beginning to answer, though I didn't know what I thought at the time. Better to bite my lip and ask my favorite question: "What do you think?"
Ted: "If it were a story about a tiger it would be a tiger that goes in a book."
Tessa: "I think it's like little circles with whatever it's about inside. Like if it was a story about butterflies, it would be a bubble with butterflies inside."
Bobby: "It's like in Harry Potter. This guy, Professor Slughorn has a wand and he put it up to his head and pulls a memory out. It's white stuff. So I think it would be white like that. ... See, Dumbledore had a memory in a jar, but it was a fake memory. Well, not a fake memory, but there was something wrong with it, so Slughorn pulled out his memory - the right memory - and put it in a jar for Harry Potter."
Isaac: "But what would it look like if a GOD gave you a story? I think he just started throwing books at him his sack."
Manuel: "It's probably like this piece of paper with stories on them. You look at them for a long time until you can tell the story without looking at the pictures and worlds. Like, it's a piece of paper with words on it. And pictures from the story."
Kerrick: "Maybe they're ghost-like because they were given by a god. Like, invisible, or see-through. He could still see the words because they're darker, but the paper would be invisible."
Charlie: "I don't think they looked like anything. He just made it so that Anansi could tell the stories."
I was blown away by these responses, I felt the breath taken right out of me. Beneath all of these thoughts, there raged the deeper question of what a story really is.
I took advantage of other telling opportunities and gathered the following ideas from other children:
"I think the Sky God took all the stories from where he kept them, like on a bookshelf in his bedroom, and gave them to Anansi."
"I think he just told Anansi all the stories."
In one case, I mentioned: "One girl I know said she thought they were bubbles with pictures from the story inside."
Response: "Oh yeah! And then they pop and come out. When he wants to tell a story, he pulls out the bubble and pops it open and the story pops out!"
The same group of kids from above continued along these lines when I told another story, "The Uwabami", a trickster tale from Japan, when Manuel noted: "At the library, I found a story like that, but it was a little different.
Isaac: "How would you know what the real story is?"
Avery: "What do you think?"
Isaac: Well, just ask the person who wrote it.
Kerrick: But they're probably not alive.
Iver: There is no real story. There's more than one and they're all good.
Charlie: Yeah. Everyone tells it differently.
Bobby: Yeah, you can hear it, you can change it, then pass it on.
Manuel: When a person dies, the person finds it [the story] and changes, and it gets changed and changed and changed until it's so changed that no one can change it anymore.
Avery: Is there a "real" story that we can find somewhere?
Kelsey: Not exactly. There is an original story ... no, there really isn't, because even storytellers tell stories different every time.
Manuel: There was probably a real story far far away and people thought he was a great storyteller and put the story where he lived.
Avery: But let's say we want to find the real story of "The Uwabami". The original. What would we do to find that out?
Kerrick: Maybe the thinking of it was probably a snake. When the author thought of the Uwabami, he thought it should be a snake.
Isaac: We could go to Japan and ask the villagers who the author is.
Tessa: Who is the author?
Avery: Good question. Who wrote that story, or told it first?
Several: You?
I share all of these comments as the stuff I am chewing on as I consider the question of what a story really is. I recall a remarkable woman I met in Germany, a renowned choir leader who went to some high organization in the world of church music, held a hymnal in front of them and said, "There are no hymns in this hymnal." Very controversial, but she stood her ground, arguing that a hymn is not a hymn until it is song, given voice by humans, and heard by humans, in community with each other.
I wonder if the same could not be said for stories?
IS THIS A STORY?Now, this is a particularly ironic question to ask considering the title. But consider any storybook. Is a book a story? When I recall the choir leader's notion of what constitutes a hymn, I feel I have no choice but to say, No. The book itself is not the story, but that which is read and heard by people.
And yet, the story communicated in this book is quite different than other versions of that same story. So, it seems the representation of the story does matter, as there are several possible ways to depict the same story.
And yet again, I recall an idea - a claim, really - that Kieran Egan shared this past summer (at a summer course in Imaginative Education). It is, at least, my memory that he warned against the belief in our current print-based, information-driven culture that knowledge exists on the paper, or worse, "in the file" or "on my phone." (I have had several friends refer to their iPhones as "my second brain"). The alphabet is merely a code, he said, but the knowledge it represents can only be grasped by the human brain who deconstructs an idea into code and the human brain(s) who reconstructs it from code. Of course, the original idea exists in the mind of one human, and none can tell what idea will exist in the minds of others when communicated to them. "You hear it, you can change it, and you pass it on..."
As might be obvious, I am leaning toward the position that a book is not a story. But I don't want to resolve myself to a definitive decision in either direction. I am excited to continue to share my favorite story listeners' ideas with others and to ask the questions that arise from recalling them (of which there are many I've not included!).
There are also, of course, other print media to consider besides books. But the question remains the same.
What is a story?
Thursday, November 4, 2010
Not a Box
I am really cherishing the opportunity to continue building my relationship with the Raindrop community. After subbing for Emily for a week, and now for Brad for a week and two days, I feel a real connection with each of the children and continue to enjoy each and every one of them.Yesterday, as some of us were looking for a book to read, I came upon this one, “Not a Box”, by Antoinette Portis. It is a gem of a book, about all the things that a box can become. The dedication says it all, really: “To children everywhere sitting in cardboard boxes.”
When I finish reading or telling a story, I often like to ask the children an open question. I’m not looking for any particular answers, just getting a sense of the kids’ thoughts on what happened in the story or on how it relates to their own lives.
This book lends itself well to such open questions. The pages alternate between a picture of the bunny as an adult would see it - sitting in a box, standing on a box, wearing a box, etc. - and a corresponding picture of what the bunny understands the box to be - a race car, a mountain, a robot costume, etc. Accompanying each picture is text that refers to the voice of either the adult or the bunny.
Why are you sitting in a box? It’s not a box.
After reading the book through the first time, I decided to go back to the first set of pages to talk about them a little.
Avery: It sounds like someone is asking her, “Why are you sitting a box?” And she says “It’s not a box.” What is it to her?
Kevin: A race car.
Avery: On this first page, it really looks like it’s just a box, but on this next page, I can see how she sees in her mind that it’s a race car. I wonder why she thinks it looks like a race car? Let’s look at the first page again. Why does she think it’s a race car?
[Silence.]
We went through the rest of the book, noting how the bunny thinks of the box differently depending on how she is positioned in relation to it. Kevin and Jessie were especially eager to share how well they remembered what each box was going to become on the next page. I asked a few times, “What else to could the box be in this picture?”, focusing on the plain, black and white depictions of the bunny. No answers. Hmm.
After reading the book a second time, we were sitting near the fabric basket. I said, “It’s fun to pretend that the materials we play with can be something else. Like the fabric. Just like the box, it’s not fabric, it’s … what else could it be?”
No answer. Kevin and Eden picked up the fabric to consider it.
Perhaps too soon, I said, “I wonder what this fabric could be. I know! It’s not fabric, it’s a snake!” With that, I shaped a piece of fabric into a long snake-like figure. I had hoped this would get their imaginations going, so I asked, “What else could it be?”
Kevin: “It’s a snake!” [started to play with it, holding it at one end]
Avery: What do you think, Isla? What else could the fabric be?
Jasmine: Snake!
Avery: Duzan, what are you going to make the fabric be?
Eden: A snake!
Hmm. Not exactly the kind of game I had thought this would be. Until I remembered that children this age are still very much learners through mimicry, not fully understanding something someone has said until they say it themselves. We see this every day as one child says something, and all the others say it back, as if echoing to show the first child that s/he’s been heard.
I realized at this point that I was far too invested in what I was looking for, and not open enough to what the children were telling me. I was looking, of course, for their sense of the abstract, their understanding of how a box can be imagined to be so very many things - indeed, how anything can be anything else, if we put our minds and imaginations to it.
But, why was I looking for them to tell me about it? I saw them thinking abstractly every day!
At the playdough table, Eden comments to Theo, “I’m making a pancake.” Theo replies: “I’m making a pancake, too. No, I’m making a pizza.” Together, on the big chair, several children fly together on an airplane to Alaska.
Jasmine shows Adam a “bee” on the lamp stand. And blocks! How many times have I watched blocks become castles, cars, storefronts, houses?! And yes ... (as pictured here) even as potties.
The point is, contrary to what a lot of courses and texts on child development like to say, children ARE abstract thinkers, from the very beginning. They use everyday objects to represent other objects and ideas all the time - it is the very basis of their play. What I have marveled at these past few weeks is that, while the children seamlessly play with abstract notions all day, the moment I try to probe their thinking about their play, it’s as if they have no idea what they’re doing. It’s as if Jean Piaget - who introduced the whole notion that children think concretely before they think abstractly - swoops down at precisely that moment to magically prevent me from unlocking the secret.
What is that secret? The only sense I can make from these observations is that, while children are, as I said, already abstract thinkers at a young age (in this case, 2-3 years old), what fails them is consciousness about their thinking: they lack metacognition. They can understand that a black piece of fabric with sparkles put over their head turns them into a spider web, but they don’t understand how they can understand that. Metacognition - thinking about our thinking - is what enables us to separate concrete from abstract thinking in the first place. It also helps us make sense of both concrete and abstract meanings in the world around us - in literature and film, in advertisements, in the behaviors of those around us, and of complete strangers, and so on.
When does this consciousness arise? I’m not sure, to tell the truth. But I do know that children are not only abstract thinkers, but keen observers, as well. The more we, as adults and teachers, can model our thinking out loud, the more they will pick up on this marvelous, dynamic, and outright fascinating process we call human thinking.
I know it’s not a box. But what is it to you?
Avery: It sounds like someone is asking her, “Why are you sitting a box?” And she says “It’s not a box.” What is it to her?
Kevin: A race car.
Avery: On this first page, it really looks like it’s just a box, but on this next page, I can see how she sees in her mind that it’s a race car. I wonder why she thinks it looks like a race car? Let’s look at the first page again. Why does she think it’s a race car?
[Silence.]
We went through the rest of the book, noting how the bunny thinks of the box differently depending on how she is positioned in relation to it. Kevin and Jessie were especially eager to share how well they remembered what each box was going to become on the next page. I asked a few times, “What else to could the box be in this picture?”, focusing on the plain, black and white depictions of the bunny. No answers. Hmm.
After reading the book a second time, we were sitting near the fabric basket. I said, “It’s fun to pretend that the materials we play with can be something else. Like the fabric. Just like the box, it’s not fabric, it’s … what else could it be?”
No answer. Kevin and Eden picked up the fabric to consider it.
Perhaps too soon, I said, “I wonder what this fabric could be. I know! It’s not fabric, it’s a snake!” With that, I shaped a piece of fabric into a long snake-like figure. I had hoped this would get their imaginations going, so I asked, “What else could it be?”
Kevin: “It’s a snake!” [started to play with it, holding it at one end]
Avery: What do you think, Isla? What else could the fabric be?
Jasmine: Snake!
Avery: Duzan, what are you going to make the fabric be?
Eden: A snake!
Hmm. Not exactly the kind of game I had thought this would be. Until I remembered that children this age are still very much learners through mimicry, not fully understanding something someone has said until they say it themselves. We see this every day as one child says something, and all the others say it back, as if echoing to show the first child that s/he’s been heard.
I realized at this point that I was far too invested in what I was looking for, and not open enough to what the children were telling me. I was looking, of course, for their sense of the abstract, their understanding of how a box can be imagined to be so very many things - indeed, how anything can be anything else, if we put our minds and imaginations to it.
But, why was I looking for them to tell me about it? I saw them thinking abstractly every day!
At the playdough table, Eden comments to Theo, “I’m making a pancake.” Theo replies: “I’m making a pancake, too. No, I’m making a pizza.” Together, on the big chair, several children fly together on an airplane to Alaska.
Jasmine shows Adam a “bee” on the lamp stand. And blocks! How many times have I watched blocks become castles, cars, storefronts, houses?! And yes ... (as pictured here) even as potties.
The point is, contrary to what a lot of courses and texts on child development like to say, children ARE abstract thinkers, from the very beginning. They use everyday objects to represent other objects and ideas all the time - it is the very basis of their play. What I have marveled at these past few weeks is that, while the children seamlessly play with abstract notions all day, the moment I try to probe their thinking about their play, it’s as if they have no idea what they’re doing. It’s as if Jean Piaget - who introduced the whole notion that children think concretely before they think abstractly - swoops down at precisely that moment to magically prevent me from unlocking the secret.
What is that secret? The only sense I can make from these observations is that, while children are, as I said, already abstract thinkers at a young age (in this case, 2-3 years old), what fails them is consciousness about their thinking: they lack metacognition. They can understand that a black piece of fabric with sparkles put over their head turns them into a spider web, but they don’t understand how they can understand that. Metacognition - thinking about our thinking - is what enables us to separate concrete from abstract thinking in the first place. It also helps us make sense of both concrete and abstract meanings in the world around us - in literature and film, in advertisements, in the behaviors of those around us, and of complete strangers, and so on.
When does this consciousness arise? I’m not sure, to tell the truth. But I do know that children are not only abstract thinkers, but keen observers, as well. The more we, as adults and teachers, can model our thinking out loud, the more they will pick up on this marvelous, dynamic, and outright fascinating process we call human thinking.
I know it’s not a box. But what is it to you?Thursday, September 16, 2010
Charter, here I come!
I've begun my year's internship at a charter school (which I'll simply call "Charter") that practices inquiry-based learning and is inspired by the pedagogical ideas of Reggio Emilia, Italy. This internship will offer me the chance to observe and immerse myself in a school community that is the closest thing I have found to what I might call my "pedagogical home", so I begin with much enthusiasm and anticipation for learning.
These first few days have been mostly for observation, getting a sense of the routines, and simply getting my bearings for the work of my internship. I'm taking such pleasure in getting to know the different class communities, the kids as individuals, and the professional community of the teachers and staff.
More to come as the year unfolds!
These first few days have been mostly for observation, getting a sense of the routines, and simply getting my bearings for the work of my internship. I'm taking such pleasure in getting to know the different class communities, the kids as individuals, and the professional community of the teachers and staff.
More to come as the year unfolds!
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