Since Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe published their signature book, Understanding by Design, the idea of planning “with the end in mind” has become an important part of educational parlance. There are few endeavors where this advice is more important than Project-Based Learning.
Because a project, by definition, has a prescribed outcome, it’s tempting to focus on the material objective rather than the accompanying learning. Regardless of the nature of the project, the important questions are:
Small children learn by asking questions and testing the answers they receive. This tendency forms the roots of critical thinking. Unfortunately, question-generation eventually takes a backseat to receiving and storing information both at home and at school as children mature. In a traditional classroom, questions are the provenance of the teacher. In a project-based learning classroom, however, questions drive the entire learning process.
In my last post, I covered the importance of satisfying students’ curiosity about why they “have to learn” various skills, facts and processes by connecting curriculum to real world applications. Project-Based Learning (PBL) is one important approach that accomplishes this task and far more.
I’ve spoken before of my mentor in graduate school, Donald Graves. He used to say that one of the most important questions we could ask, as educators, citizens or even humans, was: What’s it for? Whether an educational policy or a political stance, he’d tell us, “What it’s for has everything to do with what we’re for.”
This post is written by Mary Chase, Ph.D., an expert in curriculum design, literacy education, and technology integration.
In 1871, the poet and thinker Walt Whitman wrote:
… the process of reading is not a half sleep, but, in highest sense, an exercise, a gymnast's struggle; that the reader is to do something for himself, must be on the alert, must himself or herself construct indeed the poem, argument, history, metaphysical essay—the text furnishing the hints, the clue, the start or frame-work. Not the book needs so much to be the complete thing, but the reader of the book does. That [would result in] a nation of supple and athletic minds, well-train'd, intuitive, used to depend on themselves, and not on a few coteries of writers.
When we picture a reader, we imagine a person leaning over a text, still and silent. However, if we could peek into the reader’s “thought bubble,” we’d see instead someone wrestling with ideas, leaping between past experience and new applications, and dismantling words and phrases. Reading isn’t a passive endeavor.
This post is written by Mary Chase, Ph.D., an expert in curriculum design, literacy education, and technology integration.
It’s been a long time since I was a student, yet every year as autumn approaches I become nostalgic for the days when my only job was learning. I’ve been very fortunate in my teachers, but the highlight of my student days was surely the three years I spent at the University of New Hampshire studying under the guidance of Donald Graves and Jane Hansen. I ended up with a lot more than a Ph.D.
In the late 1980’s, literacy studies were undergoing a renaissance, and UNH, home of the Reading and Writing Process Lab, was at its center. Graves and Hansen were pioneers in new pedagogies that emphasized students’ abilities rather than their deficits. They also knew every other literacy guru—Jerry Harste, Ken and Yetta Goodman, Frank Smith—and made sure that we knew them too. One of the most influential for me was Louise Rosenblatt, author of The Reader, The Text, The Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work.
This post is written by Mary Chase, Ph.D., an expert in curriculum design, literacy education, and technology integration.
The skies are blue, the temperatures are edging up and summer is poised on the horizon: it’s that great time of year when we take down our bulletin boards and break out our (metaphoric) surfboards. There’s nothing better than those first days of vacation when our minds drain of the agendas and administrivia of the classroom, and it’s okay to pick up a book with a plot instead of a matrix of standards.
That feeling doesn’t last forever, though. After about three weeks, I get bitten by the teaching bug again. I remember the faces of all those students who never quite engaged, who might have excelled but didn’t, and I start wondering what I can do in the coming fall to address their needs. That’s when I do a different kind of summer reading—titles from the annals of pedagogy. My favorite kind of education book is passionate, based on experience in the trenches and reflective of what the writers believe about learning, not the “how to” books of which there are so many. Here are a few of my favorites:
This post is written by Mary Chase, Ph.D., an expert in curriculum design, literacy education, and technology integration.
Years ago, when I first entered the classroom, I thought I knew my subject area and I thought I knew how to teach. You won’t be surprised to learn that, while my head was stuffed with facts and learning strategies, I really knew nothing about either area. Dewey teaches that we learn by doing and that is nowhere more true than in the field of teaching. Further, all my training, all the demands of my job and the expectations of my administrators, parents and students were defined by curriculum. Nobody said much about learning, let alone thinking.
Later, in graduate school, I discovered the work of cognitive psychologist, Vera John-Steiner, and her works became seminal to my own ideas about the role of thinking in education. John-Steiner’s first contribution to the field, Notebooks of the Mind: Explorations of Thinking, centered on the cognitive habits of geniuses from science, art, writing, music—all of the humanities—based on a close analysis of their journals, personal accounts and conversations. Leo Tolstoy, Marie Curie, Diego Rivera—over 50 geniuses account for their creative visions. Her investigation is accompanied by her own insights on the nature of thinking. She writes, “Thought is embedded in the structure of the mind. One way to think of this structure is to view it as formed by networks of interlocking concepts of highly condensed and organized clusters of representations.”
This post is written by Mary Chase, Ph.D., an expert in curriculum design, literacy education, and technology integration.
I read today that there are more than a billion websites on the Internet. The mind boggles. When I look back on my own education, I remember thinking that my library’s card catalog and the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature comprised the pinnacle of responsible research. Later, I graduated to the more sophisticated Social Sciences Citation Index and other complex databases; nevertheless, my resources were paper and my access limited to library hours and collections.
This post is written by Mary Chase, Ph.D., an expert in curriculum design, literacy education, and technology integration.
A good friend of mine, Tim Gillespie, once said, “Anytime you do something for students that they could do for themselves, you are 1) working too hard, and 2) stealing from them an opportunity for learning.” I’ve carried this notion with me and rediscovered every year just how capable and creative my students can be.