Recognizing Young Children as Citizens

Last Wednesday evening Ashley and I attended one of a series of presentations and exchanges of the Boston Area Reggio Inspired Network.  This one was presented by Ben Mardell and Megina Baker of the Pedagogy of Play project at Project Zero.

We were inspired, as always, by the work that Ben and Megina presented that featured the innovative, creative work of the Boston Public Schools.  Ben and Megina were lead developers of the curriculum called Focus on K2 which focuses on inquiry into how the world works.  The curriculum creates the contexts for students' voices and ideas to take concrete form and contribute to our communities.  One of the main objectives of this program is for students to become internally driven, self-motivated, high achieving contributors to the social justice of our neighborhoods.

Last year, all Boston Public School kindergarteners received a letter from the mayor, Marty Walsh, asking if they would help imagine ways that Boston could be more interesting and more fair for children and families and then build models of their ideas.  Their ideas included playgrounds that had lockers for parents' cell phones so that they could really play with their children and bigger equipment for adults to play on, as well as a Tree House playground with rooms for homeless families.  These models were displayed and celebrated at city hall in the spring.

Ben shared how proud he is of this successful, innovative effort by an urban school district with 31% extreme poverty and 47% dual language learners.  At the gathering at City Hall, Rahn Dorsey, Chief of Education in the City of Boston said:

This is what learning looks like when learning comes to life. Certainly learning looks like reading and writing but it also looks like kids using their hands. It looks like cutting boxes and playing with egg crates and glue. It looks like working with your friends. 

Thank you Boston Public Schools, and thank you Mayor Marty Walsh and Chief of Education Rahn Dorsey and all the teachers, families and young students who are working together with imagination and creativity, confidence and clarity to build a more interesting, more fair place for people of all colors and ethnicities to live and thrive and enjoy life together in this diverse, democratic, big city of Boston.  This is what learning and thriving looks like in our democracy.

Happy Halloween

On this rainy day, I was struck by the bright yellow and crimson leaves on the grass on an afternoon walk around the Arnold Arboretum.  This weather and this season make me think of our holiday coming up...always right before important elections for our country.  I think of all the Halloweens that I have spent in schools, the parades and treats and children as animals, heroes, characters from books and movies, angels, devils, princesses, and kings. I think of all the Halloweens with our own two sons growing up...as mice, and moose and wizards in costumes often fashioned at home.  And now, I make and find costumes for our grandchildren and we attend a rollicking neighborhood party and pot luck in Boston with them and their parents right around the corner.  It's a funny holiday where adults and children can be someone else for a day or an evening, be totally zany, take on another identity. It's a time to celebrate playfulness.

I include here a few of our family's costumes going back to my mother in 1915!

We wish all of you everywhere a festive, fun, and happy Halloween.

Seeing and Drawing

A few weeks ago we traveled to St. Louis where we are working with the Lower School at Principia.  When we are in St. Louis we always look forward to visiting our home schools, St. Michael School of Clayton and The College School.  This visit, we were struck by student work of quality and the support of teachers that rendered student learning visible and striking. At Principia we witnessed a class of kindergarten and first grade students learning to carefully observe and contour draw leaves that they had collected outside their classroom as a part of a long term study of the woods nearby.

On the door of the kindergarten at The College School we saw careful drawings of sunflowers from the school garden among many other drawings and paintings from life around the school.

This month, in addition to school visits, Ashley and I had two lovely experiences tucked into the weeks of our autumn.  One was a watercolor class with artist Kate Gridley in Middlebury, and  the other, a trip to Ireland's northwest coast to visit good friends whose house sits on the edge of Clew Bay.  In our watercolor class, we renewed our own process of using materials thoughtfully as well as studying the world around us in a focused way so that we might represent it.

Slowing down to observe and notice carefully takes time and care.  Working with beautiful materials is a pleasure.  What we take away is a new way of seeing and also a memory of a process that requires us to be present and be in relationship with what we are studying.

I heard the most marvelous story the other day while listening to Krista Tippet interview Mirabai Bush who has been a leader in contemplative practice and mindfulness based stressed reduction.  Mirabai told the story of leading a several day introduction to mindfulness for college freshmen.  After a period of time studying and being present with a leaf, a football player who was the first to speak in the group, said, "May I say something?"  Mirabai said, "Yes, of course."  He said, "I love my leaf."

This is what happens when we are present and truly let ourselves notice every detail of small things.  And this is what happens when we draw or paint.  This summer during our Harvard summer Institute, Arts and Passion Driven Learning, Carlina Rinaldi said..."this is where real learning leads us...to make something beautiful for ourselves and for others."

May we all take time, make time, slow down, notice, pay attention, fall in love with the world, use beautiful materials and all the languages we have to represent what we love, and make beautiful things, for ourselves and for others.

Learning That Lasts

We have been reading Ron Berger's latest book, co-written with Libby Woodfin and Anne Vilen, Learning that Lasts.  Since his ground breaking book, An Ethic of Excellence: Building a Culture of Craftsmanship with Students, Ron and others from Expeditionary Learning have written and edited a series of wonderful, detailed, specific books about teaching and learning that we find so helpful. These include Leaders of Their Own Learning and Transformational Literacy.   One aspect of Learning that Lasts that we appreciate so much is a review of what is called the workshop model in teaching and learning.  The authors name a revised workshop model Workshop 2.0 and refer to the original model as Workshop 1.0.  They outline how these approaches are similar and how they are different.  The most striking difference in Workshop 2.0 is the emphasis placed on student thinking, wondering and grappling with ideas and concepts often before the teacher teaches.  There is enormous value placed on students making a concept their own and making sense of it through dialogue with peers, hands on messing about and, in the end, producing work that matters to them and to others.  The authors review the Workshop 2.0 process for writing and for math.  In their chapter entitled, "Creating Scientists and Historians," there is a similar emphasis on student ownership and real world work as well as uncovering big ideas, disciplinary frameworks, and diverse perspectives.

In addition to the very informative chapters, the book includes Case Studies, specific examples and stories that illustrate the practices that they write about. In the chapter "Teaching in and Through the Arts," Linda Henke and Louise contributed a case study from Maplewood Richmond Heights Elementary School whose guiding metaphor is "School as Museum." Linda and Louise wrote an iBook about the teaching and learning practices at this school that we are able to send to people who are interested.  Let us know.

This detailed and very practical book also features videos of all of the workshop models and practices that the authors discuss in the book.  Many of these videos are available on the Expeditionary Learning website which is a fabulous resource for all of us.  So much of what EL produces is free for the public because it is a central part of their mission to broadly and widely change the conversation and the practice about student achievement.  Ron points out that currently all student achievement is based on test scores and that never again in a student's life will that be true.  From graduation onward, students will be judged on what kind of person they are and the quality of the work that they do.  Though students at EL schools do very well on tests and are nearly all accepted at top colleges, the primary achievement that is celebrated at EL schools is students' character and the high quality of their work for a public audience.

With that in mind, and also for pure enjoyment, view this video produced by second graders at the Conservatory Lab Charter School in Boston, MA about their study of snakes.  Also go to the EL website and learn more about the resources and practices that guided their study.  We hope that you read this book.  It is powerful and immediately useful and transformative.  It is learning that lasts.

"50 Ways to Leave Your Lover"

We received the following question in an email from our wonderful colleagues at Buckingham Browne & Nichols (BB&N), Anthony Reppucci, Assistant Director of the Lower School and Susan Kinsky, second grade teacher: Hi Louise and Ashley,

This afternoon Susan and I were talking and she was telling me about some conversations she was having with groups in her class. The conversation was about monarch butterflies. In second grade monarchs are not a big study, just something done in the first few weeks of school in science, but the conversation was interesting and we were interested in your thoughts. The conversations were different in each group and the direction came from the kids:

Group 1- Conversation about monarchs and asking questions about why they always migrate to Mexico. In this group someone said, "The big question is what is so special about Mexico?"

Group 2- How do monarchs pass down information from one generation to the next? The kids came up with theories on this and discussed them. 

If a teacher wanted to move forward with this conversation, how would you both do it?  For group 2 we thought kids could  show their theories on paper? We were just interested in hearing your thoughts. 

Here are my thoughts…in no particular order.

Paul Simon’s "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover"comes to mind.  On September 8th we attended a fabulous concert in Middlebury with Clint Bierman and Peter Day, lead musicians of The Grift.   They sang their own original songs as well as seventeen classics of Simon and Garfunkel.  The song came to mind, I think, because it evoked both possibility and pathos.  "He/she's the love of my life...but I've got other things I gotta do...."  Isn't this a bit like when you're in a classroom of live minds and one comes up with a fabulous idea, and you think, wowowow, but I have a zillion things I HAVE to do before lunch time.  What if, though, in our infinite wisdom, we remember when Carlina Rinaldi encouraged us all to imagine a hundred ways learning might occur around an experience.  She said, "Then, we might be ready for the hundred and one ways that children might imagine."

The concert and the song comes to mind mostly because…What do teachers do with giant opportunities such as this?  Often, like one line in this song, they Slip out the back, Jack becausethey are preoccupied with their own agenda and they don't really LISTEN to their students…they just move on to their OWN next thought.

However, there is also a following line in the song: Make a new plan, Stan.  If we really LISTEN to the children, we can make THEIR thinking our main agenda. This is what Susan and Anthony are in the midst of doing.  They have listened, stopped and wondered...How can be best honor our students' thinking and their original inquiry and questions?

What’s so special about Mexico?  

Possibilities for extending their thinking include:

You wonder about why they always go to Mexico and not to Brazil?  Why do you think…?

What is migration, anyway?

Do you know other animals that migrate?

Do humans migrate?

What is so special about Mexico?  What have you heard about Mexico?  (Be prepared for a political discussion!)

How do monarchs pass down information from one generation to the next?’ 

How do you think the information is passed down?  What are your theories?

What is the information that is passed down?

What is a generation?

Have you learned information from your parents?  What?

Have you found information in other ways?

What, how?

And on and on…following the big concepts: migration, genetics, geography, climate change, the wonders all around us…others?

Teacher’s role: record in writing…on white board…on poster board…near community meeting center.

Then, with each big theory, How could you show this idea?  Could you draw it?  What other materials could you use?

Then, after each group has developed a representation of their theory, have them present to the whole group.  Guide them in a discussion:

1. Present idea and representation

2. Ordered sharing from the whole group of “what did you see?”…then, “what associations are you making with their idea?”…then, “from what you’ve heard in this discussion, what do you wonder about?”

3. What is a next step in your investigation/research?

Now, having said all this, what am I missing?  What opportunities do you think of?  THAT is, of course, the wonder of collaborating with colleagues…to think more deeply about what happened and, therefore, what could happen.

By the way, there is a wonderful school in Miami, La Scuola, where students, teachers and parents are devoting the entire year to investigating: What is migration?  They are a largely Hispanic demographic.  Stay tuned for more on their investigations…and, hopefully, also BB&N’s.