Right now I am doing a lot of writing and interviewing concerning a project I did last year within my classroom, Exploring Space and Time. Many of the links I was forced to close by the District due to "student pictures" though I had permissions I did so an interested blogger teacher/researcher can write to me at smpuglisi@gmail.com for this. The Project was one looking at observing the shadows cast by the sun from a playground observation space and was found here...a Mesa School District several year-long project to bring science and math to the forefront of better instruction.
Exploring Space and Time was
Created by Steven Clark originally when we worked together in Greenfield, CA.
It is fully described on the
Mesa Union School District Website. Along with a very good description of another fascinating project called...
Profiles in Science in Action. The links for the project are here:
It can be exhausting to try to address all of the points I am asked to do as this moves into the research part of the work, but I thought I would post the responses that are a bit colloquial, and questions as I worked on them this week. A stage in the process of "reflective teaching work."
The first thing I responded to addresses the notion that this Project might be addressing key learning issues in "different" ways than through
mandated textbook generated learning. Doing so to consider that learning potentially can be expanded in a different format than that being "imposed." I'm especially interested in that as it addresses ELL or 2nd language students. Students our testing state data shows we fail.
First I was asked to respond to the highlighted prompt below.
centrality: the projects are the curriculum not peripheral the projects teach the contentSarah Puglisi:
Somehow Standards were written in a way that sounds like a bullet to be tick off, a list to be systematically "covered." But in fact they are weighted and some hold such "bigger ideas" than others and some are overarching concepts that last many years in the getting. Some are arbitrary and no "scientific" process really came into play in their writing. For many reasons that is an emperor with no clothes.
Nothing in the present format presents learning concepts as they are in real worlds applied, it is organized in this way to assist a testing process deeply flawed in its assumptions. A test that weights fact memorization in math in 1st grade for instance, or basic skills (at the great expense of all the time number sense should be present and engaging kids through a year) but then has deep trouble reflecting a learner acting on a math thinking problem, or being able to show problem solving skills applied or indeed any of the higher order abilities. So this is a test that tells us something, but not at all enough. It's just a measure of a tip of an iceberg, no more or less. Teachers that then are forced onto the tip will be left with children unable to thrive down the road. That is clear.
A test that is packaged and sold as a way to know if a school is "doing its job" that in fact does not allow the school or student to reflect what they can do forms misunderstandings. I laughed a really long time at administering the Adept test, an oral language assessment we are now required to use-extremely artificial- that allows children at best a very limited sentence response late in the test over actually talking and listening to a child both academically and as they use language within the room, not hearing language with peers in problem solving. You have a test that designs the absolute minimum of oral language to then
test oral language and assign a "level."
Be aware, always aware Standards at present function this way. They are reducing great understandings to bulleted short answers. Do they have it? Time does tell us, only in short term memory. So this then goes to the notion of centrality actually, what is the central purpose of the interaction within this room. Is it to satisfy a state standard making deeply rooted in its ability to be "sold" packaged and designed for the minimum of student interaction and individuality. Is it convenient over comprehensive? That is the most critical thing operating in "centrality."
What are we there to do, and why, for whom?
What I am looking for really in teaching is something greater than that. As a teacher of 6 year olds I must address the creation of the frameworks upon which understandings will be laid. I have to look at what we know about 6 year old learning, brain research, developmental research, management models. I have to look at the class as it presents itself each year and to that I must bring deep understandings of content and curriculum and a reetoire of skills to employ. I as a teacher of Sheltered Immersion students embedded in deep poverty and at times gang cultures, reached for projects with longer term involvement out of the needs of the students over the flawed design of the homogenization of state curriculum designed for chunks assumed to be so that "same page every child and teacher " fell out as something desired or even possible. Nothing in any research model sans behaviorism would think it could be done like this. The variety of different kinds of levels and learners within my room requires i use expansive models and ways to address these levels simultaneously and with repetition to allow all students access to the academic content.
This is not well represented by Standards as they presently exist and drive curricular models and understandings.
So the Standards seem like a checklist and are in fact describing learning that is hierarchical, developmental, evolving and Standards are reflective often of the incapacities of the writers to adequately write to the needs of children within ages where one 6 year old can read and another has no concept of amount, and the learning issues are so stratified and varied as a "given" a checklist is at best an individualized benchmark experience. A set of things is presented in the 1st grade standards that is all too often seen as perfected, that in and of themselves rarely now questioned. It is a system that was
not well enough designed. And so that carries its flaws into the situations where they are used to direct learning now to a level one might realistically call fanaticism.
Many work lifetimes to fully "get" many of the standards I see. I may never totally understand the idea of say " matter, gravitational fields and time." Nor can I understand writing a standard to say a first grader need only read or understand a clock to the half hour. For all of my work I think that a clock needs to be taught so that it can be read to say where we are within this notion at any point in a day or night, or just not done. Hearing a 1st grader asking, "When is recess?" when my standard has not taught them the subtlety of 9:25 is a perfect example. What should I say. "You'll learn that one day"..... nor can I hold onto a teaching system that does not right from the beginning introduce global positioning and understandings of time zones, sun in relationship to earth, introduce the tilt of the earth in relationship to seasons by observing shadows through a school year and simply by observing the sun and how many hours we have it shining, or allow a child to be in a state of suspended unknowing awaiting the year someone decides they have earned the right to see how minutes function on a clock as a standard. Waiting for a standard that was designated to be next year. This kind of aborting of concept and placing in this way is a very hemorrhaged attempt at developmental hat tipping. But this is not understanding the developmental notion of children's understandings and is an artificial and foolish way of organizing learning experiences.
It is within this I am often "caught."
A favorite illustration of mine occurred this year when a teacher hearing I was teaching carrying and borrowing in a grade level meeting attempting to norm us all to the lowest common denominator the school dream mantra, since all children, or most achieved the standard of math facts to sums of 20....she informed me that was not our "grade level standard" and thus "not to be taught." Rude at best it is demonstrative of the packaging of learning in this collaborative tumor I am required to help grow, and she was elevated in position within the workplace as the greatest of instructors, no room move for her.
I would prefer to believe that some things cannot be teased into these discrete units of understanding that learning is a bit more fluid and future oriented learning is required of us. That all notions worth attaining are under an umbrella of a piece of a bigger picture we must unfold as we can so I do search out ways to do this. I am convinced that skills are necessary, can be put into checklists, but that learning is in a hierarchy and a teacher contains the mandate to unfold the house with all the rooms and all the various hallways, doors , windows that will one day be moved out of anyway as it is outgrown, into the wider world as the student moves on into their life of finding a way into seeing that we were a small place, now moved on from and recalled from a different place. I see things this way. See ideas and structures this way generally.
But to simplify, standards are quite different in the amount of meaning they have and the amount of complexity and as a teacher my job is to provide ways to gain them, not simply fail those that cannot from one or two exposures derive the meanings.
Say a first grade standard such as understanding the rotation of the earth is perhaps embedded in the weather unit or in the science material. What you get then is a mention, vague, or a workbook page of canned curriculum stating it in some manner. Yes, you "covered" it.
But actually in the field of science it took a great deal of time and innovation and capacity for thought to evolve away from man and earth as the center of the universe for the scientists to develop that singular notion, a revolution actually in which religion, science,philosophy observation all came into conflict and from it a schism occurred. Further there was persecution, defending, testing of theory and a realignment not small at all and helping to develop modern notions of thought. So then
such a simple standard has packed within it so much compared perhaps to one that stated "learned ed endings'" though that too presumes a child able to hold the past.
Time then in all it's many forms from time lines, history, how it is derived and measured, it's relativity, time zones, earth rotation, birthdays, seasons, all of the ways the day is divided, telling time, systems used culturally, it's forward movement, it's circular or orbital nature, all of this, all of this has preoccupied man from the beginning of it to now. Nothing packs the wallop that time packs, it is no small standard, it is an overarching notion as important as understanding symbolical notions and our relationship to death. It is Never apart from experience.
So I as a teacher look at this required standardized mess written by some people in a room presuming biblical type proportion of revealing the "way" and know that I teach kids on developmental spectrum, I teach tied withing time constraints, I teach when kids this young at 6 may present unable to get something on an assigned and mandated schedule. Same day same page is almost a kind of death for meaning and it certainly is a dogma.
Once they spoke to us of "spiral curriculum" to address this concern minimally. But in fact they rarely have addressed well the fact that some standards contain the universe. This is one of them. So this project Exploring Space and Time is one of ultimate value. When I'm looking to organize a child's learning, I 'm at a point where I want to build into the child learning cncepts that will like a lotus blossoom unfold potential with the taxonomy of learning, Bloom's, that we are being told is so often removed from the second language learner experience.
A definition of a term for a 2nd Language child or some grammar skill repetition is often substituted for
a full understanding of how that term is a doorway into meanings. Take rotation. It is something that just saying goes around the sun does not really enlighten. So because of this, a project that is returning and elaborating, and teaching throughout a year complicated ideas within a model has the potential to involve a student in something that may with the added element of time allow them insight. Teaching is, after all, about creating the opportunity to gain insight. And with a standard so broad and so fundamental and in fact
counter intuitive such that people still say 'the sun is rising," we need to do educationally a lot of work to look carefully at our presumptions, our language and to develop understandings that took actually science generations to evolve. We need to go from street wise to critical wisdom.
Centrality would to me be saying that this project brings to the classroom a "way" or a model to move something off the workbook page and into the working daily dynamic of the classroom. So that by the end of the year one is using this vehicle to drive the engine of incorporation of many standards through it, but to gain a way for any child at any level to make progress in the deep meanings that the standards hint at that are the core strands of learning as we have as a people developed them.
Central, big idea.So what this did, involved in this project, was work on kids understanding the passage of time with in a model, seasonal meanings and how that related to the axis of the earth, it embedded much writing within it, contextualized it, introduced vocabulary and academic language in ways children could grasp the meanings, it allow the child to act on it, to explore and to question, be empowered, learn the scientific methods actively, test a hypothesis, read to meanings, use research materials, collect and organize data, use numbers in the pursuit of answers and meanings, understand spacial and coordinate systems, learn the circle not as the name of a shape but through measurement in degrees, begin to understand that to understand we impose systems of measurement that are in some senses arbitrary, it made it so that a child could do more than memorize and in fact required they regularly and in varied forms demonstrate understandings.
I'm not yet positive their teachers entirely get that design learning as a way to create our work, certainly I was targeted and mis-understood, sabotaged, minimized, shunned, insulted at the teacher level. But what you are doing is modeling a different relationship to the learner, for those that exclusively use manufactured textbook models as their focus, with no training whatt so ever about other approaches, those taught to think teachers use direct instruction, dump learning, test and move on with no reflective process, what this project is requiring would be like a 2nd language. It would need to be valued in leadership and learned. But it does get the rsults in infinitely improved way.
I had a child intent on explaining the analema and the relationship of the shadows to seasonal observations and trying to explain that we see this related to the axis of the earth, something we should be darn glad about him doing. He was making the connection watching the shadow cast all year long from the roof over our door. (That is before they in infinite determination and wisdom about what matters decided to move me away from that opportunity in a room move) Anyway...this teacher told him to play out on the yard and "follow the rules." No ears to hear him and nothing gained by the adult. But the child was intent on continuing his investigation. For that I am glad, I saw this as so motivational some of that authority to shame was devolved just a little. Not much but a little. Too often interest is shamed at my school. Or a love of anything seem as weakness.
This doesn't seem small to me. And it drives my work too. Strenghth of character matters and is integral in education. It is not "being right" it is the power to decide to "pursuit understanding AS A RIGHT." That is embedded within this project to. We call it empowerment. And be aware those most challenged by that are those who have reason to fear thinking. And work.
It seems, this one tiny observation I made of another interacting with my child, to typify how the rest of the world often reacts to the careful observer. We did a long study in February corresponding to a study of rocks, of how odd a man was perceived that simply recorded the crystal formations of snowflakes, the truth is the scientific observational skills are often misunderstood and often seen in classrooms and by standarnistos as messy or as just not as important as being on page 7 today. so what you have is moving content off of pages and into something called contexts. And in education that is as revolutionary as Copernicus at the the present time, as dangerous as Galileo and as difficult a thing to do as we we see within the history of science.
It is a revolution in the perception of what one is there to do.Now for a 2nd language teacher you are faced with a dual issue. Children do not have the language to gain admission to the content in the same way of 1st language peers. By definition. So using the modalities, the learning styles, the immediacy of experiential based learning you find that you offer the child
an all important context for gaining the understandings and connections, and certainly the research and the literature on this is clear. I have to always be designing everything we do, choosing, in relationship to "sheltering." It's what I was mandated to do. I'm a Sheltered immersion teacher. So I am faced with these huge, big ideas in standards and kids from poverty homes and in 2nd language, so often I think of my work as the creation of the learning zone, like the play zone, a kind of park to address the meanings of all of this. That means a project such as this one can take something as simple as seeing the direction words out in real space, connect them spatially by painting and making a huge grid around a pole or gnomon that stays to be experienced, a child can walk it, feel it come to know directions by seeing it within their space from this grid aligned directionally. Then for another child....connecting to a notion like that way is Santa and then seeing the child inside close eyes and orient with it, better understand a map because of it, connect to a compass rose through it in symbolic notation. Then watch while another child who was embedded in the same experience is now asking about how the earth has longitude and latitude, gets measured for time, and is comprehending time zones and why his grandmother in Mexico seems to be at 4 when he's at 6PM. Another child might, due to her developmental level be taking from this that she notices the sun in the morning is always lined up with east. All valid, all valid experiences and gains in understanding. All essential and all from an "experience" withing the project. Layered. All to be written and shared within the group construct later where much mutual meaning is made and all become understandings that are "required" group meanings. We are learning to value "points of view." It beats the heck out of a workbook page where they color a compass rose because a person designing the workbook knew it needed to be covered, but now we have children who, when on a walk to the library can be stopped, I can ask which way is north, they might
insist on the use of a compass or they might close their eyes and orient from that outside space and what they are knowing of their neighborhood. So then coincidentally or to illustrate how one project contextualizes the whole, so I teach community, mapping and this within social studies I have gained something there too. I have gained a child understanding the basis of mapping-orientation. So I can now introduce the terms, I can introduce the spatial into the learning.
I am really just building the frames upon which learning is hooked. And the project Exploring Space and Time is a vehicle/project to do it.
That is centrality in a word. It is moving the content into the forefront of investigation, motivation , into the child's experiential bases, those often lacking in poverty or at the least re-oriented into this academic setting. I have created a core.
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