It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

I'm linking up with It's Monday! What Are You Reading? Currently, I'm reading books to get a suitable selection for my fourth graders to read as a book club related to Civil Rights. We will be completing project work focusing on the following essential question: How can conflict create change? I thought the kids would be able to really dig deep, thinking about this question through the lens of historical fiction while they are studying the Civil Rights Movement in social studies. I've read Glory Be, which is a keeper for our book club. Now I'm reading The Lions of Little Rock, and I'm loving it!

What are you reading? Do you have any suggestions for our book club? If so, leave them below as a comment.

Project Presentations - Slice of Life

In my fifth grade social studies class, students have been working on researching a variety of topics related to Westward Expansion. The students worked in pairs based on their topic of interest. Today, groups presented on the Lewis and Clark Expedition, the Louisiana Purchase, and the Trail of Tears. The kids did such a great job. The group that presented on the Louisiana Purchase wrote a readers theater script that the class performed today. They included information about Madison, Livingston, Jefferson and Napoleon, how the negotiations took place, how the country changed because of the acquired land, and the effects on expanding westward. The class loved performing the reader's theater. The second group presented on the Lewis and Clark Expedition, the creation of the Corps of Discovery, background information on Lewis and Clark. They informed us about the interactions with the Native Americans, the important stopping points along the way, as well as information about some of the flora and fauna they discovered, like the Lewis woodpecker. The last group that presented today taught us about the Trail of Tears. This group wrote letters from varying points of view, such as Native American children and mothers, as well as from Andrew Jackson. They did a great job including relevant information use in a persuasive form, especially when they wrote to Jackson. The class really felt for the Native Americans and their enormous loss.

As I've implemented project work in my social studies classes this year, I have discovered that with each project my students delve deeper into their chosen topic. They have become more curious, gotten better at questioning, developed their research and note-taking skills, and used more creativity in their presentations. I am looking forward to tomorrow's presentations!

Project Work vs Project-Based Learning

At the beginning of the 2014-2015 school year, our administration brought in a speaker for professional development from the Buck Institute. We were introduced to BIE's version of project-based learning. During the day, we learned about how we should develop and implement a project. It seemed as if there were many rules to follow and that the structure was quite rigid. During the afternoon, we had time to begin planning one that we would implement in our classrooms that year. The overall feeling in the room among the faculty was a sense of doom and feeling overwhelmed.

I will not kid you. I struggled with what our speaker said. He indicated that in order to have a project unit that was worthwhile, it had to be solving a real-world problem. I chose to focus on my opening unit in social studies, exploration. My essential question was: How was the world changed by explorations of European nations? I felt my students would have choice and voice during this unit, but when meeting with our speaker, he indicated that I was missing that authentic problem and the unit wouldn't work without it. His suggestion was to relate the explorers to street names in our community named after explorers, noticing what direction the streets faced - if facing south towards Mobile Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. I have to say, this very off-putting to me. I did not see how relating the explorers to street names made the unit more relevant and/or how it made it authentic.

My students completed the unit anyway. They each chose an explorer in which they were interested, researched him, wrote a biographical piece about him, and created an illustration to go with it. The students wanted to put their finished pieces together creating a book, which we then shared with a school in Montgomery.

Fast forward to this year. The same speaker came back. He no longer works for BIE and it seemed he had quite a shift in attitude. The information he shared seemed much more flexible, and he even said it was important to make it work for our school and our kids. The mood in the room was much different than the first year he visited us.

Last week, I had the wonderful opportunity to visit The Duke School in Durham, NC with twelve other teachers and administrators from my school. The Duke School has been a project work school for a very long time. They began with Katz and Chard's model and have tweaked that for their older students. Their model of project work follows three phases and really allows the students choice and voice in following where their interests are during the inquiry process. The first phase is where students access their background knowledge about their inquiry topic. The students not only tell their stories, but they write them and put them on display. From there, they generate questions they want answered. During phase two, the students engage in fieldwork, where they investigate. This is different than a field trip because there is no passive learning going on. Students have clipboards with them in order to take notes on their learning, they have questions to ask/interview experts, etc. They will read to find answers, and during this time, they generate more questions and/or revise the questions they had originally. Based on student interest, each one decides what topic he/she is most interested in and will then become the expert in that area. These groups work together to create a product for their culminating event, which they present to the parents.

I really loved how engaged the students were. I loved the process they used. I loved how the students were able to have choice and voice during the project. After have professional development in both these styles of project learning, I think The Duke School is definitely the style I connect better with and that is more in keeping with our school's philosophy. What I will say though, is after seeing some of The Duke School's culminating piece, my school already does an awesome job at this. I feel like the choice and voice has to extend to how students want to present their learning. I love that my students can choose to create an iMovie, use Google Slides, Powerpoint, Prezi, create a poster, a website, write a book, etc. for any given project. It is a very rare thing at my school that when students present their learning, you have a room full of posters.

We are moving towards becoming and project work/project-based learning school, and after attending The Duke School workshop this past week, I believe we are well on our way. We have great teachers at our school that are willing to step outside their comfort zone and really do everything they can to engage our students in 21st Century Learning. I'm excited to see how we move forward as a school. If you ever have the opportunity to visit The Duke School, I cannot recommend it enough! It was a fabulous experience. The faculty and students were incredibly welcoming and so willing to share their wealth of experience and knowledge with us. If you're interested in checking out some of their project work, just follow the link by clicking on the name of the school: The Duke School.