PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
Making a Big Project out of It
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ourth grade teacher Chris Buonamia and math specialist Iloire Nye attended a Learning and the Brain conference focused on civic and social engagement as the purpose of education. They came back deeply inspired by the conference topics, especially around bringing passion and purpose into the classroom through mindful iteration, reflection, and project-based learning.
New ways to Succeed, Struggle, and take Learning Deeper Students who typically have some challenges with more traditional tasks often excel in a project-based assignment — even discovering new skills or abilities. Students who are accomplished in traditional classroom work are challenged and pushed out of their comfort zone in a very positive way. New approaches to established curriculum can also help students bring process and product together in the right way. We strongly emphasize process at Town, but it’s also essential to be able to effectively and engagingly express your knowledge.
Building and Weaving the Immigrant Story In 4th grade social studies, students built models of the home environments of the cultures they were learning about in their immigration study, such as family homes in Eastern Europe and tenements in New York City. The students dove into the required reading, research and writing not just because it was assigned, but because it was necessary to achieve their goal — an important shift. Empathy was an essential skill as students worked in groups to find solutions to the problems they encountered along the way, and many came to a new understanding of their own strengths as learners. Chris found students voluntarily taking their research deeper to fully realize the home environments they were building. One group studying Eastern European Jewish immigrants wanted to make a tallit (prayer shawl) and went online to find Rabbi-approved instructions. They were 20
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then confronted with the challenges of hand-making, and even got into deeper discussions about weaving traditions and the meaning of the strings in the fringe.
Math as Road Trip 4th grade math students were captivated by the idea of a road trip, so Iloire and 4th grade teacher Ava Collins designed a project around the math of a long drive. Students calculated distance, gas prices, lodging, and food expenses and then represented their work visually. The students were learning — and immediately applying — sophisticated math in the service of a project they were excited about, which made a great difference in their engagement with applying knowledge and skills, and in their commitment to sharing what they had learned in an interesting way.
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To Glow and Grow Math students in different grades also quickly invested in the idea of crafting beautiful work, in the sense of creating the clearest possible communication of their thinking. Students offered each other feedback on their drafts in the form of a ‘glow’ (compliment) and a ‘grow’ (way to improve). Iloire has observed that the students are more deeply invested, and their math work feels more significant, when there’s a presentation and feedback loop as part of the process. And in perhaps the most exciting indication of engagement, she has come across more than a few conversations outside of math class with students asking each other ‘how could you make your thinking even more clear?’
or a teacher, project-based learning can honestly be a F little unnerving as it’s challenging and takes a lot of work to guide students rather than dispense information, and to not know in advance exactly what direction the project will take. But the rewards — seeing the students so excited to learn everything they can to make their project even better — are powerful. — Chris Buonamia