Entry # 19:
Final Project Analysis --Year One
That "change is a process not an event" is a precept that needs
reminders of its absolute truth.
My hope for the "CrossRoads Discovery Project" was that students
would develop deep understanding of conducting and reporting research under
the direction of a faculty united in understanding of the importance, acceptance,
and commitment to this work.
My fear was that that students would see this as another report to be done,
and the faculty would view the work as extraneous to "teaching the
standards," the shibboleth to the promised land of a good school report
card.
What happened was somewhere in between.
All year long, beginning with a brainstorming activity and concluding this
week with oral presentations, our students have worked on their CrossRoads
Discovery Project. To involve parents, we enlisted their support at the
project's beginning. Then each discipline took on a part of the work: science
teachers formulated essential questions; math teachers worked with identification
of supporting subtopics; social studies teachers worked with research skills,
including internet searches; language arts teachers edited written papers
and helped students craft oral presentations. Related arts teachers served
as mentors to students falling behind.
All teachers took responsibility for evaluating the actual presentation,
an attempt to mildly mimic the Coalition of Essential Schools notion for
an Exhibition of Mastery as the culmination of the work.
What directs change anyway? It is merely learning from your mistakes and
adjusting your course.
What we learned
The scope of the work did not require a year's effort: four weeks would
have been plenty. Sixth graders do not do well (nor do most adults) with
a project diluted by a protracted timeline. Procrastination is the order
of the day, with a good deal of backtracking required to figure out where
we were when we last worked. Also, there was no real advantage to everyone
in the school moving through the project simultaneously.
Next year, we'll concentrate on two teams at a time and make better use
of our support resources by focusing on fewer students at a time. Also,
we will get high school student mentors involved throughout the school year
with a succession of students.
Because parents are also new to sixth grade, they should have been presented
with the outline of the CD Project as just one other thing to accomplish
during the year. The anticipation of the work to come was made unnecessarily
alarming by the signed contracts of support. We'll ditch that part next
year and replace it with a project outline for involvement with suggestions
of what parents can do at each stage of the work.
We will be more careful in the beginning stages of the work: forming essential
questions and identifying appropriate sub-topics. When this work was done
badly, every subsequent step in the process was made worse. The really poorly
done projects always had poorly crafted questions.
"Inspiration" software will be installed on the computers in the
media center as a tool for creating concept maps, graphic organizers. Moreover,
all teachers all year will expect the use of graphic organizers as a work-planning
step for students. This seems the most appropriate scaffolding for students
to support abstract analysis of learning.
More lessons...
Rubrics are hard to create; good ones, that is. Back to the drawing board
with those we developed last summer. Writing them is devilishly difficult,
and the flaws are not apparent until they are applied to evaluation. Our
rubrics need to be more descriptive, more succinct, and we need more exemplars
of what constitutes the standard we are seeking. These should be gathered
from this year's work and posted everywhere in the school.
Teachers need to do more personal (mental and physical) modeling of the
process for students so they have examples of what experienced researchers
do. When we gather this summer to revise the project, we need to begin by
looking at student work. This will be the basis for refining the rubrics.
We have talked about narrowing the topic choices so that we could identify
appropriate websites and Web Quests. Some students stayed lost permanently
in cyberspace. We thought them to be sophisticated users of the Net; they
are not. Again, more structure is required.
The papers and final presentations should more closely resemble real work;
in fact, the whole project needs to be more authentic. We need to create
some curricular significance for the research topics: social studies is
the likely focus. The process needs to involve real experts.
We need to involve our school community: e-mail collaboration for our budding
researchers. Our presentations need to closely resemble briefings that might
occur in government. We need to craft a more authentic purpose and then
make sure our process reflects what real researchers might do so this is
not just a school thing.
Ineffective visuals
Use of a visual aid in the final presentations, a last-minute addition,
was a predictable disappointment. We gave them no guidelines for effective
visuals so students reverted to what they had done in previous presentations.
Too many students stood at the front of the room following all the principles
of good presentations except this major one: they were reading from their
visuals which were really poster displays of their learning. A fourth grade
strategy.
A visual display of their initial graphic organizer would have been ideal.
We learned. Now perhaps teachers will start early on describing what the
characteristics of effective visuals are and use those principles for all
student presentations all through the year.
Because the project had gone on so long, ideas that were engaging at the
beginning of the year were now tiresome burdens. Who has written a term
paper, thesis, or dissertation who has not experienced this personally?
That is the impetus for a shortened timeline. Keep the project interesting.
Students were asked to rate one another on their presentations and to make
comments. Looking over their feedback to others convinced me that they understood
what good presentations involved even if they were unable to deliver one
themselves. It is a step.
As a final stage in the CD Project, we will be asking students to reflect
on their growth as researchers -- as a way to make their learning of the
research process explicit. We will also ask for their suggestions and evaluation
of the whole project. (Recently, students submitted critiques of our field
day. I learned a lot and revisions are forthcoming. Never undervalue the
opinions of those who are doing the work. Seek it often.)
Sharing ownership
The power of shared ownership, schoolwide among teachers, is not to be underestimated,
and we will expand upon this next year with more shared, purposeful conversations
among teachers. I received one unsolicited evaluation from a teacher , indentifying
herself as a "math teacher," who compliments the language arts
teachers for their role. What we hope will happen is that the math teacher,
who now knows what we expect, will reinforce the tenets of effective presentations
as students go to the front of her classroom. But we are not there yet.
More progress can be made when all teachers, regardless of the subject they
teach, take ownership in parts of the process and there is no need to identify
oneself as a "math teacher." Nevertheless, she ended her e-mail
with the note that some of the students had even dressed up for their presentations.
Maybe we did make some headway that I did not anticipate.
As a transition issue (and because we are a sixth-grade-only school), we
must communicate to the next-grade teachers what we have done and what they
should expect our students to know and be able to do regarding research.
Then, maybe, just maybe, the ubiquitous cries of "we haven't had that
before" will be duly discounted.
More hovering
Finally, we did not hover enough. One weekly team report had this note written
in bold, block print in the margin: "Six students did nothing!!!!"
Why was this allowed, I wondered. There needs to be a tighter safety net
worked into the process for these unorganized, short sighted sixth graders.
So my notes for the summer work to refine the project:
-- Limit the time line
-- Limit the scope of possible topics and attempt a curriculum link
-- Involve experts in the community
-- Design scaffolding for Internet searches
-- Redesign rubrics (look at student work)
"We did the best we could with what we knew at the time." This
is my mantra of forgiveness for the mistakes I make. None was intentional
and the only shortcoming is not learning from them as a necessary part of
the change process. This is the best blessing of schoolwork: there's always
a next year to be better. And this is the way the process of change works.
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