Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education
Update on Current Work, July 2006
Artful Thinking Cultures of Thinking GoodWork® Project Interdisciplinary Studies Project Learning Innovations Laboratory Making Learning Visible Qualities of Quality in Arts Education ROUNDS at Project Zero Understandings of Consequence
Photograph by Nikki Hughes.
Image by © Bettman/Corbis. All rights reserved.
Project Zero at 39!
Unlike Jack Benny, who celebrated his 39th birthday year after year, Project Zero is truly 39 years old and proudly preparing to turn 40 and enter our fifth decade of research into how people learn and how that learning might best be encouraged and supported. Since 1967, when Nelson Goodman first convened an interdisciplinary team to explore how children and adults learn in and through the arts, new projects and teams of researchers have been emerging from those that have come before, pushing further in explorations of the nature of intelligence, understanding, thinking, creativity, and other essential aspects of human learning. Over the years, we have conducted dozens of major research initiatives, published over 85 books and hundreds of articles and reports, collaborated with countless schools, museums, and other partners, and worked with thousands of teachers. In our annual summer institute alone, we have hosted several thousand educators from around the world. The range of our work is so broad and the constant evolution of our projects so continuous that we recognize it is hard for many of our friends and collaborators to stay up-to-date with our work. (Indeed, those of us working here often worry that we aren’t current with our colleagues’ latest efforts and ideas!) Most people are familiar with the Theory of Multiple Intelligences or the Teaching for Understanding framework. Others may have been introduced to Project Zero through Arts Propel or Arts Survive, Visible Thinking or Studio Thinking, Understandings of Consequence or Understanding for Organizations. Whatever the entry point or as many times as you may have visited our website, there seem always to be new aspects of our work to discover and explore. Even our week-long summer institute only presents a fraction of our “catalogue” of work. To that end, we felt it was important to try to provide some snapshots of our current investigations. In this publication, the Principal Investigators and Project Managers on 9 different “in-process” projects offer a glimpse of what they are exploring and where they see these projects heading. In some cases, these projects have already published books and articles; in others, the publications are coming. I hope you will agree that this end of our fourth decade appears as exciting and generative a period as any in our past and I hope this little guide helps you navigate the new ideas emerging from our work. Steve Seidel Director, Project Zero Harvard Graduate School of Education
For more information on any of our projects, please visit www.pz.harvard.edu
Artful Thinking “If a picture is worth a thousand words, a painting must be worth two thousand.”—Arianna Bonnes, 9th grade questioning & investigating, observing & describing, reasoning, exploring viewpoints, comparing & connecting, and finding complexity. Each of these dispositions has specific intellectual behaviors associated with it. As a set, the six dispositions are synergistic: Observing naturally leads to reasoning, which connects to questioning, which in turn links to connection-making, and so on. Artful Thinking uses the image of an artist’s palette to express this synergy.
In New Bedford, Massachusetts, Chris Jones’ history class has been studying the Renaissance. Arianna’s comment follows a discussion about a painting that was guided by three simple questions: What do you see in this painting? What do you think about that? What does it make you wonder? Arianna’s wonderful insight—that works of art are dense with meaning and rich with communicative power— is evidence that the class discussion was deep and far-ranging, filled with questions, ideas, and meaningful connections. This shouldn’t be surprising. When young people engage in extended explorations of works of art, they find it quite natural to do such things as ask provocative questions, make careful observations, explore multiple viewpoints, and uncover multiple meanings. Not only are these powerful forms of thinking in the arts, they are also powerful forms of thinking in other areas of learning. This is the basic idea that underlies the Artful Thinking program—that exploring works of art can help students learn how to think in ways that empower learning across the curriculum. Artful Thinking is a program that helps students learn how to think by looking at art. Developed by Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Artful Thinking is designed to be used by teachers in any grade and in any subject. The purpose of the program is twofold: To help teachers create rich connections between works of art and their curriculum; and to help teachers use arts experiences as a touchstone for developing students’ thinking dispositions. The program focuses on looking at art rather than making art, and it is part of the Visible Thinking Network at Project Zero—a research-based approach to teaching thinking that links several Project Zero initiatives and a growing international network of schools and other learning organizations.
Thinking dispositions and thinking routines Dispositions are formed when people routinely engage in specific patterns of behavior. Accordingly, in the Artful Thinking program, thinking dispositions are developed through the use of “thinking routines”—short, easy-to-learn procedures that help students enact thinking-dispositional behavior in and across the six areas of the palette. For example, recall the three discussion questions that prompted Arianna’s insight about a painting being worth two thousand words—What do you see? What do you think about that? What does it make you wonder? These questions comprise a thinking routine that connects to two dispositions on the palette—observing & describing, and questioning & investigating. Other thinking routines encourage exploring multiple viewpoints, forming careful interpretations, finding complexity, and so on. Thinking routines are designed to be used flexibly and frequently. Students can use them solo or in small or large group settings, they can be used across subject matters, and they can be used with a wide range of top-
From good thinking to good thinkers: A dispositional approach Most educators believe that it’s important to teach students to think. Traditionally, efforts to teach thinking foreground the teaching of thinking skills—reasoning skills, problem solving skills, and the like. Thinking skills are certainly important. But if we want students to use their skills frequently, in diverse and novel contexts, then simply teaching skills isn’t enough. Research at Project Zero and elsewhere has shown that motivation, values, cultural context, and alertness to opportunity are also important factors in developing the intellectual behaviors—the thinking dispositions—that are characteristic of good thinkers.
THINK / PUZZLE / EXPLORE A routine that encourages questioning and inquiry Consider an artwork/topic: • What do you think you know about this artwork or topic? • What questions or puzzles do you have? • What does the artwork or topic make you want to explore?
The Artful Thinking Palette There are many thinking dispositions worth cultivating—curiosity, open-mindedness, reasonableness, to name just a few. Artful Thinking focuses on a set of six thinking dispositions that have special power for exploring works of art and other complex topics in the curriculum. They are:
of thinking come naturally when looking at art, because art naturally invites them. When Arianna tells us that a painting is worth two thousand words, she’s telling us that works of art are packed with meaning. And she’s right: Works of art are metaphorical, often multi-layered and ambiguous, often full of detail. They express artists’ intentions and their unintentions and they condense many meanings and purposes. Moreover, works of art are made with the purpose of engaging our attention. Artists generally want us to look and ponder and explore. So one deep connection between looking at art and learning to think is this: By both design and default, art naturally invites deep and extended thought. Of course works of art are more than simply a powerful vehicle for teaching thinking; they are also important things to think about. The second reason to connect looking at art and learning to think has to do with the meanings of artworks themselves and the multiple ways they connect to the curriculum. Works of art provoke rich, multilayered meaning-making in ways unlike other disciplines. They raise questions, evoke connection-making, and in many ways transform the shape of inquiry. In doing so, it has the power to transform students’ historical inquiry into a personal and contemporary one. There are many ways to connect art to the curriculum, from targeted connections between the content of artworks and specific topic or themes, to more open-ended approaches that leave loose the directions in which a work of art will lead. Artful Thinking is in favor of any and all curricular connections, so long as students are invited to think directly and deeply about an artwork itself. Art gets shortchanged when it is used superficially merely as illustrative aid to a set of facts, such as when a painting is used simply to illustrate the costumes of a particular era or the geography of a particular region. Artful Thinking avoids this shortfall because thinking routines—the mainstay practice of Artful thinking—are designed to engage students in thinking deeply about the artwork or topic at hand. They allow for the “superficial read,” which after all is part but not all of an artwork’s meaning, but they also push students to unpack the depth and complexity of works of art by inviting them to ask creative questions, make diverse observations, explore multiple viewpoints, and seek personal connections.
CREATIVE QUESTIONS A routine for creating thought-provoking questions Brainstorm a list of at least 12 questions about the artwork or topic. Use these question-starts to help you think of interesting questions. Why… What are the reasons… What is the significance of… What if… How would it be different if… Suppose that… What if we knew… What would change if… ics and works of art. Above all, they are designed to deepen students’ thinking about the topic at hand, whether it is a painting, an historical event, or a mathematical operation. Artful Thinking and Visible Thinking Too often, students are exposed only to the final, finished products of thought—the finished novel or painting, the established scientific theory, the official historical account. They rarely see the patterns of thinking that lead to these finished products, yet it is precisely these habits of mind that students need to develop. A key part of Artful Thinking involves making students’ thinking visible by documenting their unfolding thought processes as they use thinking routines. Making thinking visible in the classroom provides students with vivid models of what the process of good thinking looks like and shows them how their participation matters. CLAIM / SUPPORT / QUESTION A Reasoning Routine • Make a claim about the artwork or topic. • Identify support for your claim. • Ask a question related to your claim.
Artful Thinking research For the most part, Artful Thinking is a development and dissemination project. Its purpose has been to create a program for use in schools and other educational contexts. The program has its roots in Project Zero’s long history of research on thinking dispositions, as well as in previous Projects Zero projects on teaching thinking, such as Art Works for Schools and Innovating with Intelligence. However, there is also an ongoing research component to Artful Thinking. Our research agenda currently has two goals: To help us understand the effects of the program on student thinking and learning; and to help us better understand the nature of thinking and learning more generally. For example, through the use of student-generated concept maps, we are currently investigating how Artful Thinking
Artful Thinking and visual art Thinking dispositions, thinking routines, and visible thinking are emphasized in all Visible Thinking initiatives at Project Zero. Though all Visible Thinking initiatives are art-friendly, Artful Thinking is distinctive in that it was developed to explicitly bring out the connection between art and thinking. There are two reasons for this. The first has to do with how works of art make us think, and the second has to do with what they make us think about. In terms of how art makes us think, consider the kinds of things we have in mind when we talk about teaching thinking. We want students to learn to ask thoughtful questions, to construct careful explanations, to explore new viewpoints, to see the complexity and dimensionality of the topics they study, to find puzzles worth pursuing, and so on. These forms
affects students’ ideas about good thinking—what it looks like, what it’s for, and the kinds of things students believe “count” as good thinking. Additionally, we are investigating how the program affects students’ ability to explore and interpret art and whether these abilities transfer to non-art contexts. We are also investigating how the program affects both students’ and teachers’ concepts of art—for example their ideas about art’s purposes and meanings, and their ideas about art’s connection to learning and to their own lives.
and Education grant from the US Department of Education. It is also being used in New Bedford, Massachusetts, in Montgomery County, Maryland, and many of its practices are being used by Visible Thinking sites worldwide. Current Project Staff Shari Tishman, Patricia Palmer Funding for this project has been provided by Traverse City, Michigan Area Public Schools through an Arts in Education Model Development and Dissemination grant from the U.S. Department of Education
Artful Thinking past and present Artful Thinking was developed in collaboration with Traverse City Area Public Schools (TCAPS) in Traverse City, Michigan, as part of an Arts in Education Model Development
Cultures of Thinking The Cultures of Thinking project at Bialik College (located in Melbourne, Australia) extends the long line of research in the area of thinking dispositions conducted at Project Zero over nearly two decades. This research has shown that the teaching of thinking is more than the development of skills; it must also attend to the nurturing of students’ inclination and motivation to think as well as their awareness of opportunities for using their thinking abilities. This development is not a matter of direct instruction, but rather the ‘enculturation’ of thinking through students’ immersion in a rich school and classroom culture where thinking is highly visible and apparent. At Bialik, the Project Zero team uses the Visible Thinking approach developed as part of the Innovating with Intelligence project to explore how a whole school can develop a culture of thinking that nurtures students’, teachers’, and administrators’ disposition toward thinking. A key premise of the Visible Thinking approach is to seek ways to uncover and document students thinking so it can be discussed, reflected upon, and pushed further. Consequently, teachers employ various strategies for documenting the thinking students do. In doing so, teachers develop and use a language of thinking. They make the classroom environment rich with the documents of thinking (both processes and products). They look for opportunities for student thoughtfulness. They use thinking routines to support and nurture students thinking. They model and make their own thinking visible, and they send clear expectations about the importance and role of thinking in learning. We refer to these components—language, environment, opportunities, routines, modeling, and expectations—as cultural forces. These forces, shape a classroom and a school to give it its unique feel. As a research project into the development of thinking dispositions and the creation of cultures of thinking, we seek to better understand changes in teachers’ and students’ attitudes and practices as thinking becomes more visible in the school and classroom environment. Toward this end, we
will develop measures of school and classroom thoughtfulness to capture these changes as well as conduct case studies of teachers. In addition, we will look at how teachers’ and students’ conceptual understanding of the domain of thinking develops. As a development project that seeks to serve the needs of the school while developing materials for broad educational use, we plan to develop classroom portraits and pictures of practice that exemplify the principles and practices of Visible Thinking and Cultures of Thinking. In addition, we plan to develop classroom-based strategies that teachers can use to enhance students awareness of opportunities for thinking as well as specific thinking routines that teachers can use to enhance students’ abilities and inclination. We are currently in our second year of the project. At this point we have learned a lot about the power of these ideas to transform classrooms and schools and to reinvigorate teachers. These might be summarized along three major lines: 1) Development of professional learning communities, 2) The use of thinking routines, 3) Understanding students’ conceptualization of thinking. In our work at Bialik, we began by forming two focus groups of eight teachers with whom we would work intensively. We have since added two more groups. These groups are all heterogeneous, including teachers from K–12 and of various subjects. This is a departure from traditional forms of professional development that target subject area or a particular level. What we have found is that by working with a diverse range of colleagues, teachers’ perspective on teaching is broadened and a sense of shared mission develops. Team teaching efforts have developed out of the group that might otherwise never have arisen. In addition, the group helps teachers gain a developmental perspective on student’s thinking. These focus groups meet weekly for a semester. Each week a teacher brings a sample of student work that is analyzed in terms of the thinking it reveals. We use a specially designed protocol to guide this analysis. We are currently
in the process of documenting these groups to better understand the dynamics that develop. A key instructional practice of the project is the use of thinking routines. We have drawn on the thinking routines developed by the Visible Thinking team during its work in Sweden and have created some new routines as well. As researchers, we are looking at which routines teachers naturally gravitate towards in their work as well as the trajectory of a routine over time. We are finding that while the routines are indeed very accessible to teachers and often work extremely well initially, they are also nuanced. For example, the See-Think-Wonder routine provides a simple structure for looking at an object or image, making interpretations, and posing questions. However, teachers may still wonder how they can use the routine to get students to go beyond superficial responses and to delve deeply. This kind of selfquestioning may lead teachers to investigate just what kinds of responses they would like to see from students, which may in turn lead to class discussions about thinking, curiosity, and inquiry. These and some of our other findings about thinking routines are presented in a recent paper presented at the American Education Research Association conference, which is available on the Project Zero website. The purpose of developing a school-wide culture of thinking is ultimately to foster students’ dispositions toward thinking. As a starting place, the project set out to better understand students’ conceptualization of thinking and then to see how this conception changes over the course of the project. To do this, we asked students to complete concept maps of their thinking about thinking. We then analyzed these responses to try to create a general sketch of students’ thinking of thinking by grade level. We found that, while there was no step-wise progression in students’ thinking of thinking,
there was a somewhat additive aspect. For younger students, their focus was often on the objects of their thinking. That is, what it was they were thinking about. By the intermediate grades, we saw more strategies emerging in students’ responses. These strategies were often focused on memory and the management of schoolwork as well as strategies to motivate oneself. By middle school, students generally began to identify more specific strategies for thinking, such as considering things from more than one perspective or connecting something new to something you already know. In some students we also saw an awareness of emotions arising from one’s experience in thinking, such as the “ah-ha” moment or the feeling of satisfaction that comes from solving a problem. At this point we have only initial data from a sample at one school. We plan to get another round of data later in the school year so that we can begin to look for changes in students’ conceptions of thinking. As we look ahead in this project, one of our key questions is how do we sustain teachers’ engagement and interest with these ideas over time? Our goal is not to train these teachers in a set of practices, but to change the classroom and school culture for the long haul. Toward this end, we have begun to engage teachers in action research projects that allow them to further understand their teaching, their students’ thinking, and the classroom culture they are creating. Current Project Staff Ron Ritchhart, David Perkins, Mark Church, Terri Turner Funding for this project has been provided by Bialik College (Melbourne, Australia) under the patronage of Abe and Vera Dorevitch
The GoodWork® Project The GoodWork® Project is a large-scale effort to identify individuals and institutions that exemplify good work— work that is excellent in quality, socially responsible, and meaningful to its practitioners—and to determine how best to increase the incidence of good work in our society. The project began as a social scientific investigation of how both young and veteran workers confront—or fail to confront— the various ethical challenges that arise at a time when conditions are changing rapidly, our sense of time and space is being radically altered by technology, market forces are very powerful, and few, if any, counter forces exist. Our chosen method has been to conduct extensive indepth interviews with leading professionals across a range of sectors. In these interviews, we probed for the individual’s personal goals, the mission of the profession, the strategies being used to achieve goals and mission, the obstacles that are encountered and how they deal with these obstacles, and the individual’s sense of the major trends in their profession. We also probed a number of ancillary areas, which include
formative influences (such as mentors and anti-mentors), the role of religion or spiritual orientation, attitudes toward technology, and the entities to which the individual feels most responsible. In many cases we also used more targeted methods, such as an inventory of values and responses to ethical dilemmas. From 1996 to 2006, members of the research team conducted over 1200 interviews with leading professionals in journalism, genetics, theater, philanthropy, law, business, medicine, pre-collegiate education, and higher education. Complementing our study of leading professionals, we undertook a second line of study that involves budding young professionals (Fischman, Solomon, Greenspan, Gardner, 2004). We interviewed secondary school students, college students, those enrolled in professional schools, and individuals at their first job in a number of areas, including theater, biology, journalism, and social entrepreneurship. We also spoke with some individuals who are at the close of their careers. We consider the most illustrious of the individuals to be
“trustees”—individuals who are concerned with the overall health of their domain and its role in society. We dedicated our first collaborative book, Good Work: When Excellence and Ethics Meet (Gardner, Csikszentmihalyi, Damon, 2001), to John Gardner, the American public servant who exemplified both the role of the good worker and that of a domain and a societal trustee. This first book explored the work of professionals in the domains of journalism and biogenetic science. Our findings have been reported in numerous articles and papers, as well as the following books: Taking Philanthropy Seriously: Beyond Noble Intentions to Responsible Giving (Damon, Verducci, eds., Forthcoming 2006); Making Good: How Young People Cope with Moral Dilemmas at Work (Fischman, Solomon, Greenspan, Gardner, 2004); The Moral Advantage: How to Succeed in Business by Doing the Right Thing (Damon, 2004); Good Business: Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning (Csikszentmihalyi, 2003); and, as noted above, Good Work: When Excellence and Ethics Meet (Gardner, Csikszentmihalyi, Damon, 2001). We are presently preparing a book about how professionals delineate the ‘territory of responsibility’—how they conceptualize and act upon their various responsibilities. While we continue to write and speak about good work, at present most of our attention is focused on the following thrusts: 1) The application of our ideas. The project has launched several practical initiatives aimed at encouraging good work, including a Traveling Curriculum for Good Work in Journalism and a GoodWork® Toolkit. The Traveling Curriculum in Journalism engages practicing journalists in guided conversations about the core mission of their field, the pressing challenges and obstacles that make that mission elusive for many, and various strategies for achieving good work in the present climate. The Curriculum is a collaboration with Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel of the Committee of Concerned Journalists and consists of 12 modules, among which newsrooms select three for workshops that last a day and a half. The GoodWork® Toolkit is a series of materials that introduces and raises consciousness about concepts of “good work;” in working with these materials young students and veteran professionals alike explore, discuss, and articulate core responsibilities, beliefs and values, and goals for work. The Toolkit provides a framework for individuals to consider the kind of workers they are now and the kinds of professionals they want to become.
2) A set of studies of Trust and Trustworthiness. One of the recurrent themes in the GoodWork® Project has been the demise of trustees: individuals within a profession who are well known, widely respected, and seen as being disinterested and nonpartisan. Veteran professionals mentioned trustees (like Edward R. Murrow in journalism, or Edward Levi in the law), while younger professionals lamented the loss of mentoring and, more generally, of admired senior members of the profession. This finding has stimulated a set of studies of trust and trustworthiness. We have been exploring the individuals and institutions within American society that merit or do not merit trust; the reasons why individuals invest or withhold trust; and the means by which trust can be earned and retained. Our methods range from large-scale surveys of the general population to in-depth interviews and observations of young persons. 3) Good work in a global context. Having focused until now almost exclusively on the context in the United States, we are seeking knowledge, collaborations, and the collection of data in other countries and regions of the world. Howard Gardner is collaborating with Marcelo Suarez-Orozco of New York University on this issue. Hans Henrik Knoop has underway a parallel study in Scandinavia. Current Project Staff Howard Gardner, Lynn Barendsen, Wendy Fischman, Laura Horn, Carrie James, Mary Lancaster, Paula Marshall, Seth Wax, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Claremont Graduate University), William Damon (Stanford University), Jeanne Nakamura (Claremont Graduate University) Funding for this project has been provided by The Atlantic Philanthropies, The Bauman Foundation, The Carnegie Corporation, The COUQ Foundation, The Nathan Cummings Foundation, The J. Epstein Foundation, The Fetzer Institute, The Ford Foundation, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, John and Elisabeth Hobbs, The Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Foundation, The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, The John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, Thomas E. Lee, The Jesse Phillips Foundation Fund, The Louise and Claude Rosenberg Jr. Family Foundation, The Ross Family Charitable Foundation, The Spencer Foundation, and The John Templeton Foundation
For more information on any of our projects, please visit www.pz.harvard.edu
Interdisciplinary Studies Project disciplinarity. We have identified a series of strategies that teachers use to integrate disciplinary views in the classroom. We have begun to characterize teachers’ approaches to the central pedagogical blind spot of current interdisciplinary educational theory and in practice—that of assessing student progress. Our analyses of in-depth, semi-structured interviews with teachers and students have allowed us to gain a sense of the purpose of interdisciplinary teaching and learning, the tensions and continuities between disciplinary and interdisciplinary education, and the common misconceptions that this kind of work reveals. In the current phase of our work, we are formalizing the elements of education for interdisciplinary understanding at the pre-collegiate level. We have worked closely with twelve teachers to replicate the action-research approach that characterized Project Zero’s much heralded Teaching for Understanding project—a research design geared to yielding usable knowledge about how to teach for interdisciplinary understanding, assess student outcomes, and support professional development.
There are questions that simply cannot be addressed within the confines of one discipline’s set of tools. Indeed, interdisciplinary approaches are increasingly valued as enabling us to reach understandings that would be elusive without straddling disciplinary borders: How can a work of art encapsulate and communicate a rich understanding of an historical event? How should individuals and societies respond to pressing dilemmas like economic globalization and climate change? The Interdisciplinary Studies Project examines the challenges and opportunities of interdisciplinary (ID) work carried out by researchers, college faculty, secondary-school teachers, and students in a variety of research and education contexts. The preceding questions convey the kind of rich investigation that not only benefits from but also requires the crossing of disciplinary knowledge boundaries for experts and students alike. Building on an empirical understanding of cognitive and social dimensions of interdisciplinary work, our project develops practical tools to guide quality interdisciplinary education.
The Teacher Seminar: Pre-Collegiate Inter disciplinary Work In summer 2006, we are reaching the end of our threeyear investigation of high-school interdisciplinary teaching and learning. To share the results of our work with twelve exemplary Massachusetts teachers, we are developing a series of books and other publications intended for teachers and those who support their professional development. Here are a few highlights of what we have learned in the course of this project:
The Rise of Interdisciplinarity Decisive shifts in how knowledge is produced characterize the turn of the twenty-first century. Consider the way that the collaboration of medical doctors, engineers, computer scientists, and molecular biologists is revolutionizing medical care through new, minimally invasive surgery technologies and artificial human tissue development. In addition, pressing social issues like poverty, terrorism, and environmental sustainability challenge scientists, historians, psychologists, and artists alike to converge on solutions that defy the limits of a single discipline. Interdisciplinary understanding (i.e., the ability to integrate knowledge from two or more disciplines to create products, solve problems, or produce explanations) has become a hallmark of contemporary problem-solving and discovery—and a primary challenge for contemporary educators.
The Importance of “Integration” in Inter disciplinary Work Typically, scholars of interdisciplinary work have had a difficult time defining exactly what “integration” of disciplines looks like in the context of interdisciplinary work. Our work identifies the way that powerful interdisciplinary learning is built around meaningful complementary relationships between the knowledge tools of different disciplines. With an emerging sense of the different “types” of integration in interdisciplinary work, we believe that teachers can more effectively design interdisciplinary experiences and determine what teaching moves best support distinctive forms of interdisciplinary work.
Our Project: Goals and Outcomes Since October 2000, we have been exploring the cognitive, organizational, and pedagogical qualities of interdisciplinary work as it takes place in exemplary expert institutions and in collegiate and pre-collegiate educational programs. We have produced preliminary characterizations of “end-state performances” of the interdisciplinary mind at work. The resulting portrayals include descriptions of the more or less explicit strategies that expert researchers and teachers use to cross disciplinary boundaries and negotiate gaps across very different ways of knowing. Our research also addresses the qualities of intellectual character exhibited by these researchers and teachers (e.g., a disposition to tackle risky and ill-defined problems and to consider alternative perspectives). Our study of exemplary pre-collegiate and collegiate interdisciplinary educational programs has allowed us to establish preliminary parameters for a pedagogy of inter-
Teaching for Globalization In our work, we give special attention to teaching for understanding about the “big issues” that face our societies and our students in a time of unprecedented global cultural, economic, environment, and political change. We have studied how teachers can prepare students through interdisciplinary learning for a globalized future. Crucial issues like climate change and genocide demand interdisciplinary approaches to understanding. As we have seen, the promotion of a sense of “global citizenship” is a natural ally and beneficiary of teaching for interdisciplinary understanding.
disciplines, and meaningful integration that advances understanding beyond what would be possible with the tools of a single discipline.
Connecting Exemplars and Student Work In our research, we have observed the important links between expert interdisciplinary work at the frontiers of knowledge production and student interdisciplinary work in high school. We highlight the way in which our participating teachers anchor their students’ interdisciplinary performances in the work of integrative exemplars—experts who do interdisciplinary work “in the real world” (e.g., monument designers, climate-change policy advisors). In demanding interdisciplinary learning, the meaningful and successful work of experts can, with the right teacher scaffolding and support, help to orient students’ own interdisciplinary efforts.
A Framework to Guide Interdisciplinary Teaching Our research has also yielded a framework intended to help teachers plan and guide interdisciplinary learning in their classrooms. The framework provides a coherent model for shaping instruction for interdisciplinary understanding, highlighting the role of topic selection, disciplinary understandings, integrative understandings, performances of understanding, and assessment in the creation and delivery of interdisciplinary instruction.
The Role of Purposeful Work We have discovered that interdisciplinary work requires a special sense of purpose on the part of teachers and students, for without a clear sense of why they are pursuing interdisciplinary teaching and learning, teachers and students fail to see the point of engaging in what may be, in many cases, more complex and more challenging work than singlediscipline learning. Our participating teachers have helped us understand that teachers should pursue integrative work, at best, when there is a genuine need for interdisciplinarity to accomplish valued understanding goals. Also important is the translation of teachers’ sense of purpose into students’ own sense of purpose in their work. That is, interdisciplinary work succeeds to the extent that students are not merely compliant but rather are themselves purposeful in their learning across disciplines.
Impact and Future Directions Our work is having an impact in various national and international conversations about interdisciplinary teaching and research. For example, under a grant from the Atlantic Philanthropies, we recently co-hosted with the American Association for the Advancement of Science a conference on the nature of evaluating interdisciplinary work in research settings. In this setting, we have contributed valuable insights from our multi-year study about the distinguishing qualities of exemplary interdisciplinary work. In addition, we are applying the tools of our research in a new collaboration with the International Baccalaureate organization (IB), examining how interdisciplinary understanding is already developed in the classrooms of selected expert IB teachers around the world and how such understanding can be more broadly nurtured.
Challenge of Assessing Interdisciplinary Work Our research addresses the dilemma of assessment in interdisciplinary contexts. In particular, we offer a model for assessment tested across multiple levels of interdisciplinary work—expert work and collegiate and high school learning. In particular we focus on three fundamental ingredients of high-quality interdisciplinary work: a clear sense of purpose, credible grounding in the relevant contributing
Current Project Staff Veronica Boix Mansilla, Liz Dawes Duraisingh, Matt Miller, Alison Rhodes Funding for this project has been provided by The Atlantic Philanthropies
PZ’s Learning Innovations Laboratory (LILA) Founded in 2000 at Project Zero, “Learning Innovations Laboratory (LILA)” is a collaborative learning community of organizational leaders and Harvard faculty that shares problems, innovative practices, and research that speaks to the challenges of learning in today’s organizations. LILA creates a confidential environment in which members help one another solve the complex and practical problems related to organizational learning, innovation, and collaboration. LILA’s vision is to cultivate a learning community that: Creates Usable Knowledge: Members explore methods and models that can be adapted to suit a variety of organizational contexts. Has Practical Impact: Members support one another in making real advances in the challenges they face in their organization.
Collaboratively Finds and Solves Problems: Members share innovative practices and build strategies to solve the challenges they face across a variety of contexts. Captures Insights: The community harvests key lessons from research and the practical experiences of its members. Who is LILA? The LILA community involves members from three perspectives: Organizational Leaders. Business leaders representing a dozen different sectors comprise the main body of LILA. These seasoned practitioners hold titles such as Chief Learning Officer, Vice President of Human Resources, or Chief Knowledge Officer and are responsible for enhanc
ing the performance, learning, and innovation within their organizations. Past and present member organizations have included Cisco, Deloitte, Federal Reserve Bank, Hewlett Packard, Humana, IDEO, Johnson & Johnson, McDonald’s, Motorola, MTV, Pfizer, Raytheon, SAS, United Bank of Switzerland, Saudi Aramco, United Way, US Department of Defense, US Army, the World Bank, and the YMCA. Harvard Faculty. Researchers and professors from the Harvard schools of Business, Education, Government, Law, Medicine, Public Health, and Psychology and Sociology, participate in LILA. David Perkins of HGSE’s Project Zero convenes and is the lead facilitator of the LILA community. LILA has included faculty such as adult development expert Bob Kegan, organizational learning pioneer Chris Argyris, and an authority on the topic of organizational change Rosabeth Moss-Kanter. Visiting faculty has also included John Seely Brown, Etienne Wenger, Warren Bennis, and Ed Schein. Harvard Researchers. Project Zero researchers and HGSE doctoral students work closely with the group to analyze relevant and cutting-edge research, synthesize practical findings, and create topics of exploration that address member needs.
and change processes? Recent LILA explorations into this topic have produced articles about challenges such as: • Leading Organizational Transformation • Bridging the Idea-Action Gap • Developing Quality Decision Making • Sustaining Change • Innovating across Organizational Boundaries Collaboration & Community. What are practices and technologies for initiating and sustaining collaborative environments? What are the factors that establish trust and enable helping behaviors in organizations? How do organizations support and gain value from communities of practice? Discussions of such questions have rendered insights into challenges such as: • Leveraging Social Networks in Organizations • Developing Intelligent Helping Behaviors • Designing Collaborative Technologies • Fostering Trust in Organizations • Tapping the Power of Communities of Practice Membership guidelines LILA members follow three general guidelines that shape the collective learning: High Trust: Members treat all ideas, experiences, and wisdom that are shared in strictest confidence. Continual Representation: Member organizations send two representatives to each quarterly meeting. Organizations may choose to rotate their representatives from meeting to meeting. Active Participation: Members share ideas, discuss experiences, and give feedback to others during the meetings. In between meetings, members are accessible to LILA researchers as they customize research briefings and design relevant topics for future exploration. In addition to the meetings and materials, LILA members receive a quarterly newsletter, invitations to participate in online discussions and conference calls on critical topics, and have access to LILA’s complete online library of resources.
What does LILA do? LILA convenes organizational leaders with Harvard faculty in order find solutions to the ongoing organizational challenges members are facing. Project Zero researchers work with members to create an inquiry process in which colleagues can share cases, exchange methods and learn new models of action. The three current areas of inquiry are: Knowledge & Learning. How do organizations understand and enhance knowledge creation, capture, sharing, and application? What are the cutting edge practices and supporting technologies that foster learning throughout an organization? Recent LILA discussions of this topic have produced articles and insights into challenges such as: • Learning at the Organizational Edges • Embedding Learning in the Workflow • Harvesting Tacit Knowledge • Creating Learning Cultures • Knowledge Sharing through Storytelling Innovation & Change. What practices initiate and sustain innovation in organizations? How do organizations foster a culture of and capacity towards change? What are the roles of leadership and technology in successful innovation
Current Project Staff David Perkins, Daniel Wilson, Lia Davis, Deborah Soule Funding for this project has been provided by Corporate Sponsorship
The Making Learning Visible Project draws attention to the power of the group as a learning environment and documentation as a way to see how and what children are learning. MLV is based on collaborative research conducted by Project Zero researchers with teachers from the Municipal Preschools of Reggio Emilia, Italy, and preschool through high school teachers and teacher educators in Massachusetts.
Most of us are in groups all the time. But are these groups learning groups? When does a group become a learning group? Can a group construct its own way of learning? Can documenting children’s learning lead to new ways of learning? These are some of the questions addressed in the research project, Making Learning Visible (MLV). MLV 10
The overall goal of Making Learning Visible is to create and sustain powerful cultures of learning in and across classrooms and schools that nurture and make visible individual and group learning. Often when people first encounter the MLV work, they describe it as a project about documentation, perhaps because it is the most tangible aspect of the work—something people can see. Then, after spending more time with the ideas, they say it’s a project about group learning. But in the end, they say MLV is a project about culture, values, and democracy. Learning in groups not only helps us learn about content, it helps us learn about learning in a way that fits with the kind of people we want to become and the world we want to create. Learning in groups develops critical human capacities for participating in a democratic society—the ability to share our views and listen to those of others, to entertain multiple perspectives, to seek connections, to change our ideas, and to negotiate conflict. MLV addresses three aspects of learning and teaching: • What teachers and students can do to support the creation of learning groups in the classroom. • How observation and documentation can shape, extend, and make visible children’s and adults’ individual and group learning. • How teachers, students, and others are creators as well as transmitters of culture and knowledge.
someone is listening, students may take more care to formulate their thoughts and to listen in return. Expressing and explaining one’s own ideas, and listening and responding to those of others, are critical to establishing a democratic culture in and outside the classroom. Creating a space in which people can offer, receive, and modify ideas becomes the very thing that the teachers and students are working on. The Creation of a Collective Body of Knowledge The notion that learning in groups extends beyond the learning of individuals to create a collective body of knowledge was exciting and intriguing to seminar members, yet its meaning was elusive. Most cooperative and other group learning techniques are still seen primarily as ways to help raise individual achievement. But in our view, the focus of learning in learning groups is on advancing a collective body of knowledge as well as individual learning. Rather than simply completing a series of discrete tasks or activities, members of learning groups in school feel like they are contributing to a larger, more meaningful whole. This concept prompted much discussion about the nature of the task the group was working on and led teachers to reflect on what it is the group comes together to do. Some tasks are inspiring and compelling and provide reasons for a group to come together, whereas others are far less successful. A number of teachers identified many of their own tasks as the less successful kind and began to grapple with what is the nature of a promising task in this context. Some of the ideas that emerged in our seminar include: • Tasks which can’t be done alone • Tasks in which everyone can be invested • Tasks that invite multiple perspectives • Tasks that spark the imagination • Tasks in which there is a central focus on learning, rather than an implied or actual emphasis on the group completing work. (Although the completion of work can lead to learning, many students and teachers perceive collaborative tasks as opportunities to share labor, rather than learn together, as we note below.)
Highlights from Our Recent Research The following are some highlights of what we learned in our 2003-05 MLV Seminar with 26 teachers and teacher educators in Massachusetts. The Critical Role of Listening The ability to listen is an essential foundation for the exchange and modification of ideas, yet many seminar teachers talked about the poor skills of their students as listeners. Lindy Johnson, a high school English teacher, said that while her students could name many of the elements that make for good discussion, they did not include “listening” on the list. Lindy characterized her students’ views as more one of “I don’t like you so I don’t need to listen to you.” Lindy’s social studies colleague, Heather Moore Wood, described most of the discussions in her class as, “This is my opinion, that’s your opinion,” rather than a genuine exchange of ideas with the possibility of modification. Moreover, Heather and Lindy realized that many of their students had so little confidence in their own ideas that it was difficult for them to engage in a healthy exchange of ideas. Finding ways to help their students listen to each other became a focus for Lindy’s and Heather’s documentation. The role of the teacher as one who listens also emerged as significant. Students seemed to recognize the connection between documentation and what Carlina Rinaldi refers to as “the pedagogy of listening.” Students tend to respond thoughtfully when their teachers demonstrate—often through documentation—that they are listening. MLV’s focus on group learning in conjunction with documentation holds great promise for supporting deep thinking and the practice of democracy in the classroom. Knowing that
Equating Learning and Work A number of teachers noticed that their students seemed to equate getting work done with learning. These teachers also realized that while they considered learning a priority, sometimes learning took a back seat to the work that was supposed to generate it. In the absence of alignment of many factors in the classroom, work gets equated with learning. Consider this reflection from a ninth grade student in response to a question about whether working or getting work done was the same as learning: Most times for me it is not about learning, but completing the project. Many times I just want to complete an assignment and do not care or even think about how it may affect my learning. I guess part of the reason is [due] to my education from my past. It wasn’t until I hit 8th grade people started caring about how I learned. We learned some fancy word meaning understanding how you think. It was cool 11
to talk about, but hard to get across in an actual project. I am asking myself, “Do I learn better in groups or by myself? What is the point of me knowing if I am learning? Shouldn’t me working on something mean I am learning? Who’s to say if I am learning or not? How do others learn?” These questions are now in my head after this experiment. I feel these are good questions to better understand where people are coming from. For our seminar teachers, this discovery of the distinction between doing school work and genuine learning in the group was critical. It helped them to clarify their goals and to focus on creating genuine learning groups, not just groups in which students can get the work done.
umentation. Seminar members will share documentation of student and teacher learning at a three-day institute in July, 2006, and on the Web. Each day of the institute will be organized around a guiding theme: Schools as Places of Culture, Values, and Democracy; Understanding, Documenting, and Supporting Individual and Group Learning; and Toward Making Learning Visible in Your School. Documentation serves different purposes during different stages of learning. These purposes might include collecting documentation to aid one’s own reflection, to use in the classroom with students and colleagues, and to share more widely in and outside the school. Throughout this process, it is easy to become so focused on learning to document that one forgets about the underlying goal of documenting to learn. Documentation makes learning visible when it focuses on learning, not just something we did, and when it promotes conversation and deepens understanding about children’s thinking and effective teaching. We are currently developing protocols to facilitate these conversations and maintain a focus on learning at all stages of the process.
Current and Future Work We are currently building on our earlier research and launching a new collaboration with the Massachusetts Charter Public School Association and 12 Massachusetts charter public and district public schools to share research and innovative practices related to documenting and supporting individual and group learning. We are also working with the Wickliffe Progressive Community School in Upper Arlington, Ohio, on a school-wide initiative to support and make visible individual and group learning. The Massachusetts collaboration involves monthly seminars with 24 teachers from the 12 schools. One goal of the seminar is to create a dialogue between charter and district schools around ideas and practices related to group learning and doc-
Current Project Staff Steve Seidel, Mara Krechevsky, Melissa Rivard Funding for this project has been provided by The Atlantic Philanthropies, An Anonymous Funder, MA Department of Education, Wickliffe Progressive Community School through a grant from the Ohio Department of Education
Qualities of Quality What do arts education practitioners, administrators, and theorists identify as “what constitutes quality” in arts learning and teaching and how to achieve it? What do policy makers (administrators, program designers, other directors of local systems) need to understand in order to create and sustain high-quality arts learning and teaching?
tices, and distill policy and decision-making implications related to achieving and sustaining quality. The study is comprised of three strands of research: 1. a review of relevant literature; 2. interviews with leaders and key informants in arts education; 3. case studies of exemplary or illustrative sites. The research team will conduct simultaneous and coordinated analyses of these three strands and synthesize the findings across the components. Based on these findings, the team will develop a series of tools for decision-makers that will provide practical assistance in their efforts to understand, establish, expand, and/or improve arts learning experiences for young people. This project intends to produce a report that is aimed at decision-makers positioned to create arts learning opportunities for young people in any community in the United States. Four principal investigators at Project Zero are engaged with this project. Lois Hetland and Ellen Winner are conducting the Literature Review, Shari Tishman leads the Interviews strand, and Steve Seidel directs the Case Studies strand and is also the lead PI. Patricia Palmer is the project manager.
Our Project The newly funded Qualities of Quality project is conducting a multi-faceted study of what is currently understood about the critical elements of high quality arts teaching and learning for children and youth, both in and out of school. What constitutes high quality arts learning and teaching—and how to achieve and sustain it—are questions that all arts education programs address to some degree. Efforts to define and achieve quality certainly take place on many fronts, including program design, professional development, program evaluation, student assessment, and others. There is no single way of defining and creating quality arts learning experiences across the broad array of programs serving young people in America. Through this study, we hope to synthesize the central challenges, identify effective prac12
The Qualities of Quality project has been generously funded by The Wallace Foundation. This study is part of a Foundation initiative to develop effective ways to bring high-quality arts experiences to more young people inside and outside of school. The Foundation has also awarded two major city planning grants to strengthen arts education in New York and Dallas. These city efforts are supported by technical assistance from EmcArts, which will map the local arts learning system in each, facilitate communications, and document the work. The Foundation has also funded a study on how collaborative system-wide efforts can develop and sustain high-quality arts learning experiences for children in local communities. This study is being conducted by RAND Education. While the efforts of Project Zero, RAND, and EmcArts are aligned, they are independent studies.
Literature Review Strand The Literature review strand is currently reviewing the key literature suggested by the field in the nomination process and has begun a comprehensive search of the literature on arts education theory, arts programs, and arts assessment, including the following areas: • Standards for assessing learning in the arts. • The qualities of quality arts education identified by recognized theorists in the various arts disciplines: E.g., Eliot Eisner, Bennett Reimer, Maxine Greene. • The qualities of the most well-known and well-regarded in-school, after-school, and community-based arts programs in theater, visual arts, music, dance, and mixeddiscipline arts. The Interview Strand The interview strand team will use nominations from the field to select 15 key informants for in-depth interviews about the nature and practice of high quality arts education.
Early Stages of the Research At this point in the project, our team has defined the conceptual underpinnings across the three strands of research. This cross-strand conceptual work has focused on identifying factors and questions to guide the research process. The team is advancing the work of the individual strands, both conceptually and practically. Each strand will be addressing the following categories of mid-level research questions: • Beliefs/ideas about quality • Evidence/markers of quality • The relationship between variables and quality • Obstacles and challenges to quality • The distinctiveness of arts learning and teaching
The Case Studies Strand The case studies strand team will collect nominations from the field to find and highlight exemplary and/or illustrative sites of high quality arts education. We solicited nominations of organizations and programs that have dedicated significant focus and resources to achieving what they believe are high quality experiences for young people. The Case studies strand is sending out applications to over 200 nominated programs and organizations. We will investigate approximately twelve sites in the fall of 2006 for the case studies.
Nomination Process As part of this study we are in the process of identifying quality programs, leaders in arts education, and key theoretical writings on the issue of quality in arts in education. We invited over 400 arts educators to make nominations in three areas: 1) relevant literature, 2) leaders in the field, and 3) exemplary programs and organizations. In each area, we were looking for nominations that directly relate to strong perspectives on “what constitutes quality” in arts learning and teaching. The nomination process was conducted in the early spring of 2006 and due to a response rate of over 40% we received hundreds of nominations in each area. Each strand is analyzing the nominations received for the next stage of research.
Future Direction We plan to finish the individual strand work by the first part of next year, synthesize the findings and analyze the data for a final report by November 2007.
Current Project Staff Lois Hetland, Steve Seidel, Shari Tishman, Ellen Winner, Patricia Palmer Funding for this project has been provided by The Wallace Foundation
For information about Project Zero publications, please visit our ebookstore: www.pz.harvard.edu/ebookstore Project Zero Classroom 2006 participants get a discount good until September 30, 2006. Don’t forget to ask!
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ROUNDS at Project Zero field. This range of experiences is a significant factor in the vitality of the conversations. Everyone is considered to have special perspectives and expertise to offer the group. Participation is entirely voluntary and rewarded only with coffee, bagels, and serious, though spirited, dialogue about educational matters. Some participants come to most sessions; many come once or twice a year, while others come only rarely. All are welcome to come whenever they can and there is a sincere effort to sustain a structure that makes it truly possible to enter the on-going conversation at any time. At the invitation of Project Zero, new participants are always joining the group.
All professions must address the problem of how its practitioners stay abreast of current developments in that field and continue practicing clinical skills. Most professions have various ways in which they do this, including journals, meetings of professional associations, conferences on specific issues, and so on. Medicine is distinguished by various forms of small professional learning practices known as “rounds.” Perhaps the most popular image of medical rounds is a small groups of doctors traveling from patient to patient in a hospital ward to discuss each patient’s “case.” But medical rounds also include larger group gatherings, such as monthly meetings featuring short lectures on current research studies and protocols like the “mystery case.” In all of these settings, “young” and “old” physicians and other health professionals come together to share knowledge and practice clinical diagnostic skills. Education has far fewer opportunities of this kind for life-long professional learning. At Project Zero, we have been engaged in a decade-long effort to create a powerful learning community based on this medical model. Growing out of efforts in the early 1990s to bring many teachers with whom we were collaborating together, we sought to find ways to sustain the lively discussions and sharing of practices that had developed in the meetings of the group we called the “New England Regional Assessment Network (NERAN).” In 1995, when funding for those larger conferences ended, we initiated a monthly meeting called Rounds. The intent was to create an opportunity for educators who shared an interest in Project Zero ideas, especially related to the practice of collaborative assessment of student work, to gather voluntarily on a regular basis to discuss emerging issues in educational practice, their personal puzzles about being teaching and learning, and to practice looking at student work together. It needed to be low-cost and to have a clear, but flexible structure, requiring minimal planning and logistics, to be sustainable. Expenses are limited to the costs of coffee and bagels for the approximately 30-40 people who come to most sessions and a work-study student who helps with the set-up and arrangements. Project Zero provides “in-kind” services (email services, etc.) and the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) provides the space for the meetings. Steve Seidel, who conceptualized ROUNDS, donates his time as facilitator of these sessions.
What Happens at ROUNDS? The structure of ROUNDS has changed little over the past ten years. With the group sitting in a circle, sessions start with introductions and then a volunteer (planned in advance) offers a question or issue from her work as an educator that will, hopefully, prove to be relevant to the rest of the group. These questions/issues represent a puzzle or challenge that the volunteer feels is especially perplexing in the context of his or her work. The purpose of this segment is not to help the presenter solve her problem or figure out what to do about this issue, but rather to open a dialogue about that issue, drawing perspectives from the diverse experiences of the group. Questions that have been presented in recent sessions have had to do with how educational leaders can make their own learning public, the role of documentation in tracking the work of teacher inquiry groups, and the place of “progressive” educational practices in schools not showing “adequate yearly progress” on the MCAS tests. Sometimes the volunteer presents documentation in the form of photos, video or other artifacts from their settings as they present their questions or issues for discussion. After a break, the group reconvenes to spend approximately an hour engaged in the close examination of a piece (or pieces) of student work brought by another volunteer (again, planned in advance). The protocol used to structure this conversation is the Collaborative Assessment Protocol, developed by Seidel and others at Project Zero during work on the Arts Propel project in the late 1980s. This part of these monthly meetings also serves as a time for participants to practice their clinical skills of observation, interpretation, and analysis—skills for which few opportunities to practice exist in collaborative and reflective settings. But in this way, ROUNDS has also been a laboratory for the further development of the Collaborative Assessment Protocol. Numerous adjustments and changes in the protocol have been pioneered over the years. Since many participants have been coming to ROUNDS for so many years, the group is highly sophisticated at designing, testing, and evaluating changes in the protocol. Since October, 2001, following the events of September 11th, the structure of ROUNDS has been altered to create time at the end of every session for participants to openly
Who Comes to ROUNDS? The ROUNDS mailing list has about 150 addresses. This group is made up mostly of teachers, administrators, and researchers who have either collaborated on Project Zero research studies or have been students at HGSE. Participants work in a wide variety of settings, ranging from pre-school through graduate schools, public and private schools, inschool and out-of-school settings, museums, worker education programs, and policy/research organizations. At most sessions, the group also includes educators in the start of their careers and others with well over thirty years in the 14
reflect on what it means for them to be educators in a time of war. Usually only 10-15 minutes at the end of the session, this time has come to be an extremely important part of the experience of participating in ROUNDS. There is no specific structure for this conversation; participants speak only when and if they want and the group often sits in silence. In the last years, participants have started to question the frame for this part of the session, asking what we mean by “war,” who gets to say which conflicts are “wars” and which are not, how we can ever know how our students have experienced wars, and whether war is even the most important context for us to consider as the critical frame for our experience as educators. For the moment, the question, “what does it mean to be educators in a time of war?” continues as the frame for the
closing segment of each session, but that may well change in the coming year. Plans are underway for the continuation of ROUNDS in the foreseeable future with the hope that it can continue to foster a rich dialogue for the current and future participants and also serve as a viable model of a voluntary, long-term learning practice for educators. Current Project Staff Steve Seidel Funding for this project has been provided by Private source
The Understandings of Consequence Project Phase Four: Learning to RECAST Students’ Causal Assumptions in Science through Interactive Multimedia Professional Development Tools Ask yourself some everyday kinds of questions… • Why do my bike tires look flat in winter, but not in summer when I haven’t added any air? • How do planes fly? • Why does dead matter decay even when no worms are around? • Why do all the lights in a school hallway come on at the same time when you flip the switch? • Why do traffic jams form? • Why does it get so noisy in the school cafeteria when no one is trying to be too noisy? • Why do I sometimes get sick if I am around a sick person and sometimes not? In order to answer these questions, you have to think about cause and effect in ways that may not be entirely familiar and in ways that you have never had an opportunity to learn in school. Understanding the nature of causality is critical to learning a range of science concepts from “everyday science” to the science of complexity. For the past eight years, with funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), our project has been studying how students think about causality when answering questions such as these. In the first phase of the project, we found that students hold default assumptions about the nature of causality. For instance, that effects follow causes in a simple linear chain, that causes are close to their effects in space and time, that causes tend to be obvious, and so forth. These assumptions can hinder science learning. In the second phase of the project, we found that curriculum designed to RECAST (REveal CAusal STructure) their assumptions while learning the science leads to deeper understanding. In a third phase of the project we found that learning about causal forms in one topic can transfer to other topics—those that have similar and even those with dissimilar causal forms if students get the right kinds of support. Support for thinking about the
causal forms, applying them to diverse examples, and engaging in metacognition were particularly helpful to students. What does it sound like to hear students talking about the nature of causality? It is common to hear students refer to domino causality or cyclic causality. For instance when contrasting the processes of energy transfer through the food web and matter recycling, students are likely to talk about non-obvious causes and/or effects. The work is embedded in a pedagogy of scientific modeling. Students are engaged in developing scientific explanations that do the most powerful job explaining the available evidence. They are encouraged to trade up for better models as the evidence suggests. This puts the locus of responsibility for generating understanding with the student and the teacher helps students discover discrepancies, areas that need clarification, and evidence that doesn’t fit with the explanation at hand. We are now in the fourth phase of the work and are in the process of taking what we learned and applying it to professional development. With further funding from the NSF, the UC team and the Science Media Group (SMG) of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics are collaborating in a five-year iterative design process to create interactive, multimedia professional development tools. These tools will guide middle school physics and biology teachers in assessing the structure of their students’ scientific explanations and in using existing curricula and developing their own curriculum to restructure or RECAST students’ understandings to fit with scientifically accepted explanations. We have just completed the first year of this work. In order to develop the materials, we are working closely with teacher collaborators, some who have worked with us before and others who are working with us for the first time. They are helping us to think about what works and what doesn’t in terms of their own learning of the concepts and what this means for professional development. We are also expanding the work to communities with a greater diversity of students in terms of ethnicity and socio-economic status and figur15
ing out the best ways to bring a diversity of learners into the concepts. While there have been challenges, one very encouraging outcome was the new teachers’ response to video we showed of students in RECAST classrooms discussing ideas. One of the teachers commented that it “blew me away to see the way that those kids were talking and really pushing their understanding.” She went on to say, “I had those kids in sixth grade and they were one of the lowest [performing] classes ever. To see them doing that [as eighth graders] is amazing to me.” The professional development products will consist of a series of interactive DVDs, a parallel website, and a support guide. We will use a range of formats including: • documentary footage of real-life classrooms; • interviews with teachers describing challenges and obstacles they faced introducing the curricula, how these were overcome, and, the benefits they obtained from using the materials; • comments by students, which demonstrate the wide range of student’s prior thinking about specific causal forms as embedded in the science concepts; • discussion questions, suggested hands-on activities, and short videotaped “content explorations”; • examples of student written work and journals”; • design guides and questions to help teachers understand the features of and how to design RECAST activities, assessments, and assessment rubrics related to causal
understanding in science. We expect that individual teachers working singly or in small groups, will use the materials as a self-guided tutorial to learn more about students’ causal assumptions and RECAST activities in order to adopt the existing modules or to improve the effectiveness of existing curricula already in place in their classrooms. Teachers will bring different levels of understanding in science so we expect that they will find different paths through the materials. We plan to disseminate the resources over the Internet and through the Annenberg Channel. In the next year, as we begin developing and testing the web components of the materials, we will encourage interested teachers to get in touch with us. The Understandings of Consequence Project will hold an NSF funded institute for middle school science teachers in Fall 2006. Teachers who teach density as part of their curriculum are encouraged to apply. Contact
[email protected] for more information. Current Project Staff Tina Grotzer, Sheila Jasalavich, Amanda Heffner-Wong Funding for this project has been provided by The National Science Foundation
Other Current Staff at Project Zero Core Administrative Staff Cindy Floyd, Corina Murg, Cindy Quense, Damari Rosado, Denise D. Simon, Tom Trapnell, Karen Uminski Core Summer Assistants Kirsten Adam, Aaron Ahlstrom, Nikki Hughes Faculty Support Staff Lisa Frontado, Christian Hassold, Lindsay Pettingill Other Research Support Shirley Veenema, Jessica Benjamin, Meghan Brown, Katharine Davis, Jen DiBara, Becky DeVito, Todd Grindal, Martina Hinojosa, Alison Kelley, Dorothea Lasky, Kelly Leahy, Margot Liebman, Rebecca Lincoln, Yesenia Marrero, Alejandro Muldoon, Ariela Rothstein, Rachel Schiller, Kimberly Sheridan Special thank you to the extended Project Zero Community who make the Project Zero Classroom a success year-after-year! Al Allison, Susan Barahal, Maria Ximena Barrera, Tobin Bechtel, Tina Blythe, Alice Chen, Rhonda Clevenson, Maggie Donovan, Noel Dunne, Terry Edeli, Janet Field, Shehla Ghouse, Betsy Grady, John Harrigan, Matthew Hazelwood, Paul Hetland, Laura Howick, Bonnie James, Jane Jessep, Day Jones, Stephanie Juno, Sharon Kerr, Patricia León, Jim Linsell, Kris Martin, Mary McFarland, Ingeborg Megai, Casey Metcalf, Arzu Mistry, Peter Morris, James Murphy, Melanie Nash, Janet Navarro, Sandra Nissen, Christian Noyon, Suzanne O’Donnell-Fuks, Marisa Odria, Jim Reese, Gina Roughton, Angela Salmon, Sylvia Sarrett, Joan Soble, Becca Solomon, Sara Stillman, Amy Sullivan, Cheryl Sutter, Diane Tabor, Joan Trapnell, Lin Tucker, Karrie Tufts, Julie Viens, Debra Wise, Par Wohlin, Ana Maria Woll Publication Design Cindy Quense, Denise D. Simon
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