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Chard comments on the differences in planning for thematic instruction and project work:. The preliminary planning that accompanies much successful project work involves the preparation of the mind of the teacher for the possibilities that could arise from the children's study of the topic. It is not the kind of objectives-driven planning that characterizes much direct instruction, where the objectives can be operationalized and prespecified in considerable detail.
Instead, planning for project work involves the imaginative anticipation of the prior experience level of interest that might reasonably be expected from a given class of children. For teachers new to the Project Approach, thinking about how to plan for a project to unfold may seem difficult.
The role of the teacher can appear to be obscure to the novice. Not only must the teacher become an imaginative anticipator of the work to be accomplished, but she must also learn to become a facilitator of the understandings to be gained by the children. More-experienced practitioners know how to foster children's dispositions to wonder and ask questions, how to nurture children's dispositions to take initiative in planning and carrying out inquiries, and how to negotiate with children so that each child takes responsibility for what she or he does and learns. However, learning how to conduct this type of project work is a developmental process for both the teacher and the children.
The teacher must find ways to encourage the children to become independent workers by having them decide what they will attempt to accomplish each day during the time set aside for project work. The teacher also must plan for where her assistance is most needed for the day. For example, a kindergarten teacher new to project work comments:. I am talking to my students about my limited ability to work with each group and give help at the same time.
They are getting better with this task. I think that I could do a little more "planning" to help. I will work on this. Beverly Hart, personal communication, November 15, Teachers with more experience with using the Project Approach typically report that projects take on a life of their own. Perhaps this is a sign that they have come to respect the children's interests, motivation, and curiosity—that they recognize the value of engagement for children's learning.
While building school-wide capacity for improvement is considered critical for changing teachers' classroom practices, there is still little empirical evidence for. Changing Classroom Practice. Dylan Wiliam. Meeting regularly in teacher learning communities is one of the best ways for teachers to develop their skill in .
Perhaps this is a testament to their skillfulness in guiding children through meaningful investigations and representations during the course of the project. Certainly, skillful guidance on the part of the teacher indicates a deeper understanding of the dynamic processes involved in good project work. However, how does a teacher learn how to conduct this kind of good project work? As part of project work, a teacher may have children conduct investigations; invite experts to visit the classroom; do drawings from memory and observation; and construct pictographs, Venn diagrams, and flow charts to represent their findings.
Children may construct houses, paint large cardboard buses, or produce puppet shows for culminations. These processes vary somewhat according to the ages of the children involved.
However, even though the products and the content may be exemplary, the teacher may not yet understand the complex nature of the dynamics involved in the processes of doing exemplary project work. The ideas for the topics, the investigations, and the representations may all come from the teacher, rather than the children. Again, the novice kindergarten teacher comments:.
Progression of my project is going well. I do see the value of students working together, and do try to encourage this process at all times. It has been an eye opener to see how hard this task is for children of kindergarten age. I just want to be careful not to put ideas into their heads, resulting in everyone working on the same thing at the same time. From my perspective, one of the strengths of using the Project Approach is that students have the opportunity to explore concepts more independently than they would have with teacher-directed activities.
Ironically, this aspect has been the most difficult part of the project to manage and facilitate. Beverly Hart, personal communication, October 26, Teachers new to project work often do not recognize that project work offers children opportunities to explore concepts independently and follow their own interests, fueled by their natural curiosity and motivation. Instead, teachers may adopt new content to reflect a study of something in their environment, but the children's work is often teacher-directed so that the products are adult-like in nature.
In the first class to whom I taught the Project Approach, one teacher's experience demonstrated this lack of recognition. Because she had access to owl pellets for the children to dissect, she decided that her kindergarten class would study birds. She determined her "bird groups" by who could best work together, rather than by the children's particular interests. Then she had the children vote on five birds that they wanted to study more closely, making sure that one group would study owls.
Each group was to make a facsimile of the bird that they were studying cardinal, penguin, owl, hummingbird, eagle. Their assignment was to look at a picture of the bird and tell the teacher what they needed in order to make it. For example, for the model of the cardinal, the children indicated that they needed red feathers, so the teacher purchased some for them.
Even though the children each took part in the construction of the models of birds completed for culmination, which were beautiful, they were not child-like creations!
Other parts of the project e. As this teacher reported her experience, I realized that I had not been able to communicate to my student that the processes of doing project work vary significantly from those of direct instruction. Teachers who are able to facilitate investigations and representations that come from children's thinking and ideas have more fully developed their understandings of a central construct of the processes involved in project work. Here a teacher with more experience in using the Project Approach speaks to the issue:. Do you realize how hard it is to teach without telling them the answers?
Project work makes you think, because you have to keep thinking to keep from giving them the answers! Dot Schuler, personal communication, May 5, A deeper understanding of what Ms. Schuler meant by the frustration of not giving her children the answers came to me on a day long ago when I was learning about the Project Approach.
When I visited her second-grade classroom, Ms. Schuler asked me to assist the children in the language arts center. The assignment for the children was to write questions about what they wanted to study on their new topic of soil. My job was to make sure they used the correct spelling and punctuation. The first girl to arrive at the center said, "I think I want to learn about worms.
Because I did not yet understand that the processes of projects were different from those of teacher-directed units, I blurted out, "Did you know that? I want to find out for myself! Schuler's remark, cited above, and that of her student can be seen as defining, in part, their views of the teacher's role as someone who uses the Project Approach to facilitate and support learning.
Their remarks may represent a core insight that a teacher's role can vary from that of an instructor of skills and transmitter of knowledge to a facilitator of children's coming to increasingly deep understandings of what they are investigating. However, what does that mean and how does one do that? If teachers don't plan, transmit information and knowledge, and test, then what do they do? How does one transform one's role from instructor to facilitator?
The dynamic processes intrinsic to the implementation of the Project Approach are realized when the teacher begins to encourage children to 1 develop their own questions about the topic under investigation, 2 make predictions about possible answers, 3 think of ways to test their hypotheses, 4 negotiate with the teacher various ways they might represent their findings, and 5 take time to solve their own problems through trial and error. One part of the bone study was an investigation of an X-ray machine.
Prior to visiting the hospital, the children predicted how long the machine would be. They estimated how many children standing in a line would be needed to measure the length of the table. One child predicted children. She realized when she saw that it only required nine children that her answer was "silly.
Photographs were taken of the machine and the children's experience while they completed detailed observational drawings, asked questions of the doctor, and took field notes. When the children returned to school, the pictures and accompanying dialogue were displayed as documentation of the field experience. The children in the X-ray machine group made a list of what they needed to reproduce the machine in their classroom. They planned who would complete what task according to their individual interests.
One child negotiated with the teacher the length of the table for the classroom representation of the machine after referring to the picture. The children in the group continued to solve many problems as they constructed an amazing facsimile of the X-ray machine. While learning to implement the Project Approach, it seems reasonable to assume that teachers may begin to realize the consequences of transforming their practices from instructor to facilitator of learning. Throughout the Bone Project, the kindergarten children were able to apply basic skills to solve real-life problems.
They not only touched upon the requirements for their age and grade level, they surpassed our expectations of the knowledge they gained and the skills they acquired. This project made a difference at our school because the children's self-motivation, excitement, interest, willingness to work hard, and their display of creativity and problem-solving abilities amazed other teachers who were reluctant to try project work.
The first part of this article argued that to fully implement the Project Approach, it is necessary for teachers to develop an understanding of the underlying dynamics of the processes of project work. When teachers begin to experience a change in their basic understandings of the effects of their practices from a traditional, transmission approach to teaching toward a progressive approach of facilitating learning, they can begin to fully appreciate these processes e. The second part of the article reviews research related to teacher learning that may account for the difficulties experienced by teacher educators when helping teachers change their practices to include the processes of project work.
Extensive experience in helping teachers who wish to adopt the Project Approach suggests that even with a desire and intention to change practices to include the approach, many teachers continue to use traditional formal instruction. What are some possible explanations for this pedagogical choice, even though it is contrary to that of the Project Approach? Research on teacher learning may yield some insights into this phenomenon. The traditional approach to teaching is based on the concept of a transmission model of instruction in which basic skills and facts are taught through direct instruction.
In this approach, knowledge is transferred from the expert to the novice primarily through lecture or print. In addition to a description of Borko and Putnam's three domains of teacher knowledge and the transmission model of instruction, the discussion below includes the concepts of 1 the strength of the effects of preexisting understandings while attempting to change practices, 2 the notion of false clarity, and 3 the resistance to change in beliefs about practice.
Three Domains of Teacher Knowledge. Borko and Putnam organize their investigation of research on learning to teach around "three domains of knowledge that are particularly relevant to teachers' instructional practices: The first domain forms the focus of this discussion. It encompasses a teacher's knowledge and understandings of teaching, learning, and learners that transcend particular subject matter domains:.
It includes knowledge of various strategies and arrangements for effective classroom management, instructional strategies of conducting lessons and creating learning environments, and more fundamental knowledge and beliefs about learners, how they learn and how that learning can be fostered by teaching. Often their existing views are based on a transmission model of education in which pedagogy is based on traditional beliefs:. Instructional theories are grounded in behaviorist and early information-processing perspectives, which assume that learning is facilitated by breaking complex tasks into component parts that can be taught and practiced in isolation Students acquire the component parts one by one, ultimately putting them together in complex performances [so that curricula consist] of discrete facts and skills removed from any meaningful context or sense of purpose.
As Lortie explains, prospective teachers have experienced more than 10, hours of observation of teaching from their own experience as students, and most were within a traditional setting. These experiences form a perspective filter that determines how they interpret their experiences in teacher education programs. This filter is further developed in practice teaching and through inservice experiences. In a review of educational change, Fullan claims that inservice teachers often embrace newly recommended practices in terms of what they believe already works for them.
He posits that because their preexisting beliefs, based on their direct experiences, serve as a filter to new information, they tend to adopt a hybrid form of the innovation that they are required to use in order to fit it into their present scheme of teaching. The teachers may assume that they are making the changes required because on the surface the product or content of the instruction conforms to the new mandate. The processes of instruction, however, based on teachers' preexisting pedagogical knowledge and beliefs, may not change. Fullan refers to this phenomenon as false clarity.
In these cases, the teachers do not understand that they don't understand the proposed changes. False clarity may then, in part, explain why some teachers new to the Project Approach might assume that they are doing a project, when in fact they have made changes in their content and products, without adopting the processes involved in doing projects. Fullan discusses how changes of this nature involve the difficult process of the construction of new meanings that often run counter to the teacher's tacit knowledge and understandings about teaching and learning.
He further emphasizes that for educational change to occur, change on this level of general pedagogical knowledge and beliefs in each individual teacher is necessary. Reinvention of classroom practice innovations David W Sansom. He is interested in teacher change, and investigating why and how in-service teachers may change beliefs, attitudes, and classroom teaching practices.
Abstract Experienced teachers are introduced to classroom practice innovations during in-service education and training INSET programmes. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved. You do not currently have access to this article. You could not be signed in. Sign In Forgot password?
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