How to Start
Saturday, October 4, 2008 at 08:43AM 
The most important part of learning through projects isn’t amassing knowledge about any particular subject, but mastering how to learn.
So we start by asking children, “How can we find out about this?”
Running concurrently with our study of any particular subject is the study of learning itself: Where is the information? Who knows about this? Where can we go? What can we see?
Then, after we collect facts: When do we really know? How do we tell what’s important and what’s not? How do we explain what we know to others?
“How can we find out about this?” They may suggest books; they may suggest the internet. They may make surprising suggestions, like “Let’s ask Grandma!” They may make really interesting suggestions, like “What about that place we went last summer? I saw something about it there.” The work that we’re doing when we do project work is learning the ropes of how we acquire knowledge. We can look things up in books, we can look at websites, we can watch movies. We can visit the places where things happen in real life; we can interview experts in person or by phone, letter, or e-mail. We can ask our friends, our family, our neighbors.
There are a myriad of ways to learn about something. Rather than handing these things over to our children as a fait accompli, we want them to discover them on their own.
You’ve heard about slow food; this is slow learning. If you bring your child 20 books from the library, then announce a trip to the museum on Friday, you may succeed in getting done sooner. But if you let your child go to the library and talk to the librarian about how to find books, let your child decide which books look like they have the best information ... well, it’s going to take a lot longer. But they are learning all the while.
Even something as simple as talking to the librarian themselves is a huge accomplishment for a young child. In our adult world, we always want to race ahead; getting there first is seen as a win. In this, we need to slow down to a crawl. Take your time and examine every step of the process, because when your child really knows it, they own it, and they can access it whenever they choose.
More important, [we] had developed guidance strategies for promoting behaviors in the children that enabled them to begin to become self-directing, self-disciplined, able to make choices, and to engage in projects for sustained periods of time. — Ann Lewin, Model Early Learning Center
Reader Comments (24)
I only get glimpses of what is going on under there by the connections and insights that unfold themselves in their play and in our conversations. This kind of learning does not bear up well under a traditional teaching model that relies on "assessment" to measure learning.
But I am used to relying on an assessment model to assure myself that I am doing a good job for my students. I have used it to measure my teaching, and it is just as woefully inadequate in this capacity as in the first.
Once again I am forced to trust the unmeasurable - and relax in the hope that although I cannot measure it I can experience and benefit and learn from it. I am looking forward to putting out new roots of my own through Lori's inspiration and the challenge of exploring project based learning with my kids.
Most schools use the standards to plan what they will teach, thus breaking learning up into pieces that correspond to the different subject areas (math, language arts, science...) and even to the specific benchmarks. This is where we get the phrase “teaching to the test”.
Project learning is holistic. Reading, writing, researching, drawing, constructing, measuring, computing, experimenting, comparing, contrasting, discussing, reporting... But you can still identify work done during the project as meeting those original learning standards. You just do it as you go along, and you plan to make up for anything that isn’t covered.
Allowing children to learn this way requires trust – trust that delving into a long-term project really will give children what they need. In a school setting, it requires the administrators to trust the teachers — that they will make sure the students are meeting the learning standards and that they will address any areas that aren’t satisfied during the project work. It requires allowing classrooms to do different work — because every group of children will create a unique project. Usually, schools are not comfortable with this. In homogeneity is safety.
The need to assess varies greatly among homeschooling parents, but is uniformly very important to institutional educators, who at every level are required to meet standards imposed from above. This need has created a situation where students are learning facts and skills that are disconnected from each other and from real life.
Authentic learning requires authentic assessment.
I like the new look of your blog too. Very classy!
• identifying there is something i need to know
• figuring out who has that information
• communicating my needs to others
and etc.
jill, thank you! you are too good to me. :^)
thanks for this post, Lori. (I took notes in my journal....it was THAT good!)
It sounds so simple when you say it that way... feel rather sheepish I hadn't thought of it myself...
*grin*
megan, i have years of working on this, after all. ;^)
Thanks for the encouragement to "slow down to a crawl".
Blessings,
Shannon
So at least TWO early childhood professors read this blog! I do think it's best to teach students (i.e. college ece students) in the way we want them to teach children. I'm really still working on this! I teach so many different classes that sometimes it's just too much to be as active in all of them and still have a personal life. This semester I'm on sabbatical and trying to do some project work with my granddaughter who spends several days a week with me. Lori has been a great inspiration to me! If you have any ideas on college coursework ideas, I'd love to hear them! My big issue is that I don't teach the activities courses except for infant/toddler, only practicums, child development, families, etc. Okay-enough chatter on my part.
Re: libraries and librarians-I'm so proud of my Mikayla for feeling totally excited to ask the librarian to help her find a book about birds. When they got to the books, she figured out that "No, I really want a book about cardinals, red birds!" So cool.
Nancy
if you want your children to do projects, you must make time for them to work on them .. that could be time each day or time a few days a week, but it must be consistent. are you suspecting you want to do a more traditional curriculum (due to the use of your word “imposed”)?