making space for their ideas
Tuesday, March 3, 2009 at 08:00AM I observed and documented to find an intense interest. I was sure that I had chosen something that [my child] was really interested in. I asked if he wanted to study [this topic] and he was very excited about it. We brought home several library books, and I thought we were on our way. But then every time I suggested something that he could do, he wasn’t interested. And then he seemed to stop being interested in [this topic] and moved on to [something else]. What happened? — K.
First, I want to say that project learning isn’t easy. It is a learned skill. And the only way that you can learn it is to practice. Along the way, you are going to take some wrong steps — it’s unavoidable! — but then you know what not to do to the next time.
A negotiated curriculum is a delicate balance.
You want to have as many as possible of those perfect moments when you see your child really immersed in learning, working at their challenge level, excited by what they are accomplishing, being joyful and engaged.
You have a lot of power in this learning relationship with your child. As the adult, you start out with all the assumed power. Until your child is confident that it is okay, he won’t confidently take the controls and start driving the ship. And all along the way, if he senses that you are taking over, he will most likely just give up. And when he does that, his interest drains away.
Interest, motivation, ownership — these things are bound together. His deep interest is what motivates him to investigate and explore and work. His accomplishments give him ownership over the work.
When is a project not a project?
Your child has revealed or chosen an intense interest that you have decided is worthy of project study. You are ready to begin!
Your mind immediately begins to fill with all the cool, fun, interesting activities he could do — the neat places you can visit — the ways he could tie this topic to other interests.
Well, of course it does — because you are the adult. You are his learning mentor. You have tons of great ideas right off the bat!
But the goal is to make space for the child to have his own ideas.
Because that is the real point of project-based homeschooling — not to learn specific facts about his topic, not to create an impressive model to show Aunt Betty, not to fill his bulletin board with awesome sketches and photos. The real point is to help your child negotiate the ropes of
• exploring his own interests
• having ideas
• making plans
• overcoming mistakes
• connecting ideas
• communicating with others
and etc.
You can immediately see so much possibility in his project topic because you already know how to be a successful learner.
If you carefully observe and document to discover an intense interest, then start providing activities and plans, you aren’t doing a project, you are doing a unit study — an interest-led unit study, but a unit study just the same.
And while you can accomplish a lot of learning in a unit study, it doesn’t allow children the opportunity to learn to direct and manage their own learning. It doesn’t allow them to experience the entire arc of learning, from the initial recognition of an interest all the way to becoming an expert who can teach someone else what they know.
Even suggesting activities and experiences takes something away from your child — the opportunity to have his own ideas.
Does this mean you never make a suggestion? You clam up and stay completely out of it? No. It means you very intentionally stay quiet and use the lightest touch possible. You try to be patient and allow your child to come along at his own pace. You see your child as capable of constructing his own knowledge, and you see your role as his mentor, helping him do the work he wants to do.
Remember that in this learning relationship, you want to allow your child to drive — while you sit beside him, supporting, encouraging, and being his first, best audience.
When he starts off boldly down a path that you are sure isn’t going to work, you are patient and go along, allowing him to try his own solutions, because making mistakes is a valuable learning process, too.
When he is frustrated, you gently encourage him to try something else.
When he loses track of where he was going, you gently direct him back to his own forgotten questions and plans.
Your role is crucially important, but it is a supporting role. He is at the center, and the work he is doing is extremely challenging and sometimes overwhelming. Not the work of, say, building a model — the work of owning his own ideas, making his own plans, coming up with possible solutions to his own problems, etc.
If his light is going to shine, yours can’t be so bright that his is indiscernible.
You model what it means to be a successful learner. You learn alongside him and demonstrate what it means to be really interested, to ask good questions, to be resilient and try again when you make a mistake, to be excited, to communicate your opinions clearly, to ask for help when you need it … the list of learning skills you have to share goes on and on.
You do these things because you have a clear goal in mind — helping him learn how to learn, not by doing assigned tasks, but by negotiating the process himself, with your support.
The more experience he gets in having ideas, making decisions, negotiating problems, bouncing back from disappointment, the more confidently he will approach his next project. Project learning is a learned skill — for children and for the adults who support them.
So, keep track of your ideas in your journal — all the cool things he could do, the great places you could visit — but remember that your primary goal is for him to have his own ideas and to help him carry them out.
Reader Comments (42)
I'm interested in what others have to say, I may be off in my advice...
okay, first, i think it’s important to right away just throw away your idea of what this jupiter dictionary is going to look like.
“it’s taking a lot to get him there” — so, he’s working. if he is spending time poring over dictionaries and encyclopedias, that is learning time. if he is thinking about his jupiter dictionary, that is learning time.
did he bite off more than he could chew? that’s okay. you want him to have big, ambitious ideas. is it taking him forever? that’s okay, too; there is no timeline for project work. it’s possible he may grind to a halt; can you be okay with that?
when you say “i really think he’ll be disappointed if he doesn’t accomplish his goal” — yes. he probably will be disappointed. he didn’t do what he set out to do. rather than trying to shield him from that disappointment, or finding a way to soften his landing, can you let him experience that? and talk about it with him in a nonjudgmental way?
there was a lot of good talk about assessment in this past weekend’s open thread. at the end of this project, you could ask how he feels about what he did, what he thinks worked, what didn’t work, what he would change for next time. in the end, what is more educational for him — bombing out on his goal and figuring out why? or having it turn into a mom-managed task so it can get finished?
you can look at it this way — if the lesson you want to teach is perseverance, is that taught better by allowing him to fail or doing whatever necessary to get it done?
i would suggest that maybe having it not work out might be very educational.
i would also suggest that there’s a chance he wouldn’t fail, or quit. there’s a chance he would come to a grinding halt. think on it. decide to change his plan so he could complete it. or decide to do what it took to finish. *all of these choices are legitimate.* he learns from all of them.
if the whole point is letting them control and direct their own learning, then we have to allow them to fail. because failure is an unavoidable part of life. and failure teaches some really great lessons. personally, i would rather learn those lessons at 6 rather than 36! ;^)
i think some parents fear that if they allow their child to quit, then their child will always be a quitter. but *within the realm of the project*, your child is supposed to be making the decisions. if he figures out that you won’t let him quit, you won’t let him fail, you won’t allow his work to fall below a certain level, then that teaches him something. he knows he’s not really in control.
doing this sort of work with children is very challenging for *teachers*, let alone parents — parents are much more emotionally invested in their children’s success!
think of it like a lake. you can stand at the edge and just get your feet wet — figuring out what really interests your child, then building a unit study around that interest. you can wade out hip-deep — embracing much of the philosophy and allowing your child more freedom, but still doing a lot of guiding and shaping. and finally, you can go in over your head — surrendering to letting your child really negotiate the process for himself.
*children want to be successful.* and they want to please you. they want the attention and praise of other people. they want to accomplish what they set out to do. you have to trust that if you let go, their motivation will fill that empty space where yours used to be.
and i’m not saying it will happen immediately! in fact, i’m saying that just as your child learns to walk by first learning to balance, then cruise the furniture, then finally take a few toddling steps and sit down hard on their bum, it is a methodical process. the point is, you can hold their hand to make sure they don’t fall, or you can let go and watch them go through the somewhat painful process of figuring out how to do it on their own. but you’re going to have to let go eventually. so why not now? let them figure this out now, and they’ll be so much better prepared later to be in charge of their own learning, their own decision-making, their own lives.
my suggestion would be — let him figure out how he wants to make this dictionary. if he asks for a blank book, fine. if he asks you to staple together three sheets of notebook paper, fine! let him own it.
the great thing about doing projects with groups of children — in classrooms, but you could easily create homeschool project groups — is that they really motivate each other to complete and extend work. one child who finishes motivates them all to finish. one child who takes another child’s idea and then extends it — adds something interesting — brings the original child back in to improve their own work. it’s a great collaborative process that raises the level of everyone’s work.
but even without that, *nonjudgmental*, respectful discussion about the work — ongoing self-assessment — can continually refocus a child’s efforts. when you ask the questions i listed in my comment up above, it really matters *how* you ask them! you need to not be filling your tone of voice with implied judgment — you can’t ask “how do you think this project went?” and broadcast your scorn and criticism. you need to be genuinely interested in what your *child* thinks, and allow them to have their own opinion.
as a project progresses, you can regularly sit down and ask your child — how is it going? what are you thinking? is there more you want to do with this? is there anything you need? what do you think of it? what satisfies you? what would you like to improve?
your *attention* is, as always, a gift. the fact that you *care* about his work — *and his opinion of it!* — becomes yet another motivating force.
Also, I'm thinking that I need to order about a case of duct tape (for my mouth) before I start this type of project-learning with my daughter!
at my school, a single teacher worked with fifteen students who were all doing project work alone or in small groups. she would move among them in the classroom, sometimes observing, sometimes documenting, sometimes working directly with a student or students. then they would share their work and talk about it at a meeting that concluded each class.
this was possible in our school because we had a strong focus on supporting students to work independently — we made sure they had all the materials and tools they needed, they could get what they needed/clean up/put things away on their own, etc.
creating an environment at home that supports working independently is very helpful, for obvious reasons.
we have been doing this sort of work for many years, so my sons know they can come to me if they need me, if they need a material we don’t have or a tool they can’t find, or if they just want to show me something. we work in a very relaxed way; there isn’t really any anxiety, if you know what i mean. i am available to them, but we are each working on our own thing, occasionally stopping to share and discuss or ask for help.
lol re: the duct tape. ;^)
sally, thank you so much! :^)
I'm finding that project-based learning (at least how we practice it) involves more hindsight than forethought. I'm never quite sure where my kids' interests will lead us until I look back on the hour/day/week/month and realize that our crisscrossy curvy path actually includes many related themes and connections. Without a journal, this would be impossible for me to see. Thank you (yet again) for your valuable wisdom, Lori!
So after reading this new post and comments and going back and reading older posts (again!), and being near the end of Annabelle's first project, I think I am starting to understand more, though I have a long way to go.
I think overall her first project was a huge learning experience for me (ha! and her!), esp. with regards to my role and how to give her space to do this kind of work. There were times in the project where it truly was her work and her project and then there were times where I overstepped and took over, even with the ending. I approached her with putting her work in a book and she was really excited, but then nothing else ever happened, so today I asked (non-judgemetally, of course ;) ) what she wanted to do with her work. And she told me (she wants to hang it up in her room) and I asked her to tell me when she knows how she wants to hang it up and what she needs from me.
Then we had a great evaluating conversation about the project and there are things she still wants to do, so I will help her get the things she needs to make that happen.
Also it makes me want to work harder in getting our studio space set up, so it is easier for her to do clay when ever she wants. I think also I need to spend less time setting up things and more time writing about what she is saying and doing. The studio would help with that.
I am still not sure what is next for her, but the snow we had yesterday seemed promising, with drawing, painting, snowflake catching, colored water on snow, digging and stirring, magnifying glasses and lots of excitement and energy. Though not sure how this project will continue when we hit 70 degrees this weekend and it is March and we live in North Carolina. There are two bowls of snow in our freezer.
Another idea, which just came to me is John Denver. She is obessed. She pretends John Denver, giving concerts, while strumming a guitar and singing his songs, she loves to watch him on you tube and today she said she wants to make a book about him and all the instruments he played.
So I am still working on how to help her, when to set stuff up, when to suggest, when to just give her space. She is 4 and we are both still learning how to do this!
Maybe the research for him is like the squishing and rolling of a ball of clay, you gotta do a whole lot of it before you can make a pot.
Such a great post today. I have been thinking about suggesting we work on a loose summer project but really confused about getting started. Great food for thought Lori.
aimee, it sounds to me like you have made an excellent start. there is no way to avoid sometimes overstepping; the only way you really *find* the line is by, oops, crossing it. and each one of those experiences really teaches you so much about the next time. as projects and years add up, you get a really good feel for how to work with your child — and each child is different. they need different things from you. but all those accumulated experiences do add up to feeling confident about doing this kind of work with children — even confident that when you do make a mistake, step over the line, accidentally flub things up .. it will be okay.
and that (neatly!) is exactly what project work is for children — a chance to become confident, successful learners, who don’t expect everything to go perfectly every time, but feel sure they have what they need to get the job done in the end.
re: future project ideas .. her fascination with john denver and putting on concerts has a lot of possibilities in terms of examining, drawing, painting, and making models of musical instruments, maybe visiting a concert hall .. it sounds like you have plenty of promising material to work with!
thank you, mary, and i like your point about the need for lots of messing about at the beginning of any project (something i am always going on about ;^) — another nice thing to remember is that even if they don’t complete some particular piece of work in one project, they still learn a *lot*, and they carry that forward to their next project. their skills, their capabilities, and their enthusiasm for working tend to grow as they do.
christina, thank you so much! lol, love your story about her asserting ownership over her project. and i should interject here, for any newcomers who might be reading, that project-based homeschooling is a *negotiated* curriculum, and parents can set their expectations and requirements. but children are supposed to be making decisions within those parameters. it sounds like she enjoys it, too. :^)
re: fear of letting them quit, i was thinking about this more since writing that last comment. we are very comfortable with the process of how a baby learns to walk. when they toddle over and sit down hard, we don’t lose all hope and start imagining they’ll have to be pulled around for life in some sort of wheeled cart. that’s because we’re very familiar with the process of how babies learn to walk; we’ve seen it a million times. contrast that to watching our children learn. *this* is all new, so a little scary. it takes faith and trust — in your child .. and in yourself.
-You (the parent) observe and document the children's interests. Then , do you choose a project and tell them what it will be, do they choose, do you work it out together? And does this change over time?
-I understand the idea of stepping back and giving them the opportunity to do this their own way, but how do they know, at least at first, what resources are available to them? How do they know what media are possible to use? How do they know how to choose high quality resources? (I'm realizing that I can maybe be a little controlling about this).
-I have often wondered about striking the balance between allowing their interests and passions dictate their work habits, and somehow instilling a sense of discipline. I'm actually thinking here more about things like playing an instrument than project work, but I struggle with this in many arenas. I mean, for most people, there are times when interest is not enough, when you need some kind of habit or structure to keep you going (I think -- but maybe not?)
-I also wondered something about your project journal. Of course this would be an individual thing, but do you use one journal per project? One per kid? Or do you just use one to write down everything until it is full and then move on to the next?
Thank you!
kat, that depends on .. how someone unschools! grab a hundred unschooling families and you’ll find a lot of variation in how they do things. project-based homeschooling (a term i coined to describe the Reggio-inspired, project-based learning that i champion) is a very intentional, deliberate, purposeful way of working with children to mentor them as they master the process of learning, constructing knowledge, and creating deep understanding. it could easily be an approach to *how* one would unschool. it could also be *part* of a different kind of curriculum. it’s an approach; not a method.
mary beth, whew, lots of questions. ;^)
for your first couple of questions, i’m going to point you to a couple of posts here on the blog that should help, and then please come back if you have more specific questions —
How to Start: http://www.whiteoakschool.com/camp-creek-blog/2008/10/4/how-to-start.html
Choosing a Topic: http://www.whiteoakschool.com/camp-creek-blog/2007/10/11/project-based-learning-choosing-a-topic.html
also, can you tell me how old your children are? because that would help me tailor my advice for you.
re: instilling a sense of disciplne, the need for structure, etc. — remember this approach doesn’t have to be your entire curriculum (though, as we were just saying about unschooling, it could be). you are making a space for them to learn to manage themselves, a space for them to fail and then figure things out.
re: “times when interest isn’t enough”, this is something that is *all* about interest. the child provides the interest, which then provides self-motivation. it’s not imposed from the outside. again, giving a child the opportunity to experience doing his own meaningful work.
i do use a separate journal for each project. each project has a beginning, a middle, and an end — it has its own story, its own arc. usually there is so much material for each, i can’t imagine how confusing it would be to mix projects! :^)
sarah, thank you! and it’s true — i am a big champion of failure. :^) get out there! mix it up! get your hands dirty! :^)
So, again - you posted just the right thoughts at just the right time. You're magic that way.
but seriously — that “i think she isn’t engaged, [then] she totally surprises me” — that’s something you have to wait for.
have you thought about putting together a little urban farm homeschooling group to give annika someone other than gunnar to ping ideas off of?
you are going to be busy next week with farm planning and gunnar’s new business!
We do have another family that we're urban farm homeschooling with, which is fantastic. So much more happens when we all do it together for a while, and then she retreats with her notebook and comes back with ideas.
And yes - we are going to be very busy next week. Big plans! You know that I'm hoping Gunnar's new business will be just the thing he needs for that "aha!" moment on homeschooling if the charter school thing doesn't work out.