We found this project through Reader’s Digest and are very interested in implementing it in our school. What are your thoughts on doing this as a class topic vs. individual topic? I ask this specifically for countries/areas where resources and access to information are limited and individual topics would be difficult to research in depth.

Hi Jason,

This is a great question. I completely agree with Annabella’s response and would also like to offer some suggestions. It seems as though we tend to immediately think of knowledge as having to come from written materials. However, knowledge can be found in a variety of resources that exist outside of the “written” word as well. Such knowledge can be found in experimentation, observation, interviews, and hands-on experience. Knowledge from experts found within your community, parents, other teachers and peers can provide valuable insight and can also broaden the scope of the child’s thinking. That being said, it would then be a good idea to choose topics that are locally and culturally appropriate. For example, you wouldn’t assign children to study fish if you live in an area that is semi-arid or in a desert climate. Ideally, in such circumstances, the internet can also provide some valuable information, if one may have even limited access. However, I believe that the internet can also be used sparingly (especially in the beginnings of exploration), as there is much to be learned from the alternative methods I have suggested above. While this might not completely answer your question, I do hope it helps to provide some insight into how one might go about this in the circumstances you’ve described.
With best wishes,
Stacey
LID-SFU

@Jason
I have visited the Corbet Charter School, where students have been working on LiD topics for up to 4 years. While asking students about their topics, the student with fungi, said his dad took him out on hiking trips to find the various kinds of fungi that exist locally in the woods. The student was able to name the 5 most common varieties. Most of the rest of his portfolio was information gathered off of the internet. (Including the fact that the world’s largest organism happens to be a fungus called the honey mushroom [http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=strange-but-true-largest-organism-is-funguss] I learned that from a 3rd grader!)

I thought this student had very robust portfolio for his age but the resources that it took to build it would have been exactly what Stacey suggested above.

Hopefully this example helps

Maybe I can respond to the three above questions/comments. Mark asks about parents or grandparents leading a LiD project at home. I haven’t heard of any grandparents doing what you suggest–but then the idea is still relatively new. I have heard of some parents beginning topics with their children, and I have also seen the idea promoted on home schooling websites for parents/others homeschooling children. The LiD team would be interested to hear how it goes if you do try it, Mark.

Jason mentions Corbett school, where the LiD program is now approaching the end of its second year there (not fourth–yet.) There is, as we anticipated, a significant variety among the students’ portfolios at the school. One of the things we are constantly trying to emphasize–and which you can see in the materials on the “Teacher/School Resources” pages–is that the students should be encouraged to explore a rich variety of sources in gathering knowledge, especially experiential sources. That’s not to disparage the value of the internet and books, but to emphasize that LiD is designed to be multidimensional and multidisciplinary.

Catherine’s is an excellent observation. As with any educational activity, children are likely to do better with parental involvement, and are likely to do better to the degree of parental involvement. But not, of course, invariably. One of our hopes for LiD is that it will provide students who normally find little in school of any interest to begin seeing how learning can provide significant pleasure. We still do not have clear evidence that it can do this on any large scale, but we do have many anecdotes from teachers and parents that LiD can engage students in a unique way.

In our small religious school, with combined classrooms (1-2, 3-4, 5-6) we’ll be using LiD in it’s “standard” fashion but with a broader concept of topic. For students in grades 3 to 6 – and there are just 15 of them at this point – each student will be assigned one Jewish community from a text entitled the “Atlas of Great Jewish Communities” about which to become an expert at their own level. They’ll receive just the pages from the text concerning their community from which to begin their learning in depth. Their portfolio supervisor – at this point, me, though I hope to enlish a public school social studies teacher to assist me or to take over completely – will encourage them to “find themselves” in the community and continue to branch out in what ever direction they wish. I’m just getting started, but for our students who are only in class 3.5 hours per week and also have other topics, this will be something they can “own” . Thanks for the resources so far. I’ll keep you posted – when I can – about how the journey progresses.

In response to Fleur above–First, sorry it has taken so long for the email message to appear. Second, I’m not clear why you have only six topics. From where are they being derived? Why not randomly take topics from the website here? You are introducing a number of significant differences from the basic LiD ideas and I’m not clear what educational advantages have determined your decisions and what educational advantages you think will come from the differences. Maybe worth having a look at the book and seeing the reasons given for doing it the way suggested there. I’d certainly allow each child at each year level to have a different topic, and allow them significant freedom in developing their topics in their own way. I would minimize the number of overlapping topics. If you wish to emphasize this feature of the program, you might have one younger and one older students sharing the topics, but I’m not sure about the idea of “study groups.” Mind you, as you plan for them to meet as groups only once per month, maybe that might make an interesting addition to the LiD plan, though I think there are also costs to it. You may prefer to do something like this, of course, but it takes from LiD mainly just the idea of the lengthy time period, and you seem to see it only as a one year pilot program. Well, this isn’t a very cheerful and welcoming response. Sorry. I only mean that what you are proposing has a number of differences from the LiD project and, apart from a more detailed conversation, I can’t really see the educational advantages you will gain from the changes.But, we’d all be interested to hear how it goes!

In response to Catherine’s July 31st. message. I did forward this to Melanie Young, who is a member of the LiD team, and she replied as follows: “I think you might draw upon the example of Linda’s student who was special needs (I can’t remember the particular label). Although he couldn’t settle in the library, he did spend time looking for books for other students, contributing to the shared class project so to speak. On the other hand, I don’t remember her saying anything about how well he did in his own work. Certainly, David Futter noted that students who typically did not do so well in ‘regular’ school, did very well with LiD.” This last reference is to a teacher in Victoria who used LiD with a class of students who had various problems with regular classrooms–whose reflections are posted in the “Resources” section in the navigator bar. Some were very bright and others had various difficulties dealing with curriculum materials. I don’t remember the details of the interview with David later, but he did indicate that a number of the least able students actually engaged with LiD as they engaged with nothing else in school.

Vito M. Dipinto
vdipinto@nl.edu
Submitted on 2011/08/30 at 5:36am

The Learning in Depth Project just might be the way to transform the standardized test crazed culture of American public schools to one where children learn to think and learn some things to think about in school. You have to imagine the possible in order to discover the actual. I think the Learning in Depth Project is a way to implement the “actual.”

After 5 years of offering Learning in Depth to the students of our school I asked a teacher of 9 -10 year olds to ask her students to write a comment on their impression of LiD. These students have been participating in LiD anywhere from 1 to 4 years.
Below is a representation of their responses. Enjoy! Linda Holmes

“I think LiD is very interesting because you are the only one that is doing a topic about something. In the class you are able to tell your classmates about your topic. The best thing about learning in depth is that you’re a professional at that topic.”

“The best thing about LiD is learning about your topic that you don’t know yet.”

“Learning in Depth is definitely something I’m going to be doing for the rest of my life. It’s so exciting because you never know what you will learn. It’s always surprising.”

“I think Learning in Depth (LiD) is the best because you get to learn about something you don’t know very much about. I enjoy going to the library to look for facts.”

“My topic for LiD is sea life. I think Learning in Depth is fun and interesting. You draw pictures and learn facts. It teaches you a lot. Learning in Depth is my favorite subject,”

“I think LiD is awesome!”

“In Learning in Depth I like going and reading about my topic because my topic really interests me. I also enjoy going home and researching on our computer. Also, I like to read the stuff I printed off because you expand your knowledge about a topic that interests you. And that’s some of the stuff I like about LiD.”

Kieran Egan wrote:

Hi Sen,

This is, as you might imagine, a question a number of people raise. It is not one that is easy to reply to adequately in a small space because it touches on fundamental ideas about the nature of education. The answer is tied into the revolutionary ideas of Rousseau which have affected education profoundly during the past two and a half centuries since he wrote Emile. The influence of his ideas have been most powerful in North America in the past century and a half. Put simplistically, prior to Rousseau most people thought of education in terms of the kind of knowledge that constituted the best educational program. Rousseau’s contribution was, crudely, to psychologize the process of education, and see it in terms of  the acquisition of skills and processes or inquiry, and the other things you mention. This important revolution managed to throw some of the baby–to mangle a metaphor–out with the bathwater of traditional educational ideas. One of my interests has been developing children’s, and adults, imaginations. One of the things that became clear early on in my work was that the imagination works only with what one knows. The more one knows about something, the more easy it is to be imaginative and creative about it. Our schools have tended to take on board the Rousseauian, and progressivist, belief that one should focus attention on developing skills and processes of inquiry and “how to” knowledge very largely, while minimizing the traditional focus on learning a lot. The other point that is well developed in Robin Barrow’s book Understanding Skills is that there really are no ways to teach how to inquire or critically think or discover in some generic sense. These work only in the context of particular knowledge, and the more knowledge one has about something, the better able one is to apply these “skills.” So, my answer, simplistic though it is (but you could learn more about it in my book The Educated Mind: How cognitive tools shape our understanding (Chicago University Press) or in The Future of Education (Yale University Press), is that we have tended in current schooling, and thinking about education, to underestimate the influence of acquiring a lot of knowledge for developing precisely the processes you mention, and that there is no way to adequately develop those processes without learning a great deal. The imagination–we argue in the Imaginative Education Research Group (IERG–www.ierg.net)–is one of the great workhorses of learning, and for it to get up in the morning it needs the food of knowledge.

Best wishes,

Kieran Egan.

I am wondering if any French Immersion teachers have implemented the LiD program as yet? If so, what have been your experiences – both the positive and the hurdles?

Is it feasible to modify LiD for use in a high school statistics class? If so, I am interested in modifications used or those that come to mind.

Hi Worth,

Thanks for the discussion items. First,
I am constantly amazed at how people have modified aspects of LiD to make it work in unexpected context and with different subject matters. I can’t think of anyone who has modified it to fit statistic classes, but the usual way of doing something like that is to begin the class by allotting, or allowing choice according to appropriate criteria, topics that are generic and important to the field being studied. Each student then develops a portfolio–or whatever you want to call it–on the topic they get. They then make a presentation either once or twice according to your pedagogical requirements. Often works surprisingly well.