The Reveal Ceremony for our Learning in Depth topics was a big success. Five Primary classes chose to participate in the Learning in Depth experiment to assign each child a randomly selected and unique topic of study. The topics were chosen from a list of very general subjects designed to for this purpose by educational theorist, Kieran Egan. The LiD topic will follow the child through the remainder of their education at Corbett, allowing them to build knowledge both broad and deep.

First the five primary classes arranged themselves before a big audience of friends and family. After a brief introduction to LiD by Mr. Dunton, the ceremony began. Class by class, students lined up to receive their topics, announced by Mr. Trani. The promise of new learning and a crackle of excitement went through the air with each child’s reveal. When everyone had received his or her medallion and notebook, we took pictures and had cookies and juice together.

At Corbett Charter School. [From the website: http://corbettcharterschool.blogspot.com/, and Superintendent Bob Dunton’s blog:]

“Launching Learning in Depth

This event was truly a career highlight for me, as the project encompasses much of what I believe about powerful learning experiences. I would like to thank all of the teachers and administrators who put hours of thought and work into making this event possible, and of course all of us are grateful to Kieran Egan for taking the bold step of devising and advocating such a simple and elegant approach to deeper learning.”

Some background to the Corbett Charter School:

“Friday, January 1, 2010

Intro to Corbett Charter School

Corbett School District serves some 900 students in grades K-12 and is comprised of two, K-12 schools: The Corbett School and Corbett Charter School.

Corbett Charter School is a K-12 public school that is an integral part of The Corbett School District.

Charter schools are public schools of choice, meaning that parents enroll their children in CCS based on their preference and not on where the family resides.

Corbett Charter School serves approximately 300 students and employs Imaginative Education. Imaginative Education, based on the work of Kieran Egan and his Imaginative Education Research Group, conceives of education as the cultivation of the cognitive tools that are critical to intellectual and social maturity and success after high school.

CCS students attend ‘charter-only’ multiage (K-3, 4-6, 7-8 and self-contained 9) classrooms in grades Kindergarten through Nine. They are taught by full-time charter school teachers and all of their classmates are charter students. Charter students participate with Corbett School students in specialized classes such as band, secondary p.e., and Spanish. They may also attend ‘mixed’ math classes depending on their individual needs.

At the high school level, Corbett School District has built one of the nation’s most prolific Advanced Placement programs, and Corbett Charter School purchases space in those specialized offerings. All Corbett Charter School students in grades 10 through 12 also take an interdisciplinary course of study based on the United States Academic Decathlon. Members of this class have the opportunity to compete in the Oregon Academic Decathlon, which Corbett has won for the past two years. The winner of the state competition will have the opportunity to compete at the national level.

Corbett Charter School, from its unique approach to primary education to its nationally-renowned secondary offerings, represents an unparalleled educational opportunity for the young people of the region.

Posted by Bob Dunton at 10:38 PM”

“University of Chicago Press is publishing the book in the summer of 2010. The Contents of the book are as follows:

Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter One: The problem
Chapter Two: The proposal
Chapter Three: Objections and Responses
Chapter Four: The nature of the topics
Chapter Five: Some operating principles and examples
Chapter Six: Building the portfolio
Chapter Seven: What do we do next?
Appendix: Foundations for Learning in Depth
Conclusion

“You can read the introduction to Learning in Depth: A simple innovation that can transform schooling by clicking here. [link to: http://www.ierg.net/LiD/2009/10/23/introduction-to-learning-in-depth/].”University of Chicago Press is publishing the book in the summer of 2010. The Contents of the book are as follows:

Contents
 
 
 
Acknowledgements                                                                                                
Introduction                                                                                                            
Chapter One: The problem                                                                                    
Chapter Two: The proposal                                                                                    
Chapter Three: Objections and Responses                                                
Chapter Four: The nature of the topics                                                            
Chapter Five: Some operating principles and examples                        
Chapter Six: Building the portfolio                                                                        
Chapter Seven: What do we do next?                                                            
Appendix: Foundations for Learning in Depth                                                
Conclusion                         

The basic idea

In the first week of schooling, each student will be randomly assigned a topic to learn in depth. The topics might be such things as “birds,”  “apples,” “the circus,” “railways,” “the Solar system,” etc. Each student will then study his or her assigned topic until grade 12, along with the usual curriculum. Students will meet regularly with their supervising teachers, who will give guidance, suggestions, and help as students build personal portfolios on their topics. The aim is that each student, by the end of her or his schooling, will know as much about that topic as almost anyone on Earth. The project proposes, and draws on what research is available to suggest, that this process of learning in depth has the potential to transform the schooling experience of nearly all children by transforming their relationship to, and understanding of the nature of, knowledge.

Some potential benefits of LiD

For students: Provides knowledge of some topic in great breadth and depth; Gives a deep understanding of the nature of knowledge; Engages students’ imaginations and emotions in learning; Builds confidence; Builds expertise in use of internet and organizational skills.

For teachers: Teachers discover along with students; No pressures to grade and assess; Working with enthusiastic learners; Students’ depth knowledge will enrich regular teaching.

For the school: Provides a means for older and younger students to cooperate in learning; Makes the school into a centre of expertise on many topics; Enriches the culture of the school; Displays of topics will provide attractive focus of attention.

This proposal for a new element of the curriculum is based on the belief that learning something in depth will add an important dimension to each person’s education. It is further based on the principle that the more one knows about anything, the more interesting it becomes. (A 4 minute radio news interview, with a student, parent, teacher, and LiD expert can be heard here: http://www.ierg.net/news-items/learning-in-depth-on-cbc-radio).

Imaginative Education Research Group: www.ierg.net/LiD

Byaround fifteen years of age students who have continued to elaborate the set oflearning tools described above commonly experience another quite fundamentalshift in their understanding, which can be described in terms of some newlearning tools they prominently deploy. The most evident index of this furthertool-kit is the use of a new vocabulary in which theoretic abstractions becomecommon. Earlier in their lives, for example, students would have known themeaning of a word like “nature.” They would have thought of it in terms ofanimals and woodlands, the sea and birds, and so on. What begins to happen atthe transition to this new kind of understanding is development of such generalideas as “nature” so that it is seen increasingly less in terms of particularfeatures and more as a complex system; it is as though the connections betweenthe features of the natural world become more prominent than the individualfeatures themselves. Similarly a whole range of facts and ideas and knowledgetake on a new sense and significance by being seen as elements of general processesrather than as simply more or less interesting elements.

I hope this isn’t too abstract a way of putting it,and that it is clear how this new theoretic way of thinking is distinct fromthe forms of thinking that were shaped by the previous set of learning tools.The shift becomes clear in the way students begin to form theories of historyand society, ideologies, metaphysical schemes, and so on. They begin to build anew theoretic world, which they populate with these abstractions.

An example might help introduce what I mean. Iremember driving our sons to soccer when one was about thirteen and the othersixteen. We were coming up to a federal election and many of the lawns andwindows we passed had sprouted posters in bright red, blue, yellow, and greenencouraging us to vote for one or another candidate and party. In the electionfour years earlier, my children had been interested in how many signs were upfor “our” candidate, in who had the most signs and the biggest signs, in whichparty was likely to win, and in how anyone could vote for the villains whoopposed our good guys. Putting his soccer boots on in the car, on this lateroccasion, one son asked whether we had to pay to have a sign on our lawn, andwhether people with the really big signs had to pay more, or did the candidatespay us to put signs on our lawns. I told him that the candidates and theirparties paid to have the signs made, or made them themselves, and people putthem on their lawns freely to show their support. “But why would people votefor some party because of a sign on a lawn?” one of them reasonably asked,adding, “Wouldn’t people vote based on their principles, rather than be swayedby lawn signs?” We discussed this for a while, and their questions spread tothe ways in which lawn signs were a part of the process of democraticelections.

Mypoint is to indicate an example of a shift in thinking and in the set ofcognitive tools being brought into play. And my purpose here isn’t to try toexplain why this change occurs, typically in the mid-teens amongstudents who have continued to develop the sets of learning tools discussedabove, but rather to describe some of its features in a way that illustrateshow teachers might engage the theoretic imagination in learning.

“The sense of abstract reality” is a tool thatdevelops as a part of the development of rational, logically structured formsof thinking. It has historically been the source of our understanding of theprocesses by which nature works, and our increasing control over theseprocesses, but can come at the cost of our alienation from the natural world—sothat we might see nature, for example, only as a set of “resources.” The students’portfolio supervisors can use, and encourage in students the use of, theabstract language of the theoretical world.  A dictionary of word origins canbe invaluable for elaborating on the etymology of theoretic language, andthereby supporting the development of theoretic learning tools. 

So the student might be encouraged to explorepomology, perhaps by going to the websites of universities where there aredepartments devoted to the study of fruits, and perhaps later by visiting suchinstitutions. What are the current interests of scientists dealing withpomology? What are “replant diseases” and how are they being treated? What arethe conflicting theories involved in treating them? And what is the best way todeal with codling moth infestations? What are the underlying theories that leadto different approaches? There are hundreds of similar topics and issues, andtheoretical disputes that the student will by now be ready and probably eagerto join. They might alternatively become fascinated with the representation ofapples in art and literature, discovering how apples serve as symbols ofamorous, aesthetic, or religious meanings from historical changes in the waysin which they appear and play roles in courtship, domestic life, and art.

The “sense of agency” isa cognitive tool that enables us to recognize ourselves as related to the worldvia complex causal chains and networks. So we can become more realistic inunderstanding how we may play roles in the real world, and understand ourselvesas products of historical and social processes. This realization that our verysense of self is a product of the social and historical conditions that haveshaped the world around us is often quite disturbing to students even whileincreasing a sense of intellectual potency. Portfolio supervisors canincreasingly look for ways to encourage students to take part in activitiesthat will help stimulate their sense of agency.  The aim would be to helpstudents to look “outward” from their portfolios and see how the knowledge theyhave been accumulating can be brought to bear in the real world.

The student can begin to engage in a range ofsocial or even political activities connected with apples (or with whatever thestudent’s topic is). Perhaps the student may have concluded that the reductionin the available apple varieties in supermarkets is potentially dangerous,should some disease devastate one or more of the commonest varieties. Thestudent could be encouraged to write to owners of orchards, first seeking theirviews on the greatly reduced varieties currently grown, and see whether theythink it is a problem, and to consider the orchardists’ reasons carefully. Ifthe student still thinks there are real dangers in the reliance on so fewvarieties, she can be encouraged to write letters to her politicalrepresentative to express her concern. She can join groups who are takingaction to preserve a greater variety of apples. She might conclude that thequantity of pesticides currently used in apple cultivation is in excess of whatis needed and is posing both an environmental threat and possibly may beleading to some damage to apple stocks and to many of the non-damaging lifeforms that would normally exist along with apples. After hearing the case ofthe orchardists, if she still concludes there is a potential danger, she couldjoin political action groups that lobby for reductions and controls overpesticide use and other chemicals that lead to more profit from apples but at arisk the student reasons is excessive and indeed risks future profits. Shemight explore sources of public information about chemical and insecticide usein orchards, and engage in what she concludes are appropriate public actions toinform others and to lobby political representatives. Alternatively, of course,her public actions might be engaged in on the side of the orchardists andgrowers. What matters is the movement from knowledge to related public action.What also matters is that the action be recorded in one or another form ormedium and be added to the student’s portfolio.

 British gardeners, in particular, keep a widevariety of apples in cultivation, but most of the apple varieties that existedin the US a hundred years ago are now gone, in favor of the few commerciallyprofitable varieties in which “shelf-life” has been considered more importantthan taste. Taste is often sacrificed by picking apples too early, allowingthem to ripen under artificial conditions on the way to market, rather than on thetree. The student can become active, by writing letters, seeking interviews andlearning the problems the farmers experience, and perhaps making the case tothe farmers for adding some varieties to their orchards, using data they haveavailable in their portfolios.

The student might look for the opportunity to growapple trees and to learn how to propagate them. Often allotments are availablenear cities for those who lack space around their homes. The student might makecontact with pomology departments of universities, locally or on-line. She canrequest information about current research projects, and ask whether theremight be a role for a knowledgeable volunteer. Perhaps she might, in theirdream job, even be able to travel with a research group to Kazakhstan to study the health of the original apple trees, perhaps counting grubs onleaves, or doing some grunt work that can add importantly to knowledge. Shemight be able to do such work more locally, of course. 

“General theories and their anomalies” is a toolthat enables us to generate abstract ideas about nature, society, history,human psychology, and then recognize their inadequacy, and rebuild them intomore complex ideas. How does this work? I have described very briefly abovethat a distinctive feature of this new toolkit involves forming theories, andsome of these are very general and often simplistic. So one finds studentsquite suddenly sometimes beginning to think about whether the world is gettingbetter or worse within a huge historical timeframe. If, for example, thestudent begins to shape a theory of history that is optimistic, seeing, almostin a Victorian sense, progress in action in all spheres of life, then there aresome facts that will be anomalous to this view; some facts will clearly runcounter to it. So the fact of ThirdWorld poverty, despite excessiveaffluence in some parts of the world, is an anomaly to the optimistic generaltheory. The student’s theory need not be disproved by such a fact, though. Thestudent can make the theory more sophisticated or nuanced, claiming that thegeneral progress of the world is not regular, and so incorporate the anomalousfact. But it might then be pointed out that those deprived areas become athreat to the “developed world” because of their resentment and armedhostility, and also poverty breeds diseases that are then transmitted aroundthe globe and threaten massive destruction to all societies. The theory thenneeds to be made more sophisticated again to accommodate these further anomalies.And so the process of general schemes being threatened by anomalies and theanomalies forcing the general schemes to become more sophisticated toaccommodate them, and so, dialectically, on, is one of the tools we can see atenergetic work as students build their theoretic worlds.

The project supervisor at this stage needs to bealert for students beginning to develop the most general theories concernedwith apples and their place in the human and natural worlds. One realm for richtheory development, to continue examples from above, is the battle betweenmodern intensive orchard cultivation and the dangers, under market pressures,of reducing the varieties and taste of cultivated apples, and also the threatscreated by massive use of chemical insecticides and fertilizers. Perhaps thestudent might form a theory about organic methods of apple production.Anomalies to that theory will include the problems of producing enough apples tomeet market demands and also adequately controlling apple pests. Learning moreabout these anomalies will compel the student to develop an increasinglysophisticated theory of organic production of apples. The aim in raisinganomalies, which may become a significant task for the supervisor—but we canalso rely on the students’ own accumulating knowledge to throw up theseanomalies as well—is not to overthrow the student’s theories, but rather tomake them more and more sophisticated. While the student might begin withidealistic views, the gradual accumulation of anomalies might lead her toconclude that current industrial apple production ensures good tasting fruitmade accessible to everyone at a low cost.

“The search for authority and truth” is a furthertool that takes on a particular shape and importance with the development ofabstract theoretic thinking. Because meaning is seen to be derived from generalideas, it becomes vital to determine which ideas are true. An objective,certain, privileged view of reality is sought. Among the historical products ofthis cognitive tool at work have been dictionaries, encyclopedias, andtextbooks—repositories of secured knowledge.

The sense that truth and meaning areto be located first in the general and abstract, drives the theoretic thinkerconstantly, even if subconsciously sometimes, to look for the abstract sourcein which authority and truth can be located. If the abstract thinker lovessinging, it will no longer be sufficient to simply prefer one singer toanother. He will draw up criteria for goodness in singers, and compare singersin terms of these criteria. As theoretic thinking becomes more sophisticated,this becomes a tricky business. Callas or Britney Spears may seem bestaccording to some criteria, but Bartoli or Ani DiFranko better according toothers. Perhaps one should have different criteria and categor ies for contraltos and sopranos or for differentgenres of music? Or if the student begins to think theoretically aboutsomething as mundane as shopping, he might wonder whether shopping has replacedreligion for some people; or whether the economic benefits derived fromconsumption of certain goods that do little for the lives of many consumers areoff-set by spiritual desiccation and environmental degradation, or not? Theywill reflect on how we could reliably compare such things? What are thebenefits to our patterns of shopping compared to the way people in oralcultures gathered what they needed and wanted? How can one find the “True”answers to such questions?

Our student who is building a portfolio aboutapples may use this tool to drive inquiries into the truth about varietyreduction, or the adequacy of the criteria for establishing what counts as anew variety of apple, or whether Newton was really stimulated in his thinkingabout gravity from watching an apple fall, or any of an indeterminate array ofissues that may seem to have discoverable and certain conclusions. The student’sportfolio supervisor might be alert to such questions in case the student maybe hesitant in taking on this more theoretic approach to her or his topic.

“Meta-narrative understanding” is a tool that allowsus to order particular facts or events into general ideas and form emotionalassociations with them. That is, we don’t just organize facts into theories,but our tendency to shape even our theories into more general meta-narrativesalso shapes our emotional commitments to them. For example, think of thedifferent meanings and emotional associations that emerge when we try to makesense of the destruction of the World Trade Center’s twin towers on September 11, 2001 from mainstreamAmerican and Mid-Eastern Islamic perspectives.  In the West, this event fitscommonly into a meta-narrative in which it can be made sense of only as an evilact of terrorists, in response to which a “war on terrorism” is justified.  Ina militant Islamic meta-narrative, the oppressive Western “devils” were beingstruck by heroic soldiers of God who sacrificed their lives rather than acceptcontinual oppression and the suppression of their values and way of life.  Thisexample illustrates how a meta-narrative is not just a logical structuringdevice but is primarily responsible for orienting emotions to the topic.  Noone is disputing the central facts or events.  It is their meaning that isshaped by the meta-narrative an individual is using.

The student’s supervisor might be alert to the mainmeta-narratives commonly used in making sense of the topic. Even apples will besubject to some meta-narratives.  The student might be encouraged to questionwhether the current abundance of apple varieties and the vast orchards in China,the U.S.A., and Russia represent a perversion of an organic developmentof plants in general. Woodlands and varied grasslands have been obliterated togrow an over-abundance of a fruit that has helped degrade the biodiversity ofthe planet. Alternatively the student can shape the knowledge so far gatheredin the portfolio into a meta-narrative of the increasing accessibility of themiraculously healthy apple that has contributed so much to human health thoughthe centuries.

At around fifteen years many students will findthat the growing amount of knowledge they have accumulated begins to requiremore complex modes of organizing and also, relatedly, more complex modes ofsense making. The new toolkit that students develop in response to the array ofknowledge contains prominently such learning tools as we have glanced at above,including the sense of abstract reality, the sense of agency, general theoriesand their anomalies, the search for authority and truth, and meta-narratives.These tools are related aspects of the abstract and theoretical world thatoften begins to be built in mid and later teen years. We may currently seeclear evidence of this theoretic form of thinking in only a minority ofstudents, but I suspect that is due to the fact that so many students learn toolittle knowledge to kick this process into action. I hope it will prove muchmore common if this project becomes widely implemented. I recognize that this sectionis more complex and abstract than the earlier sections. The kinds of thinking Ihave been describing, and the learning tools associated with those forms ofthinking, are much less common in current forms of education.

In summary:

Conclusion

WhatI have focused on in this booklet are some principles that might help teachersengage students’ imaginations in their topics at different ages. I have chosena set of strategies that are a little unusual, but no less effective for that.There are, of course, many other strategies that teachers can draw on to helpstudents build their portfolios. Many excellent books and websites can givesupport to the somewhat new teaching task of encouraging this kind of learningin depth. Of particular use might be: http://intermountainforum.org/lid.This site is dedicated toproviding support for teachers and also serves as a repository of ideas andexperiences that teachers can share about ways to best support students’learning and engage their interests in their topics as they develop theirportfolios. It also provides a forum for discussing a number of problems,difficulties, triumphs, techniques, examples and whatever that are involved inthis new kind of teaching role.

I haven’t dwelt much that commonly used cognitivetool that develops with language use, and that’s the puzzle or problem. Thistool is perhaps too familiar to need much elaboration, but setting up problemsor puzzles can stimulate students’ explorations in many directions. The teachercan constantly raise questions that may encourage students to develop furtherpieces of knowledge, even if initially the knowledge is only very general andimprecise: How many different kinds of apple can you find? Where do their namescome from? Do apples float—why or why not? What is your favorite apple? Wheredo the apples you buy come from? How many colors can apples be? How many songsand stories and nursery rhymes mention apples? Why are apples good for us toeat? And so on.

In summary:

Learningtools for the middle years

Once students become fairly efficiently literate,reading and writing with ease and using many of the tools that require theintricate use of the eye in organizing and classifying knowledge, some new cognitivetools come into play. One way to think about the shift to literacy is to see itin terms of a shift from a dominance of the ear to the eye in gatheringinformation. Literacy is commonly thought of as a more or less complex skill,whereas we might better think of it as a toolkit, invented a few thousand yearsago, and accessible now to anyone who learns to use those tools appropriately.Literacy brings with it a whole range of additional learning tools that wecommonly don’t think of when we focus on simply the coding and decoding aspectof it. Here, I want to focus on the often-neglected toolkit that comes alongwith literacy.

Certain activities can facilitate this shift fromear to eye and also show students how literacy can give new powers with theaccumulation of new learning tools. Usually we see these changes begin to comeinto prominence at about ages seven, eight, or nine. So the supervisors ofstudents’ portfolios at these ages might be alert to signs of studentsspontaneously using the kinds of tools I will describe below, and might thenhelp students to begin to reorganize the information they already haveaccumulated in their portfolios in more efficient, eye-dominant, forms. Inparticular, this might be the time to develop students’ digital on-lineportfolios—perhaps even to the point of scanning or taking digital photos ofearlier drawings or pictures and having them available in the student’sportfolio server space. Attention should be given to helping studentsreorganize their portfolios, and to prepare categories and file systems thatwill be more effective in dealing with the increasing knowledge, and the newkinds of knowledge, that students will gain in this period.

During these years, the worlds of fantasy fade awayand are replaced in some degree by the light of common day, or with what adultsrecognize simply as a more realistic view of things. Santa and the Tooth Fairyyield to fantasy creatures of a different kind, whom students’ don’t believeare true in the same way, and they yield also to real-world heroes. This newsense of reality does seem to be influenced by particular forms of literacy. AsJerome Bruner puts it:  “literacy comes into its full powers as a goad to theredefinition of reality” (1988, p. 205).

So we see in the kinds ofstories that most readily engage students a new concern with reality. Anne ofGreen Gables and the rabbits of Watership Down make quite differentaccommodations with reality than did Cinderella or Peter Rabbit. Evensuch fantasies as Superman, Spiderman, and the Hulk and their equivalents allcome with elaborate explanations for the fantasy elements of the stories,suggesting that they fit into some kind of reality; fairy godmothers are simplyasserted, but Superman needs an explanation, however implausible or impossiblewe might find the account of his escape from exploding Krypton and so on. Anoddity of much educational literature at the moment is the suggestion that onecan best engage students’ interest by starting with what they already know andis a part of their everyday environment. This seems odd in the context of what arefound most interesting to typical students at these ages—those spies, pirates,star warriors, superheroes, etc.

The everyday world around students is notapparently what they find most interesting, rather it is “the extremes ofexperience and the limits of reality” that most powerfully engage students’imaginations as literacy becomes fluent. That is, the reality that we firstengage imaginatively during these years tends to focus on the extremes, on itsmost exotic and bizarre features, on the most terrible and courageous events.We are familiar with this kind of material from sensational newspapers, TVshows, and from publications like The Guinness Book of Records.Supervising teachers might sensibly be alert, then, to how to use this learningtool of engagement with the extremes and limits of reality and experience inexpanding students’ portfolios in new directions and dimensions. (The attentionto the extremes and limits of reality, to the exotic, weird, and bizarre, isnot disconnected with students’ everyday reality; rather it is how theyestablish the context of their everyday reality and, in some deep sense, itsmeaning.)

If the topic is apples, students might beencouraged to begin exploring the largest and smallest kinds of apples, therarest, those that have been cultivated for the most extreme climates, thosethat last longest after being picked and those that wither fastest, thesweetest and sourest, and so on. A student might open a file on “apple records”to contain such information. Where are the largest orchards, and to whom dothey sell their apples? How are they transported? How many tons of apples weregrown worldwide last year and how does this compare with previous years? Howmany of those original orchards in central Asia continue to produceapples? Are they in danger? The exotic and extreme can be routes to massiveamounts of engaging information.

During the years from around eight to aroundfourteen or fifteen, students feel increasing independence, but are typicallyhemmed in by rules and regulations that they commonly find irksome. They seemuch that they want, much that they want to be, and remain relatively powerlessto gain either. A learning tool that becomes quite prominent during this periodis “the ability to associate with heroic qualities”. We identify as heroesthose people who are able to overcome the threats that hem us in, constrainingus from gaining those things we dream of. We lack the money or power or skillto achieve what we would like, so we associate with those who most clearly havethe heroic qualities that enable them to achieve precisely what we want. It isa tool that helps us overcome our insecurities; it enables us to overcome someof the threat of alienation involved in the new sense of reality. Byassociating with those things or people that have heroic qualities we can gainconfidence that we too can face and deal with the real world, taking on thosequalities with which we associate.

The story of William Tellgains a new resonance for students at this age. They want to know now about thereal person behind the story. Johnny Appleseed is a mythic figure who reflectsthe heroic activity of real people who spread apple trees and cultivated newvarieties; it is now time to introduce the true stories of the real people whocarried apples across the Americas, bringing to the fore the real heroes inthis epic tale. Who made the greatest contributions to the development of theapple from ancient times to the present? Are the most widely cultivated applesrecently developed? What is happening to those older varieties of apple thatare not suitable for modern forms of transportation and supermarket sales—arethere heroic people working to preserve varieties? Who and where? The appleitself can be seen as heroic: a vulnerable plant like many that havedisappeared over evolutionary time, which overcomes its vulnerability in onesmall and remote area of the world to spread and proliferate across the planet.

“Grasping knowledge through human emotions” isanother tool that enables us to get beyond the surface of any knowledge to itssource in human emotion. All knowledge is human knowledge, discovered orinvented as a result of some human emotion. This tool allows us to seeknowledge through the emotions that were involved with its past creation orcurrent use, and so grasp its deeper human meaning. We often forget that duringthe ages from about eight to fifteen, students make sense of the world verylargely in personal terms; not personal simply in the sense of their own localinterests, but rather in the sense that it is through seeing knowledge in termsof universal human feelings that it gains much of its meaning.

This learning tool also encourages us to directstudents’ attention to the people involved in the story of apples, or whateverthe topic is. Who were the cultivators? What were their motives? Who developedorchards and against what opposition or threats? Who discovered the healthbenefits of apples, and how did they feel about their discoveries? In all suchcases we are asking, again, what’s the story here, or what narrative can wediscover that shows the emotional meaning of the knowledge being learned.

The “sense of wonder” is another key learning toolin our initial explorations of reality. It enables us to focus on any aspect ofthe world around us, or the world within us, and see its particular uniqueness.It serves like a spotlight, bringing something into bright focus while somewhatsuppressing everything else. We can turn this sense of wonder onto anything,recognizing the wonderful in each feature of the world: “everything iswonderful.” This tool can provide the gift that allows us to recognizesomething wonderful behind even the most routine and taken-for-granted things.The starting point of all science and all inquiries is “I wonder why . . .” Itgives us the ability to imbue any aspect of reality with heightened importance.

The story of the apple is replete withwonders–historical, medicinal, technical, “orchardic”, etc. Students can beginto explore the apple in greater detail, focusing on just what are its healthfulproperties, how it grows, its roles in history and art, its development aroundhuman settlements, its fruity competitors for our palette and their variouspros and cons, and so on.

Around age seven or eight one of the more curiousactivities of nearly all children begins. They commonly start to collectsomething or start a hobby. What is going on? Well, one explanation is thatthey are seeking some security in this new world of reality in which they findthemselves; that world might be infinitely extensive and by getting control ofsome small part of it, through their collection or hobby, they gain somesecurity that it isn’t, at least, infinite. These hobbies commonly continuetill around age fourteen or fifteen.

The learning tool that is tied in with “collectionsand hobbies” can find energetic work to do in expanding students’ portfoliosduring this period. If the topic is apples then one might look forfeatures of apples that open them up to the collecting instinct. This might bethe time for the development of relational tables of all the variety of applesthe student can discover, or elaborate “family trees”. The on-line portfolio canhave pictures of as many varieties as can be found. (I’m not sure what realartifacts connected with apples might be collected for the physical portfolio:perhaps photographs of all the apples and apple tree varieties the student has located,pressed leaves from various trees? I was going to add as a kind of joke “pips,”assuming they would all look much the same but maybe some of our apple expertsmight indeed be able to distinguish features of pips.)

The kind of intellectual energy one sees beingspent on students’ hobbies and collections can also be harnessed to expand andalter somewhat the work they do on their portfolios. Ideally, their portfolioswill become a kind of hobby or collection during these years from around sevenor eight to fourteen or fifteen.

“Changing the context” is a tool that enables theimagination to grasp a richer meaning of any topic. The classroom is often anemotionally sterile place; so routine that one topic after a while begins tolook like another.  By shifting the context in which knowledge is learned—often by use of simple devices–students’ imaginations can be brought vividlyto life, engaging the material much more richly.

As students begin to develop this intermediatetoolkit, the portfolio supervisor can deliberately encourage them to takedifferent perspectives on their topics from those that dominate the portfolioto this point. The aim is to see the topic in many contexts, through manyperspectives. If they haven’t done so already, they might be encouraged to startlooking at the biology of apples, or their medicinal properties, or discoveruses of apples in myth stories or other fictions, to explore the history of theapple, to study apples in art and perhaps to try to copy paintings and then dotheir own life studies, to attend to the ideal climatic conditions fordifferent varieties, to monitor and note the decay of different varieties ofapple, and so on.  

At around age seven oreight, many students’ spontaneous interests change quite significantly, and thekinds of stories they enjoy also change. These changes are clues to some of thenew learning tools we can use to refresh their interest in their topics anddraw them to expand it into new dimensions. We need to recognize that improvedliteracy brings with it a somewhat distinctive conception of the reality thestudents find themselves among. Their interest in their topics can be enlargedby a focus on extremes and limits, on the strange and exotic, on “records”associated with it. Knowledge tends to become more engaging if seen in thecontext of human lives and the human emotions that students share, andespecially if they can see new aspects of their topic through the heroicqualities of people involved with it. We will want to draw their attention tothe wonderful features of their topics—to those things that are attractivebecause of their unusualness or because they transcend the everyday. We willalso seek to show them that their topic has features that can engage thecollecting instinct or can be like a hobby. These learning tools remainprominent in students’ “tool kits” till around fourteen or fifteen.

In summary:

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How do we manage to get the five year old, or the seven year old, sufficientlyinterested in dust or apples to get the project off the ground? What will theydo for the first year or so?—especially if they can’t read. Mind you, there areother vulnerable points, such as the major transitions that commonly take placein students’ interests at around age eight—some time after fantasy worlds haveevaporated, tooth-fairies and Santa Clause are long discarded with the dolls ofchildhood, and reality-based hobbies and collections begin. The othersignificant transition is at about age fifteen, when the hobbies andcollections tend to be left behind in their turn and are replaced by a greatersense of independence, more theoretical concerns, and burgeoning social agency.

Building a portfolio over twelve years is going toinvolve a fair amount of hard work. What I want to do in this document is showhow we can draw on sources of energy in students to engage them with this workand enable them to see it as worthwhile.

I’ll suggest some teaching principles we can use,derived in part from another project I have been engaged in. This one hasinvolved a Vygotskian-oriented exploration of some of the socio-culturallyderived cognitive/psychological tools that students have available to maketheir learning most effective at particular phases of their educationaldevelopment. Well, that’s one way of putting it. Another would be to say thatit has focused attention onwhat studentsfind spontaneously engaging at different ages and then try to infer from theirengagement more general principles that can be applied when teaching. Perhapsit will become clearer as I give some examples. In giving illustrations of theexamples I’ll imagine a portfolio based on apples. My purpose here is not to give descriptions of thekind of teaching approaches that can be found in many good books and websites.Rather I want to focus on approaches that may seem a little unusual at first,but should be particularly helpful in engaging students’ interest in their LiDtopics.

Learningtools for the first years

The teacher who is supervising a few portfolios candraw on some of the following learning tools to engage students as they launchinto their topic. These tools include the story form, binary opposites andmediations, forming images from words, metaphor-use, puzzles and mystery,rhyme, rhythm, and pattern, and humor.

Take “the story form.” I don’t mean fictional stories,though they are hardly to be excluded. Rather I mean “story” in the sense thatwe use the term about the evening news. What’s the story on the bridgecollapse, or what’s the story on the election, on the movie star’s latestbehavioral extravagance, on the local team’s struggle to win the cup, and soon. That is, we are not asking for fictional accounts of these topics. We wantthe facts, but we want them in a special form, in which the emotionalimportance of the facts is vividly brought out, and the facts are organized sothat they have the greatest interest and impact. We can invite our youngstudents to begin their topic, and can introduce them to it, by asking what’sthe story on apples, or dust, or leaves, or trains, or whatever. That is wewill be looking first for what is emotionally engaging about it, what canvividly capture their imaginations in their topic.

Portfolio supervisors need to develop a skill allgood teachers are expert in: looking at topics in such a way as to engagestudents’ imaginations in their content. They share this skill with the goodreporter. “What’s the story here?” If our topic is apples, the story hasto do with the development from a restricted source of the remarkable varietycurrently available of this wonderfully healthy and delicious food, and has todo with how apples affect and have affected human lives. If that’s central toour story, how do we get the young child into it? Well, let’s see how we candraw on the help of some of the other learning tools.

We can use “binary opposites” to give the studentsa first and clear hold on the topic. Bruno Bettelheim noted the “manner inwhich [children] can bring some order into [their] world by dividing everythinginto opposites” (1976, p. 74).  Once we have such oppositions in place, then wecan mediate between them and gradually build a more adequate conception, butfirst we need to establish our binary grappling hooks. Imagine a world in whichthose wild apple trees in Kazakhstan were blighted seven thousand years ago and simplydied out. Had that happened, we would now not have any apples; we would not beable to imagine the apple. So one binary opposite can be simply the presence/ absence of apples, and how lucky we have been. We could choose lessdramatic binary opposites to build our story on, of course. We might choose sweet/ sour, or rare / common, or human ingenuity in cultivation /chance development, as oppositions onto which we can hang the astonishingstory of apples.

We can also think about what “images” can get thechild engaged in apples, or dust or trains, or whatever.By images I don’t mean simply pictures, but rather emotionally charged sensesthat can be formed in their minds with words. We can have an image of a smell,for example. So I mean something more like an emotionally charged and perhapsdiffuse association formed in the mind. The forming of one’s own unique imagesin the mind is one of the great early stimulants of the imagination. So whatemotionally charged images come to mind when we think of the wonder of themighty apple? Because apples are so common today, with supermarkets carryingsmall mountains of as many as ten varieties, it is easy for students to takethem for granted. Also, of course, the abundant availability of sugars, and thechemical industry’s contribution to appealing to the taste buds of children,reduces for children today the sense of the deliciousness that apples held inthe experience of children in centuries past. So our first images should try todisrupt that taken-for-granted sense of apples as routine, plentiful, and notespecially tasty. We could tell students that in olden times visions ofparadise very commonly involved a garden in which fruit trees were common(Hebrew, Chinese, Celtic, Germanic, Japanese, Greek, African, etc.). Fruit wasdelicious and greatly prized, and paradise was easy access to fruit. And of allthe fruits in the world, the apple has been the most highly prized. It is themost abundantly produced fruit, and fruits are the most enjoyed nutritiousfood, so the apple has been one of the world’s most celebrated foods. Later thestudents can learn that the word “fruit” is derived from the Latin fruor,which means “I delight in” or “I enjoy.”

An image suggested above is between the apple andparadise. The very word “paradise” comes, via Greek, from the Persian name forthe walled gardens wealthy Persians built for themselves long ago. Xenophondescribes his amazement that throughout the great Persian Empire the richest people had attached to their homes large walled gardensin which they would grow flowers, cedar, cypress, palm, and apple trees. Thegardens were set usually in hot and arid landscapes and engineers directedwater into them, providing cool shade and greenery among predominantly brownand tan surrounds. These gardens were called pairidaeza, andrepresented security, calm, and beauty to their owners, and to all who sawthem—the walled garden being as close as one could get to paradise on earth.The teacher can tell students about these gardens in such a way as to call upin their minds this association between the apple and the peaceful places inwhich they were early cultivated. Pictures of such gardens can help buildstudents’ images of such places and what they meant to their owners, as canstories that bring out the contrast between the harsh and arid world outsideand the safety and green shade within—particularly appropriate stories chosenfrom the One Thousand and One Nights.

Gradually the teacher can help build up other images, from the astonishing story of theirelaboration from those early edible forms of apple in Kazakhstan thousands ofyears ago to the plump, rich, and juicy varieties available today. The image inthe mind is of ingenious cultivation gradually plumping out with deliciousfiber into multiple forms, colors, and flavors across the centuries. We mightcall up the image of some of the famous apple cultivators—perhaps the EtruscanApi—to make clear that this proliferation of varieties is an achievement ofindividual people, not some inhuman process of development. Or the image can beof the apple’s interactions with our bodies: What happens when we eat one? Ifwe are what we eat, what does the apple do for us? What amazing fact about apples suggests animage we can make important to the story we are to tell? The adventures of thewonderful apple can include William Tell and Johnny Appleseed and all thosefairy tales that bring out the magic of the golden apples of the sun inmemorable images.Another of the great learning tools that comesalong with an oral language is the ability to interpret and generate“metaphors.” This is a capacity of great importance to the elaboration oflanguage. It’s a somewhat magical and mysterious ability to see one thing interms of another. Indeed, sometimes it seems as though we can see almostanything in terms of almost anything else: the tree of life, my heart is a stone,music is the food of love, the foot of the hill. You are probably familiar withthose exercises that give two random lists of words and invite you to combineany two and explore the new meaning created.

The ability to recognize and generate metaphorsseems to be very potent in young children (Gardner & Winner, 1979), tiedperhaps to the periods of most rapid language development. We get a hint ofthis power when we see a four year old playing with an empty box as a house, acar, a shoe, an airplane, all within a ten-minute period. So we will want toengage this metaphoric ability with the student’s topic early on, so they cansee it in numerous ways. An apple is literally a fruit, but metaphorically isit can be a boat floating on a river to the sea, or wholesome sign offriendship, or a computer logo, or a symbol of the theory of gravity, or anexpression of appreciation to a good teacher, or anything we care to make it.We can help the students to keep a record of metaphoric uses of their topicsand explore what these metaphors add to their understanding of it. The story ofapples is truly one of progress—that powerful modern metaphor of development ina direction favorable to us.

The “sense of mystery” is another “tool” that comesalong with language use. Language allows us to describe the world in symbols,and also to lie, to create fictions, and to articulate to others what we know.Mystery is an important tool in developing an engagement with knowledge that isbeyond the students’ everyday environment. It creates a sense of how much thatis fascinating that remains to be discovered. All the topics we might selecthave mysteries attached to them, and part of the teacher’s job in making anytopic engaging to students is to give them an image of richer and deeperunderstanding that is there to draw their minds into the adventure of learning.Too often we represent the world to students as known, and we represent theirtask as to accumulate the knowledge that we already have. This is, of course, apart of education, but when we forget that our small circle of secure knowledgeis bounded by a vast ocean of mystery we make the educational task rather dull.When we make clear that we are engaged in a journey of discovery, surrounded bymystery, we better represent what the educational task is really like, and openup possibilities and wonder.

If our topic is apples, we can suggest a sense ofmystery by picking up from the binary opposites–presence / absence–on whichwe can hang our story of apples. We might encourage the student to wonder aboutother fruits that might have existed in the distant past, but which did notsurvive. We have apples by chance, and others have certainly been lost bychance. What wonderful experiences, of taste and health, have we been deprivedof? It needn’t take much to stimulate the sense of mystery. That suggestionalone can be sufficient, if planted at the right time—to use a resonantmetaphor. A small blight long ago might easily have deprived us of apples—whatfruits, flowers, and trees were less lucky?

In addition we can wonder how many varieties ofapple is it possible to develop and what might future varieties include? Whatcolors—those silver and gold apples? Can we expect bigger and bigger apples?How do the sun and earth astonishingly conspire to pack the colorful skin withhealthy fiber? How magical is the neat skin, the rich pulp, and the seededcore? What mysterious changes it passes through on the branch, from bee-fumbledflowers to promising buds and then plumping out during the summer months tomellow fruitfulness till it ripely falls to the ground or is picked by gratefulhands? How perfectly beautiful the many-hued varieties are, especially whengathered in baskets or barrels or on the table in bowls—rich metaphors ofnature’s beneficence? Why are apples used in many religious traditions as amystical or forbidden fruit?—so many ancient stories combine the seductivenessof apples, to which people succumb, with some punishment for giving in to suchsweet temptation.  We can find ways in which even the young child can beintroduced to this mysterious dimension of apples by telling some of thesestories, and pointing out that this unexpected connection recurs in differentstories.

“Rhyme, rhythm, andpattern” are potent tools for giving meaningful, memorable, andattractive shape to any topic. Their roles in learning are numerous, and theirpower to engage the imagination in learning the rhythms and patterns oflanguage—and the underlying emotions that they reflect—is enormous. They areimportant in learning all the forms of knowledge and experience that we codeinto symbols. So we will want to find the more vivid and dramatic rhymes,rhythms, and patterns connected with any particular topic. We can start withsimple nursery rhymes. If apples is our topic, we can begin a file withsuch near-nonsense rhymes as:

Do you like apples, do you like pears?

Do you like tumbling down the stairs?

Thatone, mysteriously, kept our children in belly hugging laughter for years, aseach went through t he magical pointof language development for which it worked so well.

Teachers can invite physical participation withsuch rhymes as:

Five red apples

Hanging on a tree [five fingers held down]

The juiciest apples you ever did see!

The wind came past

And gave an angry frown [shakes head and looksangry]

And one little apple came tumbling down.

Four red apples . . .

Andhere’s an item for those mastering the alphabet:

AWas an Apple Pie

Awas an apple pie,

Bbit it,

Ccut it,

Ddealt it,

Eeat it,

Ffought for it,

Ggot it,

Hhad it,

Iinspected it,

Jjumped for it,

Kkept it,

Llonged for it,

Mmourned for it,

Nnodded at it,

Oopened it,

Ppeeped in it,

Qquartered it,

Rran for it,

Sstole it,

Ttook it,

Uupset it,

Vviewed it,

Wwanted it,

X,Y, Z, and ampersand

Allwished for a piece in hand.

[Takengratefully from: http://www.mamalisa.com/blog/?p=327]

“Jokes and humor” can expose some of thebasic ways in which language works and, at the same time, allow students toplay with elements of their topic, so discovering some of learning’s rewards.This learning tool can also assist the struggle against arteriosclerosis of theimagination as students continue through their schooling—helping to fightagainst rigid conventional uses of rules and showing students rich dimensionsof knowledge and encouraging flexibility of mind. It’s always easy to beginwith such simple items as:

Q. When is an apple not an apple?

A. When it’s a pair [pear].

To “get” the joke one has to be able to see thatthe same sound often does double duty, and so one begins increasingly to seelanguage as an object and not just as an unreflective behavior. That ability tosee language as an object we can reflect on is central to developing whatscholars call “meta-linguistic awareness,” and that ability in turn isimplicated in learning to use language with flexibility and sophistication. Sojokes are not just good fun, but they are also what Lévi-Strauss called bons-à-penser—goodthings for thinking; they have the potential to enlarge our understanding andlanguage fluency.

There are, of course, endless more conventionalkinds of apple jokes, such as:

The children were lined up in the cafeteria of aCatholic elementary school for lunch. At the head of the table was a large pileof apples. The nun made a note, and posted on the apple tray: “Take onlyONE. God is watching.”

Moving further along the lunch line, at the otherend of the table was a large pile of chocolate chip cookies. A child hadwritten a note, “Take all you want. God is watching the apples.”

Oran example perhaps not ideal for school:

Physics Teacher: “Isaac Newton was sittingunder a tree when an apple fell on his head and he discovered gravity. Isn’tthat wonderful?”

Student: “Yes. If he had been sitting in classlooking at books like us, he wouldn’t have discovered anything.”

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The 2 to 3 students are collecting information with the librarian in the computer room (conveniently next door to the library) to learn how to find suitable sites for their topics. The youngest students are struggling with all the print. They eagerly join in a lesson on tracing. With a stack of tracing paper in hand (approx. 6” by 8”) the students place and trace pictures relevant to their topic. This is exactly what my younger students need. They are fully engaged in tracing and collecting drawings of their topic. Tracings are stored in their portfolio folders.
At this point I am also talking with individual students regarding finding out if they know of any fictional work regarding their topics and encouraging them to find out. The youngest students are taking up the suggestion more readily than the older students. The older students have discovered encyclopedias and are fascinated by them.

C.D. and G.G. have started their 4th month of studying their topics, ‘Giraffes’ & ‘Nature’.
M.L. and D.M. have started their 4th month of studying ‘Whales’ & ‘Volcanoes’.
L.M. and GJ.L. have started their 4th month of studying ‘Cats’ & ‘Transportation’.
E.H. has started her 4th month of studying ‘Penguins’. All the children are busy gathering information.

Achievements in January’s plan: 1 item.

• continue learning how to access topic from the general library shelves
• introduce students to creating posters / overheads/ data/spreadsheets with computers
• story writing – creative – imaginative

February, 2009

I bravely decided to let Kieran Egan and LiD know about the progress the children and I are making in LiD. It was also time for me to ask for more direction as to whether or not I am acting within the spirit of what Learning in Depth is all about. I emailed him some photos along with my outline of what I was doing. Kieran responded most positively with what I was attempting to create and asked if there were any way I could get permission to use the photos on the I.E.R.G. website. As always, a picture is worth a thousand words. The January photos of my students in the library speak volumes as to their progress, interest and focus.

I sent home a letter to parents asking for their permission to give I.E.R.G. (Imaginative Education Research Group of SFU) to use their child’s photos on IERG’s website. I have 8 positive responses. It was wonderful to see my students showing up on my screen when I next visited the I.E.R.G. website.

Knowledge Quest

Feb., 09
Dear Parents,

As you know your child has been participating in a program called Learning in Depth (LID), developed by I.E.R.G. (Imaginative Education Research Group of SFU). We are preparing for our second presentations and all is going very well. I have been taking pictures of the students working and presenting their work. Dr. Egan, the lead of I.E.R.G. would like to put some photos of students who are working on LID onto the web site. The photos are needed for purely educational use and no names will be used. Please fill out the slip below and return it to me.
Thank you,
L. Holmes

- – - – - – - – - – — – - – - — – - – - – - – - – — – - – - — – - – - – - – - – — – - – - -

I give permission to I.E.R.G. (Imaginative Education Research Group of SFU) to use my child’s ___________________________ photo on their website. I understand the photos are needed for purely educational use and that no names will be used.
Parent Signature: __________________________
Date: ____________________________

- – - – - – - – - – — – - – - — – - – - – - – - – — – - – - — – - – - – - – - – — – - – - -

Achievements of February’s plan: 2 items.

• continue learning how to access topic from the general library shelves
• Continue training students and using computers where applicable

March, 2009

It is once again presentation time. All the students have been collecting the tracings and pictures they have been gathering over the past few months. I brought in National Geographic and other magazines for children to pull out what they needed. Our presentations will be collages (a picture made by sticking cloth, pieces of paper, photographs, and other objects onto a surface) made up of their collections. Each student has a large sheet of paper they are to fill with their topic collections. All is going very well and the students are very engaged. The more advanced and capable students are challenging themselves with outlining and colouring their collage pictures.
As the students complete their collages they turn to me and once again I bring out the clip boards. This time I give the students lined paper. Their task is to collect questions. They are to ask people (students, parents, teachers, administrators) if they have any questions about their particular topic. Once all the questions had been collected the student will choose three to answer. This would be for their final presentation in June.
I quickly realized we first need to have a lesson on what a question is. Once everyone came together we were able to formulate what a question is, what it does and why we need them. Lots of examples were given and we even categorized the value of different kinds of questions. Some questions are answered by a simple yes or no, while other questions require research, thought and consultation. Which questions teach us the most? Which questions give us the most information? What kind of questions helps us learn?
Now the students were armed and ready to find their topic questions. What were fascinating to watch were the faces of people who were asked to offer up a question. Both students and teachers stopped and took some time thinking in order to formulate what they wanted to ask. In response I heard my students say, “That’s a good question.” Or “I never thought of that.”
Over a two day period most of the students presented their posters, first to their listening team and then, if they were approved by their listeners, the presenter presented to the class. The listeners were reminded to keep in mind the 3 questions that needed to be answered.

• Could you hear the presenter clearly?
• Do you know what the presenter was talking about? Did it make sense to you?
• Was the presentation interesting/entertaining?

A few of my youngest students could not complete their projects and were given extensions and were able to complete their presentaions over the next two months. [Hindsight… I would occassionally partner some of my youngest students with their buddies to give the students more individual support.]

NATURE	PETS
BUGS – WHALES -	GIRAFFES
CATS	TRANSPORTATION

Achievements of March’s plan: 2 items.

• Children are prepared for presenting their research to date
• Continue training students and using computers where applicable

April, 2009

The librarian and I have been blessed with a very willing and thoughtful student teacher who will be with us for the rest of the school year. Having three sets of brains, hands and eyes makes LiD flow as we can meet the needs of our students. It also helps having the Youngers beginning to read with competence, skill and interest.
The questions the children are gathering have come in at a stagering number. Our little library is under a lot of pressure to find the answers the children are seeking. The librarian is now taking the oldest students in small groups to research answers on internet sites. To use the internet our oldest students have had to have permission from parents and internet training from our librarian.
I am taking small groups of students to use the encyclopedia sets. This is slog labour for most of the children as they have to learn skim reading tecniques if they are to get through the mass of information in books. They also are getting bogged down in taking notes. I have not even tried to work on collecting a bibliography from them.
Those students not involved with me or the librarian are working with our student teacher. She is either encouraging, scribing for or listening to students present their ideas.
The students now know the final presentation will be choosing 3 questions from their topic collection and answering them with as much detail and skill as they can.

Achievements of April’s plan… 3 items.

• continue learning how to access topic from the general library shelves
• introduce grade 3s to computer research
• introducing encyclopedia skills

May, 2009

The students continue to work independently on seeking questions and finding answers. We are finding the questions are exciting and fun to collect. It is searching for the answers where we are getting bogged down. [In retrospect I should have had the big buddy class help us for one or two library periods looking up information in excyclopedias and on line. It would have been a wonderful opportunity to have the older students put into practice the skills they have been learning.]
The students and teachers are funtioning on automatic now. There is a rhythm and flow on Friday mornings when we go to the library. If you came into the room you would hear several conversations humming along. Students and teachers discussing a piece of research or showing something they have just found for their topic or something that may help someone else. You would see a few people searching shelves for books, on the floor reading or on a stepstool reaching for the stacks. You would see students engrossed in dawing, writing or glueing work.
I am sitting away from the group… watching and evaluating. What I see makes me smile. I see involved, keen and inspired learners. I realize that I rarely have to discipline students and even more rarely mediate problems between classmates. Over the past few weeks I have realized how much fun I am having as a teacher. This is my favorite time of the week. I rarely have to prepare a plan for the time. Discipline is a snap. People are self motivated and interested in listening to and learning from each other.

VOLCANOES

Achievements of May’s plan: 2 items.

• continue learning how to access topic from the general library shelves
• Continue training students and using computers where applicable

June, 2009

What did the teacher learn?

The final presentations range from 2 to 5 minutes in length if I include the comments and question period. Not a stellar amount of information and yet everything that is presented is from each students’ own research. The students shared what they found and what they understand and what they KNOW. Some of the older students were asked to rate their final presentation. In many cases the older students rated their final project work lower than what they rated other students’ work. In a discussion with these students where they rated themselves lower, they stated they rated themselves against how much they had left to learn rather than on what they had accomplished. The students were focussing on the future potential of their topics and not on how far they had come. Once they shifted their perspectives the students re-rate their final presentations. These students experienced knowledge as ongoing, variable, infinite and within their reach.
This knowing is quite different from former styles of primary project studies where fill-in-the-blank answers are the norm. Often the children read their completed sentence but can not answer simple comprehension questions related to what they just read. The information itself is not important. It is the quantity of completed topics that reigns supreme and topic knowledge is soon forgotten once a new project is taken on. Knowledge is held as a certainty and finite.
With LiD I see my students developing knowledge and a sense of pride in their accomplishments combined with a comforting sense of community. No one does learning alone. The children and adults work together to learn, create and understand. As I stated earlier in this journal, I rarely have to discipline my students during our Knowledge Quest time. In fact, as the year has gone on, self discipline and self direction is prevalent.
Engaging students’imagination and interest was a lot easier than I first thought it would be. Having parents well aware of what we were doing, having the oath and tools to do the job was all helpful in setting us up for success. Letting everyone know I was not going to assess their work and I would work for them was freeing for all of us. They knew my job during LiD was to assist them in seeking knowledge. They also learned to share me, take turns and be patient. And in the end we all had a stimulating experience together, learning in depth.
Having the burden of formal assessment lifted from my shoulders inspired me to fully develop my role as a facilitator / guide / teacher. It is not to say I did not assess my children during their Knowledge Quest. Observation, note taking and student-teacher discussions were valuable in getting to know my students’ learning styles and in making my decisions of what skills, training and direction the LiD project would take next.
A surprising and most gratifying aspect of LiD for myself, a teacher was experiencing how students were transfering their knowledge quest skills into all areas of their daily work. Oration and thinking developed. Student participation in discussions rose. Not only did they have more to say, the quality and complexity of their comments and questions also increased. Students were more thoughtful and open to alternative ideas, realizing that there may be more than one answer to a question. Curiosity in new material presented in other subject areas also rose. A few students even began to see and express how their Knowledge Quest topic would relate to what we were learning as a class.
In doing the LID project called Knowledge Quest I learned many things about my students, colleagues, curriculum studies, knowledge and myself. LiD was very rewarding. What I experienced revitalized my faith in how powerful an individual’s passion is to know. I gained inspiration in knowing how little I truly know and that is just great with me because I will never run out of things to learn, thus I will never… ever… be bored.

Achievements of June’s plan… 1 item.

• Children present their final research for the year – VIDEO?

I ______________________,
will seek, write, create and

learn all I can about my chosen topic called,
_________________________.

I agree to…

• Ask for help and give help when needed.
• Honour the library by caring for and respecting the books and equipment
• Present my work before each report card date.

Our First Knowledge Quest Class in the Library

The day after all the topics were submitted the children receive their portfolio folders, make their oath and place the oath in their folders. We pack a pencil case with tools and we ceremoniously walk to the library. We meet the librarian at the door and she welcoms us in. Once inside we proudly show the librarian our list of topics on a large poster. She helps us find the areas in the library that hold the children’s topics. Beside each topic on our chart the numbers from the library shelves are recorded so the child will return to the books they need for their research. ! [In retrospect it would have saved a lot of time if I had given the topics to the librarian in advance of our coming to the library.]
This was a first lesson of where everything we need is in the library and a beginning to see and understand how a library is ordered. My greatest learning this day is… all libraries are ordered the same way. I never knew that or if I did never thought of it. I see now why the statement, “The more I learn, the less I know.” is so true.
In class Lesson
Each child received an 11” by 17” sheet of paper. They wrote their topic in the center of the sheet and circled it. The children brainstormed words and pictures about their topic. They were asked to draw a line to connect their words and pictures to each other if they saw a connection between these thoughts. An example: ‘Horses’ was surrounded by ‘hay’, ‘colt’, and ‘run’. Hay joined with horses because hay is something horses eat, while colt is a young horse and so on. These cluster sheets are great for displaying what the children know at the beginning. As the year goes by I look forward to see their knowledge and understanding grow. Nonetheless cluster sheets are a great first record of knowledge.

Achievements of October’s plan: 3 items.

• children will learn dictionary skills (way too ambitious)
• encyclopedia access and skills (way too ambitious)
• students know their topics and receive their portfolio folders
• cluster ideas for research
• how to access topic from general library shelves

November, 2008

This is around the time I honestly think I am not doing all this Learning in Depth stuff right. Still, my students seem to be flourishing. In fact, they are producing better results then any of my prior project classes. The results I am most noticing are that students are engaged and are asking lots of questions. My students are keen to tell me what they are discovering. They are talking about their topics with enthusiasm and interest. The students are also helping one another by referring each other to books and materials they come across that may be of relevance to someone else. In particular, one of my youngest students who is struggling with learning has found his role in project time as ‘project assistant’. He works on his topic, Bugs, for about 10-20 minutes and then begins to wander the library looking for books. In my class we call it, a “walk-about”. In his search he finds all kinds of useful items for other students who thank him for his help. This inspires him to search more and thus he has learned how he can positively make a difference in the lives of others. He also knows where all the topics are in the library better than most. All in all, he is finding a way to be a useful and productive member of our research group.
The students are remaining focused for the entire time we are in the library. Conversation is in full force and what they are talking about is what they are doing and what they are learning.
Gratifyingly, I am also seeing students refer to their topics outside of project time. During ‘free time’ at school a few of the children are choosing to study, discuss and create ‘artifacts’ for their research folders.
So how am I doing?
What I am discovering as I travel this unpaved road of LiD is the children need a lot of skills and direction once they have knowledge of how to use the library. Some of my children do not read, while others are struggling with the organization of and retention of the information they are discovering. In order to cope with this problem I am teaching the children to take notes. One method I found useful is giving the children clipboards. As they search the library they can take note of a book or reference material they might find useful. This is great for collecting general information such as title and location of materials and a general description of what the materials are basically about.
I ended up creating 4 Information sheets for students to record and store information on. The sheets are kept in their portfolio folders for future reference. (Information sheets – see below)

 
Information Sheet #1

TOPIC: Apples
TITLE: Ten Apples Up On Top
AUTHOR: Dr. Seuss
LOCATION: Dr. Seuss box
NOTES: (this can be words or pictures)

Information Sheet #2

[This sheet is for my students who enjoy collecting facts. They liked to fill it up and share with others.]

Information Sheet #3

[This sheet worked well with my youngest students who seemed overwhelmed with too many boxes. Finding 2 things about… was doable for them.]

Information Sheet #4

[This sheet was the last to be created and it came about only after the students got ‘stuck’ on what and where to go next with their topic.]

It is also time to start thinking about the children’s first presentation to update the class on how they are doing and what they have learned so far in their Knowledge Quest. At the end of November I introduced the concept of Research Posters. I brought a few done by older students and a few I found online. I have included a beginning piece for developing research posters from the site mentioned below.

What is a Research Poster?

Working with my students we formed 5 basic design elements of a poster that they needed to incorporate to achieve a good research poster:

• A clear topic… we should know what your poster is about by looking at it. Don’t overcrowd your poster with lots of words or pictures but pick only 5 to 10 pictures to write about.
• A poster advertises or TELLS us about what you know about your topic. Have one or two sentences to tell us about your topic.
• Use colour and outlining to have your poster stand out. Think BIG, BOLD and BEAUTIFUL!
• Present your research poster by displaying it in front of the group. Stand tall and speak up.
• Be prepared to receive comments and questions.

Take a bow… you are DONE!

Research Posters 101
by Lorrie Faith Cranor
Poster sessions at conferences and university research fairs provide excellent opportunities for students to show off their work and to discuss their research in an informal setting. While it is important to present good work at a poster session, even the most outstanding research projects will receive little attention if they are not presented well. This article provides a guide to creating and presenting an attractive and informative research poster.

Content

The most important part of your poster is the content. Before you start planning your poster design, decide on the content you wish to present. Students often make the mistake of trying to present an entire thesis or journal article on a poster. Don’t try this approach. People do not have the time or patience to read a lengthy report at a poster session. Your poster should be an abstract that advertises your work. If your audience likes the poster, they can request a copy of your whole thesis or paper to read when they get home. You might provide copies of your paper next to your poster or pass out flyers with information on how to get your paper electronically, but don’t put the whole paper on your poster.
Given that you have limited space, you must decide what aspects of your research are most important to present. This depends a lot on your audience. If you are presenting your poster to a general audience you will need to provide a lot of background information and emphasize the applications of your research. If your audience already understands and appreciates your research area, you should focus on your unique contributions and emphasize your results (if you have any — some poster sessions allow students to display research in progress).
Regardless of what you decide to emphasize, make sure your poster includes a clear and succinct statement of your research problem, a brief description of your approach, and summary of any results you have obtained to date. The organizers of the poster session might also supply a list of items that your poster should include.
Create an outline of the content you plan to present. Then fill in each section of the outline with short paragraphs and bulleted or numbered lists. Do not include lengthy paragraphs on your poster. Unless you will be presenting to a very technical audience, avoid complicated equations and code fragments of more than a few lines. Depending on the size of your poster and the number of graphics you include you will generally have room for somewhere between 500 and 1500 words. If your initial draft is longer than that, reduce the number of words before you start working on the poster design.

Overall Design

Before you begin designing, determine the overall size and shape for your poster. Find out whether your poster session has any size limits that you must adhere to. Also find out whether you are expected to present a free standing poster or whether you will be given a board on which you can attach the various components of your poster. Even if you will be given a board, you may still wish to mount all of your poster components on one or several large panels. This tends to give your poster a more unified look and it will be easier for you to assemble and disable your poster quickly at the poster session.
Regardless of whether you design your poster in panels or small components, you should divide your content into modular components, each of which will be placed in its own “box”. Boxes can be created by printing rectangles around each component or mounting the components on sheets of colored construction paper. If you design your poster in panels you can easily group boxes together, placing several small boxes in one larger box. This allows you to visually group related elements. If you design your poster in small components you can use color, position, or even lines made of string to visually group related elements on the board.
You should also arrange your poster elements so that there is a sensible visual flow — left to right or top to bottom, for example. If you have multiple columns or rows of elements it is sometimes helpful to number elements with bold numerals or use arrows to mark the suggested flow.

Presenting Your Poster

Go to the poster session ready to talk to a lot of people. Not only is this a good opportunity for you to tell people about your work, but it is also a good opportunity for you to get new ideas that might improve your work. So if people seem interested in what you are doing, engage them in conversation. A poster forum I presented at a few months before I began interviewing for a job was good practice for answering the types of questions I got asked about my research while interviewing.
It’s also a good idea to think ahead of time about some of the questions you might get asked. This is especially important if you are presenting a small component of a large group research project. You should have a working knowledge of the whole project and be able to answer questions about the project in general. If you don’t think you can do that, talk with the other members of your research group to get a better understanding of the rest of the project. You should also have some knowledge of similar research projects and how your project differs from them. A frequent question people ask about research is how it differs from similar work, so be prepared with an answer.
For the Complete article go to http://www.acm.org/crossroads/xrds3-2/posters.html

Achievements of November’s plan: 3 items.

• Journal and note writing techniques
• Start presentations
• The use of art in journaling
• Continue learning how to access topic from the general library shelves

December, 2009
This is the month we do our first presentation to the class of what we have learned in the past two months about our topic. All the students are making or have made a research poster of their topic. Once the poster is complete the students practice presenting their work to small groups of children. The presenter is looking for feedback on clarity, interest and audibility. When a presenter comes to me to tell me they are ready to do their final presentaion I refer to the listeners in their group and ask them;

• Could you hear the presenter clearly?
• Do you know what the presenter was talking about? Did it make sense to you?
• Was the presentation interesting/entertaining?

All the listeners had to say yes in order for the presenter to be approved for a final presentation. If the child did not achieve all yeses, the presenter was given time to rehearse and a new group of listeners. [In retrospect I would use our grade 5 buddy class to be guides and listeners as well. They could model and help direct some of my students more.]
Over the span of 6 days all my students bravely present their Knowledge Quest to the class.
Achievements of December’s plan: 2 items.

• Children are prepared and present their research to date
• Art? Speech? Overhead? Poster?

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