..Whole School Projects

Invigorating learning and building community

The idea is that each school will take on a particular topic to study for three years. The whole school will be involved in the study. The topic might involve local phenomena—such as “plants and animals of the desert” if the school is in Alamogordo, New Mexico, “sheep farming” if it is in Walworth, New Zealand, “water resources” if it is in West Vancouver, Canada, “the Columbia River Gorge” if it is near Portland, Oregon, “the castle” if it is in Ludlow, England, or “the Yarra River” if it is in Melbourne, Australia, etc. Alternatively, it could involve quite distant things—such topics as “the Solar System”, or “desertification and attempts to combat it,” “ocean life,” “migrating animals,” and so on.

All students and all classes will be involved. The rest of the curriculum will continue much as it is, but some time will be given over during which the school as a whole builds up its knowledge of the chosen topic, directed towards a large-scale final product. While the WSP is distinct from and is in addition to the regular curriculum, the “whole school project” can help achieve many of the year’s curriculum objectives in mathematics, science, art, history, and so on. Any teacher can choose to incorporated their curriculum aims into the project study, even when those aims also include meeting externally mandated achievement levels.

Here is a simple list of some of the benefits that implementing this kind of project can achieve.

Whole school projects can:

• Contribute powerfully to community building within the school––the project provides a distinct joint purpose for all members of the school community;

• Build appreciation for the abilities of others;

• Help students, teachers, and administrators discover how individual contributions to a coherent large-scale project can produce enormous results;

• Help students, teachers, and administrators discover how individual contributions to a large-scale project can give pride to all contributors for more than just their own individual contribution;

• Enable everyone involved to recognize that all kinds of learning style and kinds of intelligence and ability-level can play an important part in constructing the whole;

• Enable students to understand the gradual growth of something very big from many small contributions—“a stone upon a stone, a word upon a word”;

• Encourage the development of school identity and cooperation skills in students of different social groups, skill levels, cultural backgrounds and classes;

• Expose students to activities they might not otherwise experience and potentially foster new hobbies and interests;

• Help students see how many different “subjects” in school work together or overlap when engaged on a large-scale interdisciplinary project;

• Give pride in the visible product of the completed project, whether in the form of a book, a multi-media presentation, a mural in the school, or all of these or others forms in which the work of the whole group is made visible for them and presented to others, whether parents or school board officials, or other citizens, or all these.

Please come back—we will be adding more material frequently as the WSP develops.