The Project Zero Classroom

PZ faculty

PZC faculty – Image credit: @JimReesePZ

Last week I worked as faculty at the Project Zero Classroom at Harvard Graduate School of EducationProject Zero studies human learning and knowledge, and pushes thinking further with a focus on arts and creativity. Here is a short animation What is PZ? that gives some more information.

Howard Gardner opened PZC claiming that the US has too much influence on world education through excessive testing and ranking, and Project Zero is ready to help people have a broader view of learning and ethics. Daniel Wilson then claimed that Project Zero has a very provocative view of learning, suggesting that education has not come far since Jean Marc Cote’s 1899 vision of education in the Year 2000, and he pleaded with participants to not be seduced by the transmission model.

Jean MarcThe Project Zero Classroom has five throughlines. These are big, important questions to keep in mind and reflect on during the institute:

throughlines

Image credit: @maryannesacco

My role was to co-lead a Study Group. Study Groups are like a home base for institute participants to synthesise and personalise information from the plenary sessions and mini-courses. Our role was to facilitate the learning process and let the participants’ interests and passions guide much of the session. This led to deep conversations about thinking dispositions, cultures of thinking, Reggio, active learning, and documentation.

study group

Two PZC highlights for me were listening to Daniel Wilson talk about Making Learning and Learners Visible and being invited to present during Tina Blythe’s mini-course on Protocols for Professional Conversations.

Daniel spoke about how underneath our practices are a particular set of beliefs. Powerful learning moments open up complex windows into seeing who learners are and what they come to know – windows of identity and windows of cognition. He cited John Seely Brown, saying it is not about stuff, it is about creating opportunities for students to become, and he showed this video: The Amazing Circus Act. Learners and learning remain largely invisible in most schools because of time, standardised assessments, ambiguity, and incoherent beliefs and practices. Daniel spoke about learning portraits – what beliefs about teaching and learning do you see in action in this classroom? Learning is…? People who make learning and learners visible believe learning is purposeful, social, representational, empowering, and emotional. He then went on to discuss key teacher moves in documentation: being curious about noticing, intentional inquiry, collecting artifacts for group memory, engaging in reflection that informs teaching and learning, making connections across classrooms, and creating public exhibitions.

Tina modelled the facilitation of professional conversations with protocols (structures for guiding a conversation). Protocols are tools for the work of supporting teacher and student learning. They create opportunities for conversations about teaching and learning and support interactions that enable us to develop our understanding of a variety of perspectives. I presented a dilemma for the group to analyse through a consultancy protocol.

While there are many thinkers cited during PZC, three quotes regularly rise above the others:

“Understanding is a consequence of thinking” (David Perkins).

“We do not learn from experience… we learn from reflecting on experience” (John Dewey).

“Children grow into the intellectual life around them” (Lev Vygotsky).

PZC concluded with David Perkins advising participants how to create lasting change. A key message was to invite rather than advocate.

Project Zero Sydney 2016

Inspired by the success of Reggio spreading from Italy, Project Zero is now building up networks around the world and our school will be hosting the Project Zero Sydney conference on 13th and 14th March 2016. The event will be a magnet for educators from around Australia.

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The focus is on the opportunities and challenges facing educators in the Digital Age. Young people are connected to one another around the globe in ways unimaginable just 20 years ago. How we respond will influence the level of civic engagement, the ethics and the intellectual curiosity of an entire generation. Do we continue on with a traditional curriculum, ignoring forces in the wider world, or do we meet the challenge head-on and shape it in ways that will be both rigorous and relevant? Using the theme “Global Connections in the Digital Age”, this two-day conference will feature keynote addresses by prominent Project Zero researchers who have been exploring questions such as:

  • How do we educate for the unknown?
  • With an abundance of knowledge now available to students at their fingertips via the internet, how do we shift teaching practices from a model of knowledge transmission to one of developing certain dispositions that transcend subject areas and other boundaries?
  • In our fast-paced world, how do we slow the learning down and focus on depth, not breadth?

In addition, renowned educators and educational researchers from around the world will lead interactive courses and special interest sessions on these topics and more, such as how to make learning and thinking visible, how to teach for understanding, and what school leadership looks like that supports deep learning.  These sessions will provide practical and relevant ways to help young people make important connections—to curriculum, to the world beyond the classroom walls, to their peers, and to their teachers. 

The Project Zero team includes leading researchers, writers and thinkers in the field of teaching and learning. Their interests include investigations into the nature of intelligence, understanding, thinking, creativity, ethics and other essential aspects of human learning. The professional learning from Project Zero has proven to be transformative for teachers and has direct, practical and powerful application in the classroom.

Throughout this two-day conference, in major talks, interactive courses and special interest sessions, prominent Project Zero researchers–such as Carrie James, David Perkins, Ron Ritchhart, Shari Tishman and Daniel Wilson–and educators from around the world will examine the importance of the conference strands in the education of our students today and tomorrow.

PZ Sydney promises to be one of the best educational events Australia has ever witnessed.

Reconciling Tensions and Radical Openness

A few years ago I returned to fulltime study for a year in the US. My favourite classes were with Tina Blythe and Eleanor Duckworth. Both banned technology from their classes, preferring face to face interactions, and I experienced my most powerful learning experiences in their classes.

I also took a class with Chris Dede, who was fresh from having written the National Education Technology Plan for President Obama. His class was a dizzying array of top US educational technology experts and we were encouraged to use our devices in class. While I sat spell-bound, some of my peers would surf Facebook and this made me question the benefits of technology in relation to learning. I now oscillate between believing that the deepest learning experiences I can design in my classes are face to face conversations, and simultaneously arguing that technology should be ubiquitous and invisible. One of the ways I am reconciling this tension is by explicitly teaching students mindfulness in order to cope with continuous partial attention and our always-on lifestyle.

I have often argued that pedagogy should be the driver, and technology should merely act in support. Project-Based Learning is a pedagogy that works well with technology. My students produce audio e-books for young children, make films, and design social media campaigns for rights and freedoms. We also take part in global learning projects and conduct Skype learning calls.

I know that I need to improve the documentation of the learning in my classes. While I’m a fan of post-it notes and speech bubbles, we also have a class Twitter handle which tweets out photos of our learning, and, when students work in teams, one of them sometimes has my Go-Pro on a headband for real-time KidCam.

Next year I am planning to explore Sugata Mitra’s Self-Organised Learning Environments, I want to get my students blogging, and I’m thinking of using Snapchat to run a short project for students to share photos of local war memorials and commemoration activities. We have a student voice team who attend our Heads of Department meetings and I am curious about what would happen if we adopted the radical transparency of broadcasting these meetings via Periscope. Also, I am in awe of the work being produced by students at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne and I want to learn how to do this myself.

Finally, George Couros now has me wondering whether pedagogy really should always be the driver? This video of Lachlan getting his hearing aid shows how technology can be transformational. Could transformational learning become the norm, rather than the exception?

There is a fragile tension here because, despite the wonderful affordances, in most of my classes computers and tablets are off and we still talk to each other in face to face conversations.

NB. Cross-posted on the NSWICTE website.