Building From Passions and Interests

15th December 2022Website Admin

Building From Passions and Interests

Sam Dexter

In the first issue of The Bridge, we introduced Gesher’s Five Design Principles. These principles were developed by members of the Gesher community, friends and supporters of Gesher, and with input from members of the wider community. They are central to everything that happens at Gesher and as such, across the next five issues of The Bridge, we will look at how they are put into practice.

For this issue, we spoke to Monique Lauder, a Teaching Assistant in the Early Years/Year 1 Class about Gesher’s second design principle; personalised learning informed by young people’s passions and interests. Monique has spent twenty-one years working in Early Years settings and joined Gesher two years ago. In that time she has developed her own approach to personalising sensory trays and tuff trays.

The decision about what to include in the trays is driven by her deep knowledge of the young people.

Sensory Trays and Tuff Trays

Sensory trays and Tuff trays are a regular  feature of many Early Years and Key Stage 1 classrooms.  They promote and support language development, gross and fine motor skills and support children to develop their problem-solving skills. They are typically large plastic trays filled with materials such as shredded paper, coloured rice, pasta, different types of lentils, couscous, shaving foam, or water. They also often include small-world play items or objects linked to a topic. When we sat down to chat with Monique, her latest sensory trays were full of small white stones, tweezers, and what looked to me suspiciously like old Weetabix.

… the personalisation of learning informed by young people’s passions and interests.

Planning and Creating the Personalised Trays

For Monique, the decision about what to include in the trays is driven by her deep knowledge of the young people she works with. ‘I try to get something I know will interest them, maybe someone is really into cars, so I would put cars in that tray… It’s mostly about looking at the children, seeing what they really like, asking them what they like and going from there.’

As well as knowing about the interests of the young people she works with, Monique also discussed how a young person’s individual targets feed into the personalisation of a tray. ‘A lot of our students have targets related to communication and interactions so I use the trays to encourage role-play… the students are seeing their friends or adults playing in a certain way or interacting with an object in a certain way and they’re able to do the same.’ Monique also told us how, if a student is working on a very specific target, that can be practised in the tray. For a student working on recognising numbers up to twenty, for instance, putting objects in the tray and asking students to find them, means the skill from a maths lesson can be practised throughout the day. The student’s Project-Based Learning (PBL) topic also helps Monique to decide how to personalise a tray. A PBL topic usually runs for half a term so one of the trays will also be linked to this.

Monique also shared with us how her approach to planning and setting up the trays has developed throughout her time at Gesher. ‘At first, I was doing two a week but I changed it because I felt that students needed more time to explore’. Now, Monique will change the trays once a week and this gives the students much more time to be curious and work out which different sensory experiences they like and don’t like. ‘The other thing I’m trying to do more is implement what the students are doing in the classroom into the trays.’ At this point in our chat, the young people Monique works with came charging in from the playground. After taking off their coats and putting away their bags, they headed straight for the trays filled with the white stones and Weetabix. One of them grabbed a picture of a mouth and the other immediately picked up the tweezers asking who wanted to be the first dentist to collect the teeth. Monique explained that their topic this term was healthy bodies and that specifically this week they were looking at how to keep healthy (and that I was correct, it was old Weetabix).

Monique’s Tips for Creating a Personalised Sensory Tray

Ideas

The vast majority of Monique’s ideas come from knowing the young people she works with really well, so her biggest piece of advice is to take time to build relationships with the young people. Once you’ve done this you can start including personalised objects in the sensory tray and build the process up from there. Knowledge of a young person’s targets and next steps will also ensure the tray can be further personalised to their needs, as can a broad awareness of the curriculum experiences they are having.

Resources

Monique told us how most of her resources come from things she would have usually recycled, like food containers and packaging, as well as natural materials from the garden like leaves, conkers and acorns. A store of these materials can be built up relatively quickly, especially if more than one person is contributing to it. The materials could then be shared between classes and reused for different topics. Finally, she said that shops like B&M, Tiger, Poundland and Wilko are great places to get inspiration (and often bargains!)

End Note

Whilst the work that Monique does is specifically related to sensory trays, this article is also about something much bigger — the personalisation of learning informed by young people’s passions and interests. The principles are the same whether it is six or seven-year-olds or much older learners — build relationships; know the learner well; involve the learner; connect to the real world; and design experiences relevant to their learning ambitions.

 

Professional Prompt Questions

  • We included this article because Monique’s sensory trays provide a highly accessible example of personalisation in practice. What is the best example in your school?

  • This example is built on relationships — and knowing students’ SEND needs, learning challenges and passions. Who in your school has this relationship with SEND learners?

Critical Friendship Groups: Think ‘Fireside Chats’

15th December 2022Website Admin

Critical Friendship Groups: Think ‘Fireside Chats’

David Jackson

Gesher School serves children who learn differently — many of whom have had highly stressful school experiences previously.

To do a brilliant job for these children, we want to be the best that we can be — the best in well-being, best in assessment, in project-based learning design and facilitation, in exhibitions, best community links, best staff development, best parent engagement, skilled in the use of technology and so on.  Not best or better in any comparative way — just the best that we can be to serve the young people, adults and families who are part of our school community…

We need to be the most informed and intentional learning organisation that we can be.

To do that we need to be the most informed and intentional learning organisation that we can be, and one feature of that is to reach out to people who have relevant knowledge and experience to help us with dilemmas or ‘problems of practice’ and to debate with us key elements of our ambition. One strategy for this is Critical Friendship Groups.

Critical Friendship Groups (CFGs)

Gesher started as a primary school and is now an all-through school. For the first 18 months of its existence as an all-through school, it is emphatically in learning mode. We plan to harness the goodwill and professional generosity of the school’s multiple partners and connections to establish a small number of CFGs around key themes that are central to the school’s success.

At the time of writing we have held one CFG so far, on the theme of well-being, when we asked our critical friends:

How do you empower young people to manage and own their own mental and emotional well-being through adolescence and beyond school?

Eight people from backgrounds as diverse as the Anna Freud Centre and Place2Be, and as geographically spread as Bolton to Israel, met online for two hours to engage in a facilitated conversation, the outcomes of which will be featured in Issue 3 of The Bridge. We plan to share both a think-piece distilled from that session and also a tool or framework that might be of practical value to teachers.

Critical Friendship Group Objectives

There are four objectives to CFGs, which are:

  1. To connect Gesher with advanced practice and thinking around issues linked to the school’s ambitions, and to the needs of the SEND sector.
  2. To build relationships with people who have experience, knowledge and insights that can help to advance Gesher’s work and the work of the sector.
  3. To generate usable knowledge and ideas around key ‘problems of practice’.
  4. To create an informal space that allows people to engage and contribute to Gesher’s evolution.

We hope, of course, to learn a huge amount. And we plan to share the things that we learn which are of collective value through the journal.

For the moment, we offer up the idea of ‘fireside chats’ with a group of people who know stuff and who care about young people’s learning, as one that might have value for other schools.

Three Houses Model

15th December 2022Website Admin

Three Houses Model

The Three Houses model is a tool which provides a visual way for people to express their views about a topic or experience. The tool was originally developed in 2003 in New Zealand for use in the field of child protection, but since then has been adapted for use with other groups. The version here is based on that created by Cunningham (2020) who used the tool as a way of eliciting the views of autistic children about what made their school autism-friendly. 

How Does It Work? 

The Three Houses model is a very flexible tool, which can be adapted to suit the needs or preferences of the young people you work with. Below are two options for how the tool could be used.

Option 1: The adult and young person draw three houses together. Once the houses are drawn the adult explains the name of each house: house of good things; house of less good things; house of dreams. The adult then asks the young person some questions and the young person’s responses are recorded in each house. For example, the adult could ask questions about what

 is going well at school. After the young person has given their responses, the adult would add these to the relevant house, in this case, the house of good things. This would be repeated until all three houses are filled.

Option 2: The adult shows a young person a picture of three houses and then asks the young person to draw their own version on a separate piece of paper. The adult would then explain the name of each house: house of good things; house of less good things; and house of dreams. Next, the young person would be asked to write or draw pictures of all the ‘good things’ about something, for example, school. As the young person draws or writes, the adult can ask the young person for more information about what they have drawn or written. This process would be repeated with all three houses.

Example

The below three houses are from Gesher’s conversation with students for the Changing Schools, Changing Lives article.

Where Do Projects Come From?

15th December 2022Website Admin

Where Do Projects Come From?

HTH Unboxed

We would like to thank High Tech High for their generosity in allowing us to share in The Bridge project cards and the occasional article from their Unboxed journal.   

High Tech High in San Diego, now some 16 small schools serving over 6,000 young people K-12 across four campuses, is one of the most feted and influential school designs in the world. It is known for its commitment to a project-based curriculum, to relationships, to deep learning and to the development of students through the development of staff. More relevantly for The Bridge, HTH is also committed to sharing practices and learning in multiple ways. They have a graduate school supporting Masters degrees for their own staff and others; they host literally thousands of visitors to their campus each year; they facilitate a MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) available internationally and, for the last 14 years they have published their own adult learning journal, making it available both in hard copy form and via the Unboxed website, which is a rich treasure trove of resources.

Where Do Projects Come From?

by Angela Guerrero

On a cold October morning, my colleague Breawna and I carpooled to school together as we often do. I piled my bags into the back seat, hopped in the passenger side, handed over a cup of coffee, and settled in for a drive full of teacher talk. The topic of discussion, as it so often is, was how to make projects meaningful and still hit the content needed in the history standards. This is an odd question for us to ponder, since we teach at a school that alleviates some of that “standards” stress by asking teachers to teach what they are passionate about through projects. But there we were, without the pressure of a frustrated principal or a zealous department chair, agonising over our fear of not giving the kids enough content. This may be because we both started our teaching careers at traditional high schools, attended traditional universities, and attended traditional high schools where school looked very much the same; teachers lectured, students feverishly took notes, a test was given, an essay written and a grade awarded that measured proficiency on some standard. Breawna and I are both struggling to define what education is all about, and building the curriculum around projects requires a break from the past that is often difficult. But on that morning when Bre asked me, “Where do good projects come from?” I felt I finally had something to say.

Eleanor Antin, “The Tourists” from Helen’s Odyssey. Copyright Eleanor Antin. Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, www.feldmangallery.com

This question, and the struggle to meet standards, plagued my first year teaching at High Tech High Chula Vista. So much of my work in the first year was simply writing and reading a pretty standard English class by most accounts. As I entered my final grades and completed my first year of teaching, I made a promise to myself to create engaging projects that would also comfort me by hitting standards. But what were the projects going to look like? Where would I get the ideas? Where did projects like that come from? Thirty journal entries, ten morning walks, hours of reviewing the state standards and countless conversations with friends left me no better off with my query as the summer days slipped by. I decided to simply enjoy summer for a while and return to the burning question in August. But then something happened that answered my questions. And it happened while I was enjoying myself, no less.

My sister invited me to a local museum to see an exhibition called “Historical Takes”, by Eleanor Antin. I sauntered into the swanky evening exhibition expecting to be impressed by the art. Indeed I was, but it turned out to be a lesson planning adventure like no other. Antin had created a collection of photographic portraits depicting historical tales from ancient Greece and Rome with feminist spins on the events. Helen of Troy was a devious vixen slinging a rifle on her hip. Ancient Grecians strolled casually by the dying veterans of the Trojan War with shopping totes and sunglasses. Wealthy Romans dined in elaborate clothing while servants died in the wings unbeknownst to their masters. And next to each scene was an explanation of the artist’s “take” on it. I was fascinated and found myself wondering how the artist came up with her interpretations. Then I wondered how I would create scenes from different time periods from different perspectives, say, a nihilist’s perspective, or a child’s perspective on the French Revolution. As I gazed at more images, and wondered more about how to create my own, I felt my legs tremble with delight. I had reached a new understanding. “This is perfect!” I exclaimed, to the surprise of the museum docent. History, photography, costume design, set and scene design, research, literature — all these things were present in the work. And they could all be studied in a project modelled after this exhibition. It almost felt like cheating since the idea came to me, not when I was agonising over the state standards or feverishly writing up drafts at my desk, but rather while I was out looking at art and doing something I enjoyed. From this outing, my 35mm Revolution project was conceived. In this project, students choose a revolution to research and write about and then choose one scene to re-enact in a photographic portrait. We plan to unveil the students’ artwork at High Tech High Chula Vista’s 2009 Festival Del Sol.

After the “art aha moment” as I now refer to it, I started thinking about projects while doing all sorts of things I love to do. Checking out music at local venues, I thought about starting a local artist Rolling Stone magazine to teach writing, photojournalism, editing and advertising. Running through the city, I thought about “walking a mile” in the shoes of someone who was homeless. Hiking up in the Sierras, I thought about nature reflections, the history of natural parks and the preservation efforts in California. It seemed that every time I was doing something I truly enjoyed, a new idea for a potential project sprang into my head. Some of the project ideas had been done before, but somehow, this new revelation made them feel fresh, pristine.

Do what you love and let the project drive the curriculum. These are the mantras of my wise teaching partner, Rod Buenviaje. Rod would listen patiently as I voiced my concerns about my inability to come up with what felt like meaningful projects. At the end of each conversation, he would repeat these mantras. I would nod in agreement and stare blankly out the window. I could never fully comprehend what he meant. After viewing Antin’s exhibition, however, the mantras made sense. I was doing something I loved. I was passionate about it. I wanted the kids to see it. I wanted to teach it. It turned into a project that would guide the curriculum.

So, where do projects come from? My answer is this: they are born in the places we love to visit, the things we love to see, the tasks we love to lose ourselves in. They are the things we find exciting. They are the things we deem worthy of writing essays and graphing charts about. They come from teachers who fall in love with something and decide to share that something with their students.

To read this article online, and to see High Tech High’s full collection of project cards, visit:

https://hthunboxed.org/blog/unboxed_posts/where-do-projects-come-from/

World Cafe

15th December 2022Website Admin

World Cafe

World Cafe is a protocol to discuss a ‘Question that Matters’.

This is what it says it is – a key question that matters to participants.

The Basic Format or Protocol

  • Groups sit at round tables, where all participants have a felt-tipped pen
  • One person, who has been briefed, hosts and facilitates the conversation and stays at that table throughout
  • Each group discusses and attempts to answer the ‘Question that Matters’ posed by the host – they come up with ideas
  • In the first round, each group has a blank paper tablecloth or flip-chart paper in front of them  They engage with the question and make notes or jottings or diagrams on the tablecloth that record key issues that emerge in the discussion. It can be either the speaker who writes down their own point, another table member who does so, or both – the important thing is those good ideas find their way onto the tablecloth. An alternative is to have a scribe as well as a facilitator.
  • Tables rotate after a set amount of time (15 or 20 minutes)
  • The host stays at the table. He/she welcomes the new group, repeats the ‘Question that Matters’ and shares the essence of the previous conversation, the insights that have started to emerge — where the previous group got to. That might include the beginnings of some categorisation of issues or lines drawn between points. (No more than 3- 5 minutes.)
  • The new discussion then builds from the previous conversation(s)
  • With each new rotation, the room might also be asked to consider a particular aspect of the question:
    • Within that question, what about x?
    • Who do you think is best placed to do this work and why and how?
    • What key recommendations would you make?

Key Protocol Rules

  • Keep introductions short
  • Everyone should contribute – all voices matter
  • Everyone has the right to write on the tablecloth.

Feedback At The End – From The Table Hosts

Avoid ‘This is what was said on this table’. Better is ‘The four key things that I would synthesise from this table…’ or ‘The most original two ideas that emerged on this table were…’

This group feedback can be publicly recorded, in writing or graphically.

Humane Society of Palouse

15th December 2022Website Admin
Editor’s Note: This project was the project mentioned in Ron Berger’s Interview.
View or download

The fourth-grade crew at Palouse Prairie Charter School hosted an evening of art, poetry, and inspiration to benefit the Humane Society of the Palouse (HSOP). At this Celebration of Learning, students presented their final product for the EL Education curriculum “Poetry, Poets, and Becoming Writers” (ELA, Grade 4, Module1). For this module, students read Sharon Creech’s free verse novel Love That Dog and studied the art of poetry along with Jack, the main character who is inspired to write poetry about the dog that he adopts from an animal shelter. As a crew, they were inspired to “adopt” animals from their local Humane Society, make coloured pencil sketches of them, and write poems in their voices to inspire others to adopt animals.

Students engaged in fieldwork at the HSOP to learn about the organisation’s mission, meet all of the animals in need of adoption, choose an animal to “adopt” for their project, and hear stories about the animals’ lives to inspire their work. Several experts helped students study and practice the arts of poetic writing, coloured pencil sketching, and poetic reading. Experts helped students develop a poetry and artist’s toolbox, both of which we turned into co-created criteria lists for high-quality work. This work clearly reflects students’ attention to craftsmanship and responsibility for their learning.

At the fundraising event, students read their poems, displayed their art, and sold posters and greeting cards showcasing their work. The crew raised $942 for the Humane Society of the Palouse and was awarded a “Humane Society Hero Award” for their extraordinary work of service and compassion to promote our local organisation and inspire the adoption of animals who dearly need a home.

Teacher Reflection

  • Beautiful high-quality drawings that draw the reader in
  • Shows a project that could be replicated at different grade levels in both rural and urban settings
  • Inspirational model of a project that involves service work
  • Excellent idea for a fundraiser for a nonprofit organisation.
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Here Now, Gone Tomorrow

15th December 2022Website Admin
With thanks to High Tech High for allowing us to share their student’s beautiful work.
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As a collaborative project between the Chula Vista and North County campuses, students created and published a children’s book detailing their chosen endangered species challenged with the impacts of climate change. Students created a watercolor illustration of their endangered species which was included in the children’s book. Our created children’s book is now being used to help educate other students and the public, on how human impact has become problematic for our wildlife. This project was aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards.

Teacher Reflection

This was such an impactful project dealing with a very important issue, not only in our country, but worldwide. Students were able to be scientists, researchers, artists all in one through this project. To have the students create their own learning around this issue by exploring this phenomena really allowed for them to want to become activists. Also, the cross-school collaboration allowed for our schools to come together. We feel literacy is very important and we wanted to find a fun way to incorporate it in a math and science classroom. We saw students step out of their comfort zone, and we teachers did too. We had no experience using watercolors, and it was great learning experience, which we shared with our students.

Student Reflection

I feel good about helping the earth, because now I know ways to save the environment in the future.

—Rishi

I didn’t know I could paint. My animal looks really cool!

—Leo

The best part was seeing my book on a website. People can buy it and my name is there.

—Illeana

To see or purchase the book, visit http://www.blurb.com/b/7640975-here-now-gone-tomorrow

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Toy Story

15th December 2022Website Admin
With thanks to High Tech High for allowing us to share their student’s beautiful work.
View or download

In the Toy Story project, second graders explored the essential question, “What is the magic of toys?” To investigate this idea deeply, our students visited a local preschool and became buddies with these young children. They surveyed their new friends to learn about the types of toys they like, their favorite colors, favorite characters and so much more. After finding trends in the data collected, the students used this information to design the perfect toy for their preschool buddy. After many drafts, critiques, revisions and prototypes the students took their designs to MakerPlace (a DIY workshop in San Diego) in order to professionally create the toys. Students also studied story elements by reading a variety of stories that have a toy as the main character. They incorporated the elements they learned into a story about the toy they created for the preschooler. And then they learned the writing process in order to publish their story in a board book for their buddies. Finally, our second graders returned to the preschool to give both the toy and the book to the preschoolers.

Teacher Reflection

When designing this project, it was important for us to have a product that was minds on, hands on, and hearts on. Since every second grader loves toys we thought that would be the perfect fit. This project felt like a great blend of allowing the students to have choice and be creative while learning many essential math, reading, and writing skills. Throughout the project, we wondered if our students would be upset to give away a toy and story they had worked so hard on but we were pleasantly surprised at their eagerness to give a gift to another child. We felt like the authentic audience in the project was also another driving force in its success.

Student Reflection

“The magic of toys is they can come to life. They encourage kids. They’re adventurous. They help kids imagine.”

—Joshua

“The magic of toys is that they have feelings too. They can talk!”

—Zuri

To learn more visit:

http://jsteffan9.wix.com/digitalportfolio#!toy-story/c5ic

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Come Play With Us

15th December 2022Website Admin
With thanks to High Tech High for allowing us to share their student’s beautiful work.
View or download

High Tech Elementary Explorer had a run-down grassy area as a part of its playground, and a real shortage of options for creative outdoor play. Patricia Lim and Stacey Stevenson decided to create an inquiry-based project about the nature of play, in the hopes it could ultimately transform the underused space into a nature playground.

They began their project by asking some open-ended questions: Why do children like to play? How do they like to play? What allows children to be creative, to pretend, to build, to be active?

Stacey and Patricia launched the project with a trip to a nature playground, where their classes played for hours and also reflected on how they played, and how the materials they encountered encouraged them to play. In the following days, when they were back at school, they observed other students playing. Finally, based on their observations and field work, they began a process of re-designing the run-down play area. Children made sketches of their ideas, and gave and received critique from classmates as well as older students and adults in the school. They voted on final ideas for various areas of the playground, which ultimately included a sand house for pretend play, sticks and rocks for building, stumps for balancing, a water wall, a music/sound wall; and a giant tire for climbing.

The final weeks of the project were spent building. Each group also created safety rules for each play area, and wrote how-to books to teach other children how to use the new play area.

Project Learning Goals

This project met many standards for kindergarten learning, including counting; measuring; data collection; observation; reflection; persuasive speaking; drawing a model of a proposed solution; giving and receiving critique; and writing informational how-to manuals. Social and emotional learning goals included collaboration; negotiating over final products; analysing what makes playtime fun; and understanding and creating rules for play spaces.

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