The Daily Texture of Progressive Education

My Year to Think It Over took almost two years, actually. Every week or so I looked through my overflowing boxes of teaching souvenirs, revisited twenty-five years of life in an extraordinary learning community, and returned to these questions:

• What did I learn, over time, about collaborating with young adolescents?
• What learning adventures were particularly memorable, and what seems to have helped them work?
• What am I still learning from the comments of past students, now adults?
• What can I give back, out of the gift of all that time doing what I loved best?

When I started the blog, I had stopped teaching. Finally I could write more: savor wonderful moments, and reflect on them; give credit to people who deserved it; give voice to ideas and practices that had guided me; honor students whose descriptions of their experience had transformed mine.

I began writing posts one by one without any realistic schedule–I really thought a year would do it!–and without any overall plan. Very soon threads of continuity began to emerge, willy-nilly, and those stretch across the screen up at the top, below the butterfly.

If you click on those headings, you’ll find an introduction to each strand, with links to posts exploring that strand. You can also click on the topic headings below.

Power in Literacy   I worked mostly with kids who were 11 or 12 years old. Often, in our mixed-age class, I spent two years with students. Across any time we had, students developed real and flexible fluency as readers and writers. With increasing confidence, they used reading and writing to explore the world and their own emerging identities. This heading title includes the word power, because that’s what I saw: I watched kids–in a world and at an age in which they can so easily feel powerless–taking up the effectively magical powers of literacy with contagious pleasure.

Being Human   Within an interdisciplinary approach, we could draw on both science and social studies–and anything else–to explore our human evolution and the voyage leading to who we are. We could grapple with issues our species still struggles to work out, about how to live together. Eventually, students often dragging me along, we arrived at questions this basic: “Can we come to see each other, all over the world, as cousins? Over time, could that change the way we view the notion of race? Or the costs of war? Or the goals of economies and governments and communities?” If you give them the chance, young adolescents will tackle amazing things.

A Sense of Place  What do we mean by “a sense of place” or “place-based education”? What can kids gain from exploring and coming to know the places they call home, and the places they share with others, including school? How far can a vivid sense of place reach, and what skills support that reaching? How can we respect and honor–and take responsibility for–the places that nourish us? These posts explore the teaching and learning of geography in its largest meanings.

Serious Playfulness  Here I gathered posts about our explorations of mathematics, various branches of science, and some related matters. Obviously “serious playfulness” is my own wacky term, but it means what it says: we were serious in our goals, but the ways we pursued them were playful oftener than not. Playful didn’t mean games based on television quiz shows. It meant true inquiry; open-ended questions; working together, taking risks, and getting dirty; discovery and surprise.

Together  This overview gathers posts that explore social and emotional learning: learning to care for each other, learning skills for working in a group, learning both kindness and resiliency. This strand also includes a series of posts about not using grades, because, in our experience, other kinds of assessment worked better to support authentic collaboration and community.

When I first began this blog, and composed the About page, I wrote out of that clarity that can come from life in the trenches. “The world is full and busy and loud with ideologies about what works in education. I want to revisit some real experiences that worked for real live students, and think about why and how.”

It would be thrilling if my school’s approaches became–soon!–the norm not only in published research results, but also in mainstream practice. None of us should hold our breath. In the uphill battles we still face, I’m going to keep these posts available as long as they seem to be useful. Rereading, I’m deeply grateful for both experiences: to have lived that richly challenging and rewarding teaching life, and to have taken the time to “think it over” afterwards. I’m grateful to everyone who felt that this was an important thing for me to do, and said, “You can do it.” (Alex Brown, you’re at the top of that list.)

Through this writing, things I’d learned from teaching reached forward into my present.  Attending writing workshops at UMass Boston’s William Joiner Institute for the Study of War and Social Consequences, I felt again how overwhelming and exhilarating learning can be for the learner. Visiting my dad as he slipped further into dementia and spoke much less, I watched him learn to play a game oriented around spatial relationships. My math teacher self talked to my daughter self, helping her.

Am I done here? I’m not sure. I haven’t explored some topics, or told some stories that feel important. But at this point I am more involved in other adventures.

Meanwhile, however you’ve found this blog, I’m glad. I feel like the host of a fabulous potluck feast. In effect, I’ve spent years working with wonderful cooks. Enjoy! Be emboldened! You can reach me, if you want, at the most obvious email address for someone named Polly Brown. I don’t like to write it out, because robots search for such things–but you’re very unlikely to guess wrong. Or you can share a comment.

From my new adventures, I wish you well in whatever you may be exploring or daring to try, in your own learning life.

Learning Styles Revisited

After my first post about learning styles appeared, I heard from a number of past students and their parents, who affirmed the good things our learning styles work had done for them. I’m so glad!

I also heard from Anne Powell, coauthor of the book that’s been my learning styles bible, How Your Child Is Smart. Annie said, “Write more!” and then filled me in on some of the ways the terminology has continued to evolve. For example, Dawna Markova’s approach to the subtleties of individual learning, what we called “learning styles” in my class, is now more commonly referred to as “Mind Patterns.”

I love that term, mind patterns. It evokes streams braiding together in a delta, or lines of music, or people dancing to weave the ribbons of a maypole–or the braiding together of different states of consciousness, in the way we do almost anything.

All the illustrations for this post come from my archival set of learning style posters. For each student, we brainstormed evidence in a class discussion, and I took notes (in apparently very variable handwriting) to help the class keep track of what had been said, and to create a recording of the discussion that could be given to the focus child.  For each poster, I’ve cropped off the name at the top, and also the letters representing students’ hypotheses about Mind Patterns that could fit the evidence.

All day long you cycle among different states of mind, with various kinds of alertness to your surroundings, or attention to your own internal processing.

• Sometimes you’re fully conscious: alert, systematic, able to attend to the world’s detail and organize it, comfortable with the view from the front porch of your personality. (Just in the way I describe all this, I inadvertently manifest my own pattern, by talking about a view from a porch. For some people it’s more like hearing all the strands in the flow of a conversation, or grasping the physical processes in the workings of an engine, or…)

• In the blink of an eye, though, you can switch to the state of mind Markova calls subconscious, where input and output are more balanced, where you question and process, perhaps continuing to pursue an interesting thought instead of listening to a musical performance, or distracted by something you see off on the edge of what you’re meant to be seeing, or continuing to think of ways to solve a challenge in building something. You mull things over. You are less efficient, less systematic, but more intuitive than in your conscious channel. Your processing has the motion, the flow between poles, that can lead to new insights, fresh approaches, good decisions.

• You also cycle through moments when you are in a state Markova and Powell referred to as unconscious–although they didn’t mean asleep, or in a coma. They meant that loose place, that fuzzy place, where you are “in another world,” much less aware of detail and much more aware of essence; where you are your most intuitive, your most receptive–but in a way you can’t easily organize or control–so you’re also vulnerable.

These three states of mind, described much more fully in How Your Child Is Smart, have become increasingly associated with brain wave patterns, in the ways Mind Pattern people talk about them.

• Beta waves predominate when you’re conscious, in your front channel.
• Alpha waves characterize the middle channel, what Markova called the subconscious.
• Theta waves, trance-like, characterize the back channel, the unconscious.

(I’m simplifying this considerably, to get where I want to go with it.)

The Mind Patterns schema also thinks about types of experience, both receptive and active.

• Auditory experience involves both listening (passively) and speaking or singing (actively.)
• Visual experience involves both seeing–landscapes or charts or people’s facial expressions–and also creating things to be seen: drawings, presentations, maps.
• Kinesthetic experience involves both feeling, receiving sensation–and also building, moving, acting out a story, transforming things by changing their position or connections or condition.

Mind Patterns analysis says that these three states of mind (conscious, subconscious, and unconscious) and the three realms of experience (auditory, visual, and kinesthetic) tend to interact in interesting ways, triggering each other. Nothing’s absolute, but for each of us visual experience, for example, tends to trigger a particular state of mind. Also, given a new experience, each of us tends to process it in a relatively predictable pattern or sequence.

Those interactions and patterns affect, for example, not whether we see but with what kind of attention–not whether we speak, but within what kinds of safety–not whether we feel, but with what kind of access to our own feelings.

Another italics interruption, to marvel at these recordings of kids’ comments about each other. Some comments are pretty blunt, as in “sometimes brags”, to the left. (I’m surprised I wrote that down–it’s possible that the kid himself said it!) Overall, though, the comments are both astute and kind. Within our community, we regularly affirmed that none of us were perfect, that all of us were figuring out how to be both true to ourselves and respectful of others. Reading the posters, I’m struck again by the safety these kids created for each other.

In class with my students, when I got to that point, having explained the three kinds of consciousness and the three realms of experience as seen within this schema, and having gotten the kids to help me list examples within the categories, I wanted to help them see how it all comes together, and sometimes I began with myself.

By the time we were doing this–never at the very beginning of the year, in spite of public demand–the kids knew me pretty well. They knew that my ability to see what was happening in the entire room could be kind of spooky. They knew that I wanted to see their faces while I read aloud, so I had learned to grab big chunks of print in quick looks down at the page. They knew that my particular kind of visual attention let me do that back-and-forth, back-and-forth, between the print and their faces, almost any time–unless I was too tired or too emotional about the book.

They knew that I tended to process anything unresolved by talking or writing about it; or getting them to talk or write. They knew that I depended on hearing every voice in the class–which meant side conversations within a group meeting could throw me off. I wanted to hear everything, but I couldn’t sort and organize what I heard as quickly or comfortably as with visual information.

They knew that active kinesthetic experience was exciting for me–bicycling! canoeing! building things!–but often a little out-of-control. Almost everyone talks with their hands. I talk with my entire arms, and bystanders have been known to look for helmets. I’m trying to sketch, in the air, the thing I’m talking about, to make it visible, and that can get messy.

My students had also experienced me as a person with very strong feelings, sometimes surprising to myself, revealed to me, often, only by the intercession of language.

None of this is about what I like most or least, or what I do more or less well. It’s about relationships between states of mind and kinds of experience.

Most of the time, I tend to use the VAK pattern (visual consciously / auditory subconsciously / kinesthetic unconsciously.)

Like each of the six patterns, VAK has many variations, and it has its ups and downs. VAKs drink in the visual world, and love to create things to be seen. We tend to be eager and compliant students, for whom the traditional classroom setup actually works pretty well. In an active classroom, we can easily become overwhelmed by kinesthetic experiences and demands–but they are really helpful for us, long-term, if we’re given support from our friends.

Reading the advice for parents of a VAK child, in How Your Child Is Smart, and reaching a part about helping your VAK child understand “how long it takes her to do anything,” I burst into tears. “Oh,” I thought, “if only they could have!” They were doing their best, like most parents. Still, if they’d known how to help me understand my slowness, I might have avoided years of considering myself useless for anything practical, that really mattered.

Here’s the fundamental fact: no one of us can be everyone.

So we put up big pieces of paper on the walls of the classroom, and brainstormed what we had noticed about each student’s patterns–with the focus child getting to put in his or her own two cents, with huge competition for who would be next, with gradually increasing clarity about the whole business. It was fun–

–and it was also an indispensable part of what our school called “the social and emotional curriculum.” As we explored these ideas together, kids could discover and experience for themselves, in a very direct way, Markova’s and Powell’s central insight: there are many ways to experience the world and join in its creation.

In the previous post about our learning styles work, I wrote about the ways my understanding shaped my teaching, my sense of individual needs, and my sense of appropriate (and sustainable) ways to respond. (Short version: I invited them in, to be “their own best teachers.”)

The learning-styles work was never about alibis, giving kids reasons to try less hard when faced with challenges. All of us can grow and become more balanced versions of ourselves, more receptive to the insights that aren’t native to us, more active in ways that take greater effort or practice.

Still, none of us should be made to give constant attention to what is challenging for us. We need to encourage each other–in schools, in our families, in our workplaces, in our communities–to live in the happy momentum of our strengths, to give with joy whatever is ours to give.

Vive la difference!

Get Out!–and Find Four Things

Someone on the radio said research had shown that the typical American kid spends an average of just 7 minutes each day outside. “Yikes!” I thought later, as I walked under oak woods and tall white pines, past a beach still covered with snow. I couldn’t have heard that right.

What happened to the outdoor recess that should be every schoolchild’s right? Even in winter, it had to be really cold and windy to keep us inside. Kids conducted unscheduled experiments with snow and rocks and mud, learned how to approach a group and join it, invented complicated variations on gym games and argued about the rules; shouted each others’ names under the sky, and learned how to run in a long chain, or backwards–or how to conduct a complicated conversation while walking at full speed.

We could read the importance of this outdoor time, in experiments conducted by nature. Even a few days of pouring rain took their toll on kids’ patience, stamina, confidence and social skills.

My father died a few weeks ago, a long, slow, mostly peaceful death. I kept seeing him, in my mind, in one of his boats, following the bends of a creek in no hurry to reach open water.

The mortality curriculum, I used to call it–something we would never go hunting for, or plan into the life of a class–something that would find us, one way or another–not an experiment of nature, exactly, but a reality.

Reading and writing can give us ways to think about endings, and the place they have in stories. That’s part of why we send our students there. Taking a break from blog posts, I gave myself the kind of assignment I used to give my students, and wrote a version of my dad’s story, going back to think again about the impact of his war on his life.

Beyond that, spending a lot of time outdoors was always the most important way we held onto huge, hard-to-manage realities–and it remains that for me now. Because my father always spent as much time as possible outside–gardening, shooting baskets, working on boats–it’s a way to think about him even without thinking. I’m walking a lot these days.

As I watch the spring melt (finally) pouring over the steps of the channel downhill, I keep worrying about all those kids indoors too much. What about sitting outdoors at dismissal? Walking or bicycling home from school?

For that matter, what about outdoor learning? At Touchstone, we deliberately encouraged curriculum that could be carried outdoors, or actually required the outdoors– outdoor sketching, perched on stools in the gardens; outdoor biology directly related to the school grounds, for example, studies of the macroinvertebrates to be found in our compost.

What about quick unaccompanied runs around the school, and the invaluable discussions of the ground rules needed to guard against people hitting the ground?

Finally, what about outdoor homework? We asked kids to follow the run-off water from their back yards, or pace off the distance from the front door to the nearest rock bigger than a loaf of bread (rarely a long distance, where I live, in the glacial debris field of New England.)

But maybe the most important thing we did, to preserve kids’ free time outdoors–emphasis on the word free–was our homework policy, limiting homework strictly, faithfully, including a generous amount of reading time within the limit. (Almost every year, at some point, my class had a conversation about kids’ favorite places to read outdoors.)

Here’s a game, or an assignment, or a meditative practice–take your pick. It’s based on something Holling C. Holling says in the feast of marginal notes in his rich, sprawling, problematic and wonderful classic of American geography, Minn of the Mississippi. 

As he’s following a snapping turtle down the river, Holling says that a miniature natural history museum could consist of just four things–a pebble, a leaf, a feather, and a button. Something mineral, for geology / from a plant, for botany / from an animal, for zoology / made by a human, for anthropology.

Minn was published in 1951. We might organize those sciences differently, now–and I was always tickled by the kids who said, “But humans are animals, too. Why are they made separate here?” Still, I come back again and again to the task of finding Holling’s four things, when I’m walking,

Here’s a collection from a recent walk at  Hopkinton State Park.

Early on, in my career of using this exercise, I swore that I wouldn’t pick up cigarette butts, although they are almost always the easiest human artifact to find. That day, I found two human-made things that intrigued me: a piece of crockery, and a tiny woven cord. For my final collection, I chose the crockery.

That day, as almost always, the hardest thing to find was the animal thing. The melting snowbanks were strewn with dog poop, but I wasn’t going to pick that up and carry it away.

Rodent tunnels disappeared into the remaining snow, and I thought of the mole’s wine cellar I found at the family farm in Maine, crabapples crammed and fermenting in a tunnel beneath the snow, revealed when the snow melted away. I’m just guessing that the critter was a mole. In any case, that too defied being carried anywhere.

Unless you’re at the beach, it takes very careful observation to find a feather, or a shell, or a bone, or a bit of hair or fur snagged on a thorn. Mostly, animal remains get hauled off to be eaten, or processed by beetles and bacteria pretty quickly. They disappear. But this day, I found that tiny feather where the snow had just melted.

Find Four Things made a wonderful assignment for homework outdoors. (Here, to the left, are most of the collections of a recent class.) We said that kids could do this in their backyards, or in other outdoor places, but should skip things found indoors–so, for example, no shells from Florida, sent north by cousins.

We took plenty of time sharing these collections, hearing about where they came from. Then we left them set up on the table–a museum of miniature museums.

What’s learning without arguments? If you can’t find any animal remains at all, can you count a souvenir of animal activity, for example an acorn bearing obvious toothmarks, or those channels of tiny micro-arthropod travel inscribed on the inner surface of tree bark? Is it a human artifact, or a plant thing, if it’s something humans made out of wood? But isn’t everything mineral in origin?

I’ll let you imagine all the productive channels those discussions could follow.

Sometimes I bring home the set of four things I settle on. But I’m here mostly to practice gathering and letting go. I stand outside, under an enormous sky, and hold enormous things in my small and always aging heart. All the living beings of the natural world–not just we humans–dwell in the compost pile of what has been, and in the seeds and (often invisible) eggs of what will be.

As I lay down my collection, gathered from that dear rubble the melting snow reveals, I think of all those children trapped indoors. I really don’t believe that thing about seven minutes. Still, just in case, I mutter to the air at large: Let my people go.

“That Thing with the Letters”: Working with Perceptual Thinking Patterns

Kids who’d heard rumors from older brothers or sisters often sidled up to me in the first days of school, to ask, “You know that thing with the letters–which one am I?”

“That thing with the letters” referred to Perceptual Thinking Patterns, PTP’s, a system for thinking about the diverse ways people receive the world and respond to it. The PTP schema was first developed by Dawna Markova, and interpreted by Anne Powell, particularly for parents and teachers, in a book called How Your Child Is Smart. (Conari, 2011.)

In class, we usually referred to the patterns as learning styles. The terms “learning styles” and “diverse learning approaches” are occasionally used in writing about education as  euphemisms for different levels of ability. That’s not what PTP’s are about. They’re also not about what activities you like best. Instead, Markova and Powell ask people to think about their uses of various modes of perception–visual, auditory, kinesthetic–and then think about how those modes are linked with the states of consciousness they trigger or require for each person.

They ask, “What mode brings you to your most alert awareness? Within which mode are you less efficient, less in control, but perhaps more intuitive? What are you comfortable doing for an audience, and what will you need support to do in front of an audience? What would you rather do unobserved, in more freedom? Where are you most active? Most receptive?”

The PTP schema offers subtler ways of thinking about learning approach than the conventional shorthand, which says things like, “I’m a visual learner.” That’s crazy! We’re all visual learners! But–exploring just one dimension–some of us become more alert when asked to draw something with detail. Others paint in bold color with wild freedom. Still others scrutinize and create maps to ask questions and sort out possibilities, to hold a kind of conversation. We all use visual perception and visual thinking, but in different ways. In fact, we all use all the modes of perception, one way or another. If we think carefully, though–about when, and how, with what support, and to what effect–our answers to those questions will vary considerably.

At my school, we were introduced to PTP’s by a Touchstone parent, Peter Senge, who had written an introduction to How Your Child Is Smart. Anne Powell visited the school to do workshops with staff and parents, and spent additional time in my classroom, videotaping me as I worked with students, and helping me interpret what I saw when I watched the video. She also did detailed PTP analyses for some of my students.

Markova’s and Powell’s insights clicked for me, so much that I drove my family a little crazy, applying PTP’s to family interactions, conversations overheard in restaurants, even political campaigns. Markova and Powell spoke to my own convictions about the very diverse ways people learn and make sense–a diversity which had fascinated me since childhood. Years later I continue to be most excited by what I see as Markova’s and Powell’s fundamental message: We experience the world in very different ways, and the world needs all those ways. 

We are lucky to be so diverse in our approaches to learning and thinking and doing, lucky for the sake of our survival as a species, and lucky in the resultant richness of our culture.

Learning style diversity may be a wonderful thing in the world, but it can also be a deal-breaking challenge in a regimented, industrialized classroom, with too many students for any teacher to know each of them well, and all of it warped by constant testing and grading.

Consider something as fundamental as taking notes. If you are taught just one approach to note-taking, and graded on your use of that method, it’s chancy whether the outcome will show the learning you could have experienced, if you’d been given an opportunity to choose between several methods, or invent a variation that works for you. One size does NOT fit all.

On the other hand, does this mean that a teacher has to hand-tailor completely individualized assignments? Or six assignments, one for each of the six basic Perceptual Thinking Patterns?

Heaven forbid, as my grandmother would say. Life is too short. (And there are too many variations on each of the patterns.) If we want to honor individual learning styles, do we have to forgo the enormous benefits of kids learning in groups, and send them all back to their corners to learn in individualized autonomy?

I can’t describe here all the ways we found to make room for individual learning approaches within a busily collaborative classroom. (That may be the most important preoccupation of this whole blog.) Many of our methods came down to this: handing both power and responsibility to each child. We encouraged children to observe themselves and each other, in order to come to tentative understandings of their patterns. We modeled–and let them model for each other–many ways of approaching new material, and many ways of making it their own and sharing it. We gave them realms of choice within which they could try approaches and methods, and see what worked. We consulted with them, asking them to describe their processes and assess their results.

Above all, we said that being active in their own behalf, being “their own best teachers,” was part of their job. And it worked. Sometimes, after I refused to answer the “Which one am I?” question, the sidling-up child would ask, “And what are you?”

Me? I’m a VAK, although I wouldn’t say that for a ways down the road, knowing that I make a pretty good guinea pig for kids who are learning about this stuff.

Hooray for all the connections that led from Dawna Markova to a child who had struggled all his student life, who arranged his portfolio according to the perceptual thinking pattern with which he’d come to identify.

Hooray for the difference it’s made in my own life, to understand my VAK-ness. I’ll explain what that means, and tell more about the ways we worked with learning styles in class, and how students responded, in my next post.

Teaching Evolution: Three More Thoughts

Here’s a link to my post about the Evolution Treasure Hunt. I’ve kept thinking about all that, and my thoughts right now have been shaped partly by my father’s very last journey, in process as I write.

A Particular Kind of Walk through the World

Naturalist Bernd Heinrich now owns the old hill farm on Mount Blue’s shoulder, where one of my great-grandfathers tended cows and apple trees, and where my grandmother posed one Fourth of July for a photograph taken with the Kodak Brownie camera she’d been given by her students’ parents.

In one of his books, The Trees in My Forest, Heinrich explores the woods that took over my great-grandfather’s pastures. He describes an isolated apple tree, far from the old orchard. How did it get there? Did a bear carry and drop an apple, or deposit scat containing a seed?

Eventually, Heinrich describes a game he himself played, growing up with some of my grandmother’s cousins, another branch of Adamses. Each child skewered, on the end of a supple sapling, an apple too wormy to eat, and then, with a practiced flick of arm and hand, flung the apple as far as it could go.

They weren’t planting; they were playing. Some of the world can only be explained by play.

Elsewhere in the same book, chewing his way through observation after observation, Heinrich tackles another kind of mystery. Why do deciduous trees drop their leaves? He explains how expensive this is for the tree, to produce a new crop of leaves every year, like a manufacturer building a whole new set of factories—and then trashing them.

Here’s a piece of the answer: if the leaves were retained, in a place like Maine, they would hold snow and overload the branches, breaking them. Yes, I thought, remembering the destructiveness of unusually early autumn snowfalls, the sound of maple branches crashing to the ground.

Did someone design trees that would drop their leaves? My great-grandfather and my grandmother would have answered, resoundingly, yes: God designed and created every natural thing around us, chose all their shapes and functions. As a child, I believed that myself, sang hymns that said so. (I still sing them, with my parents’ and uncles’ and aunts’ voices–and the photographs on the top of my grandparents’ piano–vivid and treasured in my mind.)

As an adult, though, I have come to understand another explanation that seems to me equally wonderful. Mutations that led to leaf drop gave an edge toward survival and progeny. The mutation persisted, generation by generation, because it did something useful for the species.

Here’s the translation in my heart: letting go of all those leaves, all those creations, lets the tree live on.

If, like me, you feel the importance of an evidence-based, scientific understanding of how the world we see came to be—

if you want to share that with your students or children or just the many daily wandering-around versions of yourself, but the real texture of that understanding is still pretty fuzzy in your mind—

and if you have an allergy to abstractions, as I tend to—if abstractions just don’t stick to your ribs as well as specifics do—

you may want to read Bernd Heinrich, or other evolution-informed naturalist writers, who will take you on a very particular kind of walk through the world, noticing things and thinking through how they came to be like that, doing a steady series of experiments with bumblebees, ravens, squirrels, weeds; observing the tracks and traces of evolution in detail.

(If video works better for you, here’s a link to a brief video from the HHMI series called The Making of the Fittest. This one describes the effects of natural selection, as observed in the coloration of rock pocket mice in the American southwest. It’s short, vivid, and persuasive–and there are many more where it comes from.)

For me, that kind of walk through the world is ultimately full of joy, true joy in the rich diversity and beauty of what works. When you can come to that joy in the reality of the world, whatever your religious beliefs may be, you will be part of our culture’s growing up, part of our species’ reach into clearer understanding. Teacher / scholar / student / parent / citizen—we’ll all be lucky to have you along on that voyage.

Squabbles in a Transitional Time

In so many places, evolution is minimized, or outright skipped, in elementary or middle school teaching of biology.

Even at the college level, some students do their own censoring. Here’s a piece by a professor at the University of Kentucky, who knows that some of his introductory biology students will storm out of the lecture hall and slam the door behind them, when they wake, in shock, to the news that evolution is the organizing principle of modern biology–not a minor topic that can be side-stepped, but the key to everything we know about the nature of life. It might have been better for them to hear some version of that sooner. Maybe when they were five. Or three.

Here’s another link, to a lecture by Kenneth Miller, cell biologist and faithful Catholic, who answers high school students’ questions about religion and science by affirming the powerful evidence for evolution, and at the same time expressing compassion for students’ confusion about how we define meaning in life.

At my own very progressive school, parents of whom I am enormously fond turned to me and said, “But evolution is just a theory, right?”–misunderstanding the word theory to mean unproven and unreliable. But a scientific theory is a huge concept that makes sense of overwhelming evidence–not something less strong than a fact, but something held up by, and holding in a coherent whole, thousands upon thousands of facts.

Students I prized–exactly because they worked energetically to hold in one mind everything they were learning–asked, “But what about God? This is so different…”

Accepting religious teaching as scientific authority can put people of any age in a jam. My father, a biologist, told me a while back that an emotional and mental breakdown while he was in graduate school had been triggered largely by those conflicts.

Commitment to my students and their parents, and affection for them, encouraged me to keep thinking carefully, not about whether we would explore evolution–but about how. Still, now, I’m always looking for voices that honor the evidence for evolution and also explore ways we can all absorb it–because absorbing it is an unfinished task for my people (by which I mean all of us), and it’s not so easy to do.

“Go find a good children’s book…”

My mother, a retired children’s librarian, still says this to anyone who’ll listen. “To begin learning about almost anything, go find a good children’s book. A picture book, if possible.” I’ve illustrated this post with the covers of four children’s books that played important roles in my own effort to understand. You’ll find the bibliographic information down below, at the bottom of the post.

Eventually, I read Stephen Jay Gould, a selection of Darwin’s letters, an entire volume about the extinct arthropods called trilobites, book after book after book about human evolution. This winter I’ve been reading Bernd Heinrich’s latest book, The Homing Instinct.

I started, though, with picture books and other non-fiction for young readers. I knew that I would be in honorable company, a learner among learners, a voyager among voyagers.

Our Family Tree: An Evolution Story, by Lisa Westberg Peters with illustrations by Lauren Stringer. Harcourt, 2003.

Life on Earth: The Story of Evolution, by Steve Jenkins. Houghton Mifflin, 2002.

Darwin: Nature Reinterpreted, by Piero Ventura. Houghton Mifflin, 1995.

From the Beginning: The Story of Human Evolution, by David Peters. Morrow Junior, 1991.

The last two books listed work best for older children supported by adult fellow learners. They’re both out of print, which makes me sad–but I’ve just confirmed that they can be found used online.

The Evolution Treasure Hunt

I get a huge kick out of a Facebook group called I Homeschool and I Teach the Science of Evolution. In their posts, members ask each other, “How do you approach concepts like evolution? What about the Big Bang?” They trade recommendations for resources, including, for example, Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s incredibly rich BioInteractive resources, or the Big History Project.

When I started exploring evolution with ten to twelve-year-old students in 1991, the resources available to me were few, but fabulous. Our experience as students and teachers of evolution began with The Voyage of the Mimi. Published by the Bank Street College Project in Science and Mathematics in 1984, this sequence of video story episodes and documentaries engaged students with fundamental biological concepts by focusing on the evolution, physiology and behavior of whales–and kids ate it up. Aspects of the series feel a little dated now, thirty years on–but the Mimi remains an excellent platform for evolution studies, for children even as young as five or six.

Below, in a photograph from the student book published to accompany the series, Ben Affleck, one of the actors, meets with a scientist at the Smithsonian Institution:

The right books and videos can be such a boon–especially if children and adults are able to explore them together, working at a pace that allows for plenty of mulling and questioning. Still, if you stop with just reading and watching, talking and writing, you’ll miss the benefit of more active, hands-on learning. In order to construct their own real understanding of challenging topics, kids need chances to build, create, arrange–or jump up and pretend to be a jellyfish. If you’re going to tackle understanding our strange and wonderful universe, you need some serious playfulness.

The Evolution Treasure Hunt took a hands-on approach to the history of life on earth. Working together, we created and set up a series of stations–some in our own classroom, some in other classrooms (by teachers’ consent) or in public areas of the school. (I imagine a network of homeschoolers going from house to house.) Weather permitting, we located some stations outdoors. As they moved from station to station, students followed a series of innovations affecting body-plan, reproduction, metabolism, and behavior, over the past 3.5 billion years.

Here are four kids in the Common Room, learning from the Land Arthropods station, about the radical innovations of breathing air, and flying.

The power of this experience lay largely in the kids’ role in its preparation. I did put together some of the stations, often using materials generated by students in previous classes. As many stations as possible, though, were researched, designed, and created anew, by groups of students in each class.

Here’s the sequence from one year:

If you’ve read much of my blog–or if you were there!–you can guess that we worked on the station displays in projects time. The chart also shows that we ignored plants that year, which is sad–but teachers and students are always having to leave things out, in order to explore other things in satisfying depth.

What could work as a display? Even at the beginning, we tried to do more than just point to some target classification of plants or animals and say, here, this came next. (In fact, that could be a misleading thing to say.)

The simplest display consisted of representations of the target group of plants or animals, and the approximate time of that group’s first appearance, along with a brief written summary about particularly important innovations for surviving and thriving.

Here’s a group of students at the reptiles station, with Bili the dinosaur, one of the class mascots, reading along.

This version of the text for the reptiles station came from a year when I was responsible for it. (I’m mixing and matching evidence from different years, because that’s what I can find!)

Sarah Stein’s Evolution Book served as a spirited and comprehensive reference for all this history of life on earth. At first, I assigned full sections of the book as background reading. Then, in a year with a somewhat younger class, I created simplified versions of the text by copying, cutting and pasting–a lot of work, but worth it, to make this excellent resource usable for my students.

Each group, in turn, created their own very simple version, with their sense of the high points, for their station in the treasure hunt. Below, one of those cards I kept reusing for later classes.

(Yesterday, when I exchanged messages with Addie Kemp, one of the writers of that card, she was holed up in a cafe in Austin, Texas, writing the proposal for her thesis in anthropology and evolutionary biology. I’m not kidding. She actually can’t remember doing the evolution treasure hunt–but maybe it had some kind of subconscious influence?)

Each student read several pages of challenging text very carefully, with small group support. Then they worked as a group with that chunk of information, to summarize it on behalf of the full class. During the treasure hunt, each student observed and interacted with the displays, read a summary for each group of animals, took some notes on a specially designed chart, and also collected, station by station, a set of summary cards to keep.

Here’s one group’s poster about some crucial characteristics of sea arthropods.

This might have been the year we had a live lobster present, thanks to parent volunteer Carol Liasson. A favorite memory, from a projects time sharing: drafting enough other students to make it work, the sea arthropods group embodied the jointed appendages of a lobster, bending and swaying in articulated splendor.

Another group showed fish in a tank, along with drawings of important characteristics of fish such as the swim bladder. Beyond that, though, they had made a model with wooden blocks and pipe-cleaners, and invited treasure hunt participants to play with the model and feel for themselves how a jointed spine could help a fish maneuver more quickly and flexibly in search of prey, or avoid becoming prey. This might be their fact card:

In order to create an effective display, a group had to understand the payoff for the evolutionary development they were representing–and they had to figure out how to make that evident to other students.

Almost always, groups came up with displays that provided for active viewer participation: a model to manipulate, or a microscope view of water from Julie Olsen’s swamp tank, full of protozoans; or jello to touch, as evidence of the state of matter, somewhere between solid and liquid, of jellyfish.

Early in the evolution of the Evolution Treasure Hunt, students convinced me that I couldn’t call it a treasure hunt without some kind of treasure at the end. So we munched on animal crackers from individual boxes, while holding the invaluable end-of-treasure-hunt debrief. I asked, “What new ideas stood out for you? (In other words, in your new-formed opinion, what are some surprising moments in the history of life on earth?) What were some things you especially admired in other groups’ displays?” To make sure everyone got to be evolution critic for a day, I usually went around the room, kid by kid. As always, their synthesizing comments were the very best part of the whole shebang.

Other experiences helped students think about other aspects of evolution, including the mechanisms and processes by which it happens. Other books and videos helped them, and me, arrive at clearer and clearer understanding. Maybe I’ll come back to that?

A last photograph for now. One year, after the treasure hunt was over, we compressed simplified versions of all the stations onto the largest available bulletin board. So here’s a partial view of that colorful grand parade of life, for sure and certain a cause for celebration.

The Alhambra Banquet

The Touchstone Common Room has been transformed into a palace courtyard, with twinkling lights, a mylar fountain, and carefully painted scenery.

Wearing the loose, richly decorated clothing of long-ago centuries and far away places, kids stand tall and proud, representing people whose achievements still shape our lives, even though their names have been forgotten.  After the presentations, gathering around low tables with their families, kids try foods they wouldn’t usually touch with ten foot poles–because in this case, after all, they helped with the cooking.

It’s all magic, magic we made together.

In designing our version of the Alhambra Banquet, I found both inspiration and practical help in resources assembled by Audrey Shabbas at AWAIR, Arab World and Islamic Resources. As part of a workshop I attended at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, Shabbas described a new approach to the study of medieval Europe, which would include the vital role of Arab Spain, often omitted. To engage students with this hidden history, she had conceived of a banquet in the Alhambra Palace in Granada.

I’m going to quote from a letter I wrote to parents:

[From the Alhambra] we look back to the 700 years of Muslim Spain, in which Christians, Jews and Muslims lived together in relative peace and prosperity; and in which all three religions co-existed comfortably with advances in science, technology, and culture that were largely unknown in the rest of Europe during the same period.

We look out to the world of the Mediterranean, where trade and the common language of Arabic created connections between many cultures; and where the Arab enthusiasm for paper,  an invention brought from China, resulted in an explosion of publishing and translating and an unprecedented exchange of ideas.

Shabbas asked classes like ours to imagine travel through space–the entire Islamic world of the time, around much of the Mediterranean, but also beyond, including the rest of Europe. We also imagined travel through time. Students represented artists, architects, rulers, Sufi mystics, rabbis, Christian nuns, Muslim philosophers, librarians, book collectors, poets, physicians, mathematicians, and astronomers, from across seven centuries of the medieval world.

In our imaginations, in a grand triumph of serious playfulness, all these ancient people came together for a glittering, century-transcending, multicultural, multi-generational dinner party.

When I set out to design the way the AWAIR curriculum would unfold for us, I found inspiration also in the creativity and intellectual ambition of Touchstone students, and in the generosity of their parents’ involvement in the classroom. I knew that we could handle these rich, challenging, unfamiliar worlds and concepts in hands-on ways that would make them real for us.

First, we set our sights high. Literally. Up above the whiteboard at the front of the classroom, I posted Essential Questions for this study:

• If we could hold an imaginary banquet in about 1400 in Spain, and invite people from past centuries and the whole world known at that time, who could come? What could they talk about?

• How did life in Al Andalus look and feel and taste?

• How are we still influenced by the religions and cultures represented at this banquet?

• What can Al Andalus teach us about the ingredients of successful multicultural societies?

In the light of those questions, we got down to work. During the four or five weeks leading up to the banquet, each student became involved in five different efforts:

#1   As a whole group, we learned about the background history and geography. We arranged big file cards into time lines by rearranging our own bodies in a line. We created a giant map of the Mediterranean world in the gym, each person representing an important city. I vividly remember Kate Keller describing the evolution of the mathematical idea of zero, and how that idea found its way from India to northern Europe, by way of Arab Spain. In their classes, our Spanish teachers helped us think about the history of Spain as part of a larger Mediterranean history, and as a hinge between worlds. Taking it slowly and carefully, I found ways to explore Ibn Rushd’s sense of the relationship between revelation and reason–and marveled at the ideas with which these young students could engage.

#2   Through a process of choosing from among various professions and roles, each student took on a historical figure to represent. (Adults sometimes filled in gaps. I’m not sure who was being represented by Don Grace in the year of most of these photographs, but the kids did a great job on his clothing!)

Working hard to understand challenging sources, students found it exhilarating to take on the identities of people such as Ibn Sinna, known in the West as Avicenna, who brought scientific methods to the study of medicine and healing; or Zubaidah, a queen of Baghdad who set new standards for public works, particularly a series of wells, reservoirs and artificial pools that provided water for Muslim pilgrims along the route from Baghdad to Mecca. It’s driving me crazy not to describe all the people we called back to life. But you can click to enlarge this fairly representative list from 2011.

If a student represented someone well-documented in resources available to us, he or she had to set priorities for what would be included in a two minute presentation. For figures about whom we could find very little, even making careful use of resources on the internet, students branched out to include more information about the person’s areas of work or interest, using resources that would explain monastic life, or Islamic architecture, or the history of mathematics.

Each student checked in with one or two partners, with whom they could share and compare, and stand together in front of the banquet’s assembled audience.

# 3   To help students enter the spirit of these representations, parents worked with them to create special clothing, decorated with magic marker “embroidery” using the motifs and styles of medieval Islamic design.

#4   Students also prepared scenery and decorations for the Common Room. In our own microcosm of cultural evolution and preservation, we saved some of these murals and columns and window-top decorations from year to year, so any particular class knew that aspects of their work would last, and be built on by future classes.#5  Finally, what’s a banquet without a feast? Some typical foods of Arab Spain could be prepared ahead by the students during projects time, and frozen in home freezers. Other things–vegetarian kufti, chickens roasted with dried fruit, flan–were cooked at home and brought in by parents the night of the banquet–along with pillows to make it easier for all of us to sit on the floor at low tables, and potted plants to help us simulate the lush gardens of the Alhambra.

Through the weeks before the banquet, kids rotated through projects time groups working with wonderful parent helpers along with teachers and aides, to create clothing, scenery, and food. They read background text related to the clothing, food, and design of medieval Arab Spain. They practiced taking notes, shared what they had understood–and then chopped up tremendous quantities of onion or garlic, or crawled all over the floor collaborating on complex designs.

Throughout this entire process, and by the end of the banquet, all the adults involved were captivated and stunned–by the students’ hard work and accomplishments, and by the content they worked to share with us.

What did students get out of it all? I wanted to document this with excerpts from their own reflective writing as we went along, and afterwards–but I’m writing out of a blizzard zone, and can’t find those right now. So I have to try to summarize.

Because these students were so young, almost everything we learned in this study was new. Thinking back, I see faces scrunched up with the effort to grasp strangeness, and glowing with the satisfaction of making sense. Conceptually, they reached far, reached deep, and felt the strength of that reaching.

They also shared my satisfaction in their nitty-gritty skills growth: in note-taking, in handling unfamiliar words and other aspects of challenging texts, in interpreting maps and timelines and other charts, in oral presentation, in giving each other useful feedback.

Above all, students loved the way most of the learning we shared at the banquet was new to their families–so that their sharing had real focus and purpose. Students felt important, and powerful. I have memories of kids putting on the special clothing they had made (from recycled bed sheets transformed with love and patience)–then straightening up with an amazing light in their eyes.

All of us remember with wonder the physical world of the banquet, so much a product of grand collective effort–but all of us, both students and adults, remember even more the passion in student presentations, the miracles of stepping up, the deeply personal pride.

And, of course, the wild exultation when they were done.

I’d be thrilled to hear from past Alhambra Banquet participants, or to help others create their own Alhambra Banquet experience. You can write one of the usual comments, for others to see, or send something directly to me using the contact form below.

Name(required)

Email(required)

Website

Comment(required)

Submit

Δ

Finding the right game

My father, 93 this year, barely speaks now. During the three days my sisters and I recently spent with him, he said little more than yes or no. Even for that he mostly nodded or shook his head.

The exceptions touched us deeply. When our father’s wife asked me to play their small organ, and we three daughters sang together, our father joined in for parts of “Dwelling in Beulah Land,” smiling broadly.

Before every meal, as we held hands around the table, our stepmother prompted our father to say grace. Sometimes he used words we’d heard throughout our childhood (until he and our mom separated and then divorced, and we saw him much less often.) Sometimes he used different words to request the same blessings, ‟living kindly in each others’ lives,” where the original grace asked that we be kept ‟mindful of the needs of others.”

Mostly, though, he listened to us. Sometimes he raised his head at a name, or to watch when one of us grew animated telling a story.

Through our childhood, and for many years after, our father was the most powerful talker we knew. A church deacon who sometimes filled in for the minister on Sunday, he helped to broker peace in a fractured congregation more than once. He sat on the school board in our town, helped build support for a new school, became a leader in his professional organization.

Later on, farm boy turned Green Revolution advocate and diplomat, he spoke persuasively to ministers of agriculture and heads of state all over the world.

We were immensely proud of him, and lucky ever to get a word in edgewise. In fact, the last five years we’ve been glad to have him dominate the conversation less, glad to have him listen more effectively and more appreciatively.

Near total silence felt different, awkward, heart-breaking. That talented, challenging, proud man sat at his dining table, folding a paper napkin along the diagonal and then throwing it into the waste basket. Then he started with another, and folded that one in half the other way, midpoint to midpoint, and then half again. He lined up his knife with the pattern of the tablecloth. He adjusted the position of a box of tissues, making it align precisely with the table’s corner. Looking at a stack of photographs, he positioned a smaller photo under the lower border of a larger one. Then he picked up another napkin and used it to measure the place mat, putting down a pointed finger to hold his place. All in silence.

Without meaning to, I watched my father through a math teacher’s eyes. I thought, ‟He’s practicing spatial reasoning.” Practicing, doing the same thing again and again, to do it well.

I thought back. Our father’s professional and community roles depended heavily on his verbal persuasiveness, but strong kinesthetic and spatial intelligence has also shaped his life. Before I was born, he played basketball, and sometimes refereed. (Years later, reading John McPhee helped me appreciate the way a really good basketball player knows where every other player is, and where the ball is, moment by moment.) All of us had watched our father build boats, plan and create gardens, play pool, dance.

As I watched him now, adjusting objects edge to edge, experimenting with fit, I thought about pattern blocks, math manipulatives beloved by many of my students, which they used occasionally in math, and often during rainy-day recess.

Where could we get some? On an errand at a nearby mall, my sisters and I saw a toy store. No pattern blocks, but we found something called Imaginets, from MindWare. Small flat wooden shapes painted in five brilliant colors, with magnets on the back, filled a wooden suitcase lined with shiny white magnetic surfaces.

The set offered cards with designs to reproduce. By unanimous consent, we hid those right away, sensing in them an invitation to fail. That afternoon we just took out the box, and opened it on the table where the four of us sat together. After some fuss opening the plastic packages of shapes, one daughter set a purple rectangle in the middle of the white space. Another added to that shape a blue semicircle, lining them up the way our father had been lining up place mats. The third daughter added a green shape that became one of my favorites, an irregular pentagon.

We all held our breath. Would our wordless father join in?

With the exquisite care of a ferry pilot approaching a dock, he steered the piece he’d chosen into the position he had chosen for it. When we oooohed and ahhhhed with appreciation, he beamed.

Gradually, as we kept playing, our father joined in with increasing confidence. He had his own sense of fit and appropriateness, in this completely non-competitive, non-verbal, intuitive game we were all inventing together. Until recently, we realized, he might not have been able to do anything this loose, this unconcerned with winning. Here he is, to the right, with one of our completed designs, which fulfilled our goal of using every piece in the set.

When we started letting the curved shapes be tangent instead of fitting closely, he went along for the ride. We grew more and more relaxed about taking turns, particularly after our father added seven shapes one after another, in a run of brilliant yellow, and looked up, pleased with his own sophistication.

I turned away, not wanting him to see tears. Transcending everything that made it hard for us to communicate, we were having a kind of conversation. A man in hand-to-hand combat with dementia, losing one capacity after another, our father was learning.

I wrote the first draft of this post riding north again on the train (a happy little link to the previous post about riding trains with my students.) As I watched the eastern seaboard slide by, creek by creek and cove by cove, I kept mulling it over. My daughter, by phone, suggested the string of words I might use for an online search about spatial / kinesthetic / sensory experience for the elderly. (And I’d welcome leads from any of my readers.)

Already, I can say this much. Unlike the students I observed and fell in love with and learned to support both verbally and non-verbally, my father does not have years of growing and learning ahead. He’s in his last chapter, no matter what right games we find. But he, too, needs and can savor the experience of learning. He is still one of us, a human, seriously playing.

In today’s email, I found a photograph our stepmother had taken, shown above, in which our father builds designs with the Imaginets on his own.

This photograph, taken by one of my sisters, captures the image in my heart. I wanted to focus this post on my father, but I come to the end of it needing to thank not only my father but also my funny, creative, wise sisters, and my brave and patient stepmother–all the hands in this photograph. Also our mother, blessing this visit from her distance, and our families, giving whatever they can to the dispersed village we are together.

I think also of my students, from whom I learned so much that is still with me, about all the ways to be alive and aware–and learning–in this world.

The Great Train-to-Boston Public Transportation Adventure

For two weeks I’ve been trying to write about field trips to Boston during our transportation thematic studies. (This continues a recent post about Projects Time activities connected to transportation.) I keep coming back to two cautionary tales.

#1  I once heard of a class of eleven-year-olds studying metric units of measurement without any access to meter sticks. For that matter, no actual measurement going on, in a unit about measurement systems. Meters and centimeters had become mere abstract notions.

At my school, we were all about real. If we were going to study physics, engineering, history, economics, and public policy, all through the lens of transportation, we would have the visceral, hands-on experience of transportation in all sorts of ways, from silly to sublime.

We would design and draw towns and streets on a white-board-covered table, and then play on them with little cars and trucks, gleefully adding back-up beeping noises.

On individual field trips in our own neighborhoods, we would carry clipboards, stand on busy corners, and tally the passing cars–on the basis of how many people were traveling in each car. All those engines–almost all of them burning fossil fuels–how well or efficiently were they being used?

Children who can’t legally drive are denied access to transportation in many rural and suburban areas–along with the elderly, the physically disabled, the poor. So we would spend a day using all the forms of public transportation we could get our feet on: commuter rail, and several different subway lines, and buses–reveling in the power we gained through these forms of access.

We would ride on elevators and escalators, and moving walkways if we could find them–and be thrilled by a line-up of Hubway bicycles.

We would cross Boston Harbor with our faces into the wind, on one of the ferries that is a part of the MBTA. Our happy hearts would agree with Robert Louis Stevenson: For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.

.What did all this require? The head teacher (me) had to get control of her exaggerated but unfortunately earned fear of accidental injuries. I had to trust that my students would follow instructions, think carefully in these unfamiliar environments, watch out for each other, and have a blast wisely. (Only a small stuffed animal, known as Medium Rare, would tumble down the escalator for the sake of our video script.)

It helped that the conductors and drivers and transportation planners with whom we traveled or met were absolute saints. For example, below, Stephanie Pollack, associate director of the Kitty & Michael Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy at Northeastern University in Boston, talks with us about the role of public transportation in reducing transportation’s heavy impact on global climate change. Before our first trip, Maureen Trainor at the MBTA spent a long time with me on the phone, giving me ideas, helping me figure out the best way to buy tickets, and suggesting T-shirts that would carry our message. When we arrived on her sidewalk, she took us in to tour the MBTA dispatching facilities, then whirled us through a Silver Line bus (so we could say we’d been on a bus), and personally conducted us back into the subway, to make sure we wouldn’t get lost. That year we traveled during National Public Transportation Week, and there could not have been more earnest public transportation enthusiasts, or kinder guides, anywhere.

It helped most of all, though, that teams of wonderful parents joined us. Some had extensive experience with Boston’s public transportation system. One was a confirmed Hubway bicycle user, and could tell us about that. Another had a special connection to the person in Mayor Menino’s office in charge of promoting bicycling. Every parent contributed what he or she could, including reassurance at moments of uncertainty. (See below.)

Cautionary Tale #2   From a colleague: Two children are on a field trip. One says, “Ooooh! This is so cool!” The other says, “Don’t act too excited! They’ll make us write about it!”

Almost all my students liked writing, in fact, but I always hoped that what we did would be textured and various enough to work for everyone. We would all have great fun traveling to and around Boston–I knew that–but rich learning experiences would be less rich if I didn’t ask them to capture their observations in language, one way or another.

So, sometimes the pre-writing, before the trip, took the form of posters, in which a little language goes a long way.

The trip book, a booklet I had created and copied for every child and adult, included invitations to sketch rather than write, along with opportunities to write lists rather than paragraphs, and also ways of recording observations by circling things on a pre-made list. (That’s a good solution for kids who get carsick if they try to write in a moving vehicle.)

The last trip, much of our pre-writing (and research) went into the script for a video to be made with still photographs. You can see the finished product here.

On the day itself, we accidentally left our main character, Moosey, in South Station. Oh, no! On the spot, walking down the street, we revised our script to allow for a new main character, Medium Rare (posed to the right.)

At the end of the day, we revised our story yet again, to include an ecstatic reunion with Moosey at the station’s Lost and Found. (Both group bonding and creativity thrive on the unexpected.) Certain student voices, muttering in my ear, remind me that we missed our train back to Grafton that year. But we had a lot of South Station fun while we waited for the next train.

What did we carry away from all this? No matter how much fun there is in hands-on projects in general, and field trips in particular, it’s important to ask what gets learned, what gets known and understood and used. Facts, yes, many; but also a sense of the interconnected dynamics of large systems, expressed here in an NESEA (Northeast Sustainable Energy Association) worksheet.

That first year, Stephanie Pollack, working at that time with the Conservation Law Foundation–and never a very tall person, no matter how distinguished–stood on a table in order to be heard over the lunchtime bustle at South Station. With fire and passion, grounded in research, she told us about the damage wreaked on the environment by a car-centered transportation system.

As we walked away from South Station in little clusters, all still talking about it, I asked Troy what he thought. “Oh,” he said, holding his head in a familiar gesture, “I don’t ever want to get in a car again.”

Kate and I looked at each other. We knew the field trip had worked, to get us thinking about connections and impacts and large systems. We also knew that our debrief would have to include some discussion of moments when we felt uncomfortable–because none of us could instantly make the changes in our lives to follow what we’d just heard.

Back at school the next day, a student note-taker captured, a little chaotically, a discussion that wound up imagining reasons why a person might have to make change slowly. We were in this together: absorbing new understanding, so important it would change our lives.

We only bought the special t-shirts the first year, but every time we were following their slogan: learning to make good transportation decisions, and learning that together. I wear mine to bed whenever I want to have brave dreams.

Transportation Projects

When I think about transportation projects, I remember Kate Keller rounding up approximately a million human-powered wheeled vehicles, so we could try them and compare them and consider the relationship between function and design.

Transportation involves the movement of people or goods, so these small human-powered examples count, even when powered by very small humans. (See below.)

Why do wheels help so much, when we need to move things (or ourselves)? What design modifications help a wheel work well? What about handles? What about the way the weight of the goods is balanced?

Kids had time to think about all these questions as they were actively trying out several vehicles at each station, comparing wheelbarrows and garden carts, or several kinds of strollers, dollies for working under cars, wheeled suitcases, even wheeled desk chairs. Then they had time to think about what they were noticing, and add to their notes or charts, before rotating to their next station.

In this activity, unlike some projects time set-ups, everybody tried everything. We would not have been forgiven by the people who didn’t get to try the scooter. Also, we wanted to avoid any suggestion of girl stuff and boy stuff.

When I think of transportation projects, I’m bound to think of this photograph of Troy, experiencing the enhanced mobility provided by his very first car, in the form of a paper plate.We added cars in the third round of a simulation of the relationship between transportation and trade, usually referred to as “the villages.” A Touchstone alum turned transportation planner (my son, Colby Brown) heard that we’d gotten a grant to develop curriculum about transportation. He said, “You have to do this Touchstone style. You have to model the interactions with a simulation on the playground.”

So Kate Keller, resident genius at translating complex concepts into compelling experience, designed a simulation in which students pretended to live and survive the seasons in three villages, widely spaced on our school grounds–under the gazebo out front, at the back of the rear playing field, and at the bottom of the slide.

Kate put special care into making sure that none of the villages could be seen from the others, so transportation was also the only route for communication, true to most of human history. In order to conduct a trade, the traders had to travel.

We imagined each village having its own geography–mountains, woods, or a lake in the form of the playing field, which students pretended to cross by pulling saucer-sled boats.

Each geography had its own resources to offer in trade, for example cattails from the lakeside, wood from the forests, or cloth woven from the wool of mountain-tolerant sheep. At first, the villagers had nothing but their own bodies to carry their goods, but in the second round each group had some additional transportation, such as a wheelbarrow.

Here’s one student’s writing, evaluating how that day’s experience had worked:

I kept the little note at the side, saying that trading was interesting, because that was such an understatement. The students were wildly excited about trading. In one debriefing conversation, a student said, “It’s hard to take part in the simulation and learn as an observer at the same time, because I get so excited about the trading.”

Looking back, I appreciate more than ever the engagement and thoughtfulness, the serious playfulness at its best, that gave rise to such astute observations about what we were asking students to do. I appreciate also the ways students supported each other in being both participants and researchers, reminding each other of our questions: What impact did the transportation have on the trading? What impact did the need for trade have on the need for transportation?

Village culture evolved very quickly, so magic stones and medicinal pieces of bark were also traded, and one student, writing up the day’s events, wrote as the History Keeper

In the third round, after class discussion about where to take our simulation next, we introduced transportation that involved motors–individual private cars, a toll bridge, and a train route in the tunnel through the mountain of the school. As it played out, students were surprised at the expense of private transportation, at least in this simulation. In one of the replays of the curriculum in later years, a student yelled in exasperation, “This car is making me go broke!”

It’s torture to leave out everything I’m having to leave out. I want to describe just one more of our transportation projects. Later in the unit, we split into groups working parallel and reporting to each other–about transportation access issues, or about what it’s like to make a transportation plan. For example, one group designed a bike path from West Upton village to our school.

Another planned several bus routes. No bus could pick up all our students, from the many towns in which they lived. But when we had mapped all our own class member locations, at the beginning of the year, Kate and I had noticed how many families lived near the state highway very close to the school. The bus route planning group spent a lot of time with maps on which they located all the school families involved in the clustering we had noticed. They made two lists, the one I’ve shown, and another of families who lived south and east of the school, in Milford and Hopkinton. Then they designed routes.

One of the students pointed out that parents might or might not be willing to let their children ride a bus, even a school-sponsored bus. She might have heard about the parent-organized bus to Worcester that ran for a few years, with continual difficulties around poor communication. So she designed the questionnaire to the right.

The bus route planning group had several final products to share, including maps made on Topo software, annotated with the proposed routes, and an article which ran in the school newsletter.

Although the bus routes never did materialize, those Very Young Transportation Demand Forecasters had learned lessons almost impossible with anything less connected to their own experience.

That was true, of course, of the whole deal. In the next post I want to write about the transportation field trips, giant projects time sessions on many kinds of wheels.

Two extra notes:

#1  This post is the third in a series. The first post in this series about Projects Time describes some logistics, considers the social benefits of this format for hands-on inquiry, and takes a flyover of a typical afternoon of outdoor projects. The second compares accountability and responsibility in the context of Projects Time.

#2 Our hands-on explorations of the physics, history, public policy issues and fun of getting from here to there were the Projects Time side of a curriculum called Transportation Choices, which Kate Keller and I developed with the help of funds from the U.S. Dept of Transportation, administered by the University Transportation Center at Assumption College in Worcester.

One of several university transportation centers throughout the country, the Assumption center focused specifically on K-12 learning about transportation and the environment. When the center closed, its website documentation of the various curricula developed by grantees disappeared from public view–but I’ve saved most of what Kate and I produced to record and evaluate our own work, including curriculum plans and maps and a bibliography. I was able to return to that material and use it in subsequent explorations of the transportation theme.

I’ve written elsewhere about Kate Keller’s gift for developing hands-on developmentally-appropriate activities about complicated ideas. You can find more here.