Wednesday, May 8, 2019

Embodied Learning: Reflections on a Talk with Hectalina Donado

Recently I sat down with Hectalina Donado, my former principal where I taught second and third grade at Colegio Karl C. Parrish in Barranquilla, Colombia.  The following reflections are from my notes on this interview, part of a process in constructing a human centered learning design.



Schooled Minds


 Harvard graduates and professors were asked about basic scientific concepts, for example “what causes the seasons”, and an overwhelming majority expressed gross misconceptions, citing the earth moving further from the sun in winter as opposed to the tilt of the earth’s axis exposing different hemispheres to the sun for more hours than other phases of the yearly rotation.  Probing deeper, the study revealed high school student misconceptions developed from lack of dimensionality in learning.  They developed false constructs from graphic representations of abstract three dimensional phenomenon.  Two dimensional drawings of an elliptical orbit with an earth seemingly much closer to the sun during its orbit led students to create a “personal universe”, something akin to Edwin Abbott’s Flatland.  


This recent conversation with Hectalina unpacks how theories of knowledge as a representation system within the brain continue to influence learning design, reflected in the apparent simple efficiency of two dimensional representation over the complexity of embodied experience.  Much of what we call “schooling” deals with the development of representational systems often far removed from a real world context.  

Circles and Lines

Hectalina tells two stories of circles and lines.  Students had been observing fish in an aquarium and decided to create a mural.  They had shown curiosity about the bubbles and to create bubbles in two dimensional form, went in search of a tool to create “flattened bubbles”.  They brought in cardboard cylinders from toilet paper and paper towel rolls, which they dabbed in paint to stamp circles on paper.  Moving from three dimensional observation of bubbles to two dimensional paper, after seeking out the proper tool in the world to create this representation, students then transferred the concept of circle back upon the world - a light bulb viewed from below, a looped earring, a pupil, a running pattern, a seating arrangement.

In another scenario, a teacher was going to have students draw lines across big cutouts of paper.  In the Reggio Emilia approach, teachers plan collaboratively in the atelier, normally the central nervous system of the school, surrounded by artifacts of learning - each embedding a narrative of a process in constructing an understanding.  The group talked about lines and how this activity might contextualize in students’ life.  They began by having students identify lines in the world and then create two-dimensional representations with the tools at hand, paper and pencil.  One student drew a zig-zag which almost prompted the teacher to correct.  The student explained the zig-zag represented the mountains, which on a clear day you can see from Barranquilla.  He had taken the idea of line further, breaking the idea of line to form a series of connected line segments, moving from line-land to flat-land.

Experiencing Color

The night before I talked to Hectalina I had been reading about the teaching methods of Josef Albers, student and teacher at the Bauhaus.  Josef Albers later moved to the US, and after Black Mountain College moved to Yale where he created the first Art course on color.  Albers designed his course around experiences, believing that students must sense properties of colors, understand their changes in relation to adjacent colors, essentially raising an understanding of color not as scientific fact, but as psychological experience.  The color itself does not change but our perception of it changes as it moves over different background colors.  Albers believed experience, reflection, and construct precede the teaching of theory.


Brenda Danilowitz writes…

“Albers's holistic view of the world and of life led to his classroom focus on context, contiguity, and relationships among elements as the key to understanding both the real world and the world the artist creates.”

Classrooms, I reflected that night, are our laboratories of learning, where we unlock meaning from the “tools” within the environment - “tools” being methods of experiences, social interaction, physical constructions, mental models, language… Like Albers’ colors, adjacent context is critical.  Lines and circles on paper are invitations to reflect on embodied experience, or lead to future experiences.  These two ideas, “tools” within a learning environment and the context of the laboratory to the extended world open big questions about how we construct knowledge.  How do 2D representations connect to 3D experiences?  Should 3D full sensory experience precede representational constructs, such as Montessori students “experiencing” geometric shapes before describing them with language?  How might 2D representation frame embodied experiences and reflection?  How is all of this bracketed by a larger cultural construct?


Extruded Plastic Dingus

In the Cohen Brothers’s Hudsucker Proxy three identical drawings appear, a circle with a line next to it, to represent three different innovations - a hoola hoop, a twisty straw, and a frisbee.  Norville Barnes shows his two dimensional sketch to anyone who will listen and gets incredulous stares.  They think he is an imbecile.  But as the hoola hoop, or “extruded plastic dingus”, is released, the right kid picks it up and performs waist, foot and neck hoop moves.  Mobs of screaming kids then run to the nearest toy store creating hoola hoop mania.



Norville’s sketch representation meant nothing to those he showed it to, they couldn’t extrude the shape from the page.  And even when Norville demonstrated the hoola hoop before the board of directors, their adult skepticism blocked them from seeing anything useful or marketable.  It took the children to create the culture within and around the hoop.  The Cohen Brothers are playfully fictionalizing the story of the hoola hoop, which in real life became a cultural phenomenon.  And in real life hoop culture predates the hoola hoop fad as hoops have been used as objects in trans media storytelling in which dance, gesture and hoop forms represent animals, symbols, and storytelling elements.  Circling back to Hectalina’s teacher’s inability to decode the zig-zag representation of the child and the layers of experiences recorded that lay dormant, ready to be unlocked - three layers of understanding emerge, experience of the world as 3D mountains as seen from Barranquilla, representation on paper as 2D zig zags, and the surrounding brackets of a cultural context.

Ecological Psychology

James Gibson’s Ecological Psychology develops these two complimentary ideas in how individuals learn from their environments and engage with tools.  First, it is not what is inside your head, rather what your head is inside of, the environment itself unlocks knowledge.  His second idea is that of affordances, the ability to unlock knowledge from the tools within an environment will depend on the individual’s beliefs, experiences, goals, and abilities with that tool.  The student who drew the zig zag mountain representation connected real world observation with the tools of paper and pencil in the learning environment.  The Hudsucker board whose bodies no longer wiggled lacked these affordances, while the child’s beginner mind and body used to tinkering with the surrounding world could unlock the potential of the “extruded plastic dingus”.  Zooming out, the Cohen Brothers are masters of playing with these cultural brackets.

Similarly the students studying bubbles took their embodied knowledge of bubbles, identified tools within their environment that would project a two dimensional representation, then extruded that form back out into the world exploring the multiple properties of circle, sphere, and movement.  These examples illustrate how Gibson questioned the entire mental representational system as something within the mind, but rather as our senses interpreting information out in the world.

When one sees a table, he or she does not have to walk around it, under it, above it to construct a mental representation.  The mind creates this simulation, combining information in the environment with that of collected schemata from previous experiences.  The process proceeds in an ongoing loop, decoding surroundings, constructing further schema.


Meanwhile our standardized tests often prompt our ability to slide, flip, turn objects, to recognize patterns, but we humans also come equipped to unlock information from our environment making possible the illusions within two dimensional representation, the ability to imagine and build 360 immersive simulations as simple as “Empty” to immersive multiplayer games, to imagining movement through the fourth dimension.  

Concerning is elementary students whose screen time on Fortnight far exceeds time spent jumping from boulders, climbing trees, running through the collaborative fantasy play constructed from their minds.  They are learning three-dimensional thinking from Minecraft without Making with physical tools of construction.  This is not to say that our digital environments should not play a role in developing 360 thinking, rather it should not take the place of physical world experience.

Enacted Learning

Francisco Varela goes a step further building from three movements - cognitivism, phenomenology, and mindfulness.  Appreciating the part of knowledge that is part representation in the head but negating the idea of the mind as mirror to the environment, Varela worked form the perspective of knowledge as experience, action with intent upon the world and reflection on the results of such action to inform further action.  Knowledge, then is beyond just the brain but is build through this interplay between brain, sensory organs, and the context of environments.  Our constrictions are set by what we cannot sense, what we do not believe in, what we have not formerly experienced, and what capabilities we have not developed.  These constraints determine what we afford ourselves as goals.

Varela termed this theory of knowledge, Enactivism, setting groundwork for Embodied Cognition, and more recently Grounded Cognition.  But what most differentiates Enactivism is attention paid to mindfulness.  In the West, the ultimate goal of mindfulness is the Buddhist monk completely removed from the world.  Varela clarifies that the goal of mindfulness is attuning oneself to the immediate world, to clear the clutter in order to focus on the task at hand.  For education, this means teachers are designers of environments and experiences to facilitate students attuning to active engagement in the learning objective.  Mindfulness in education then is not about escaping to this happy land of bliss, but rather to slow the mind into focus and flow, an embodied learning.

Context and Purpose

What happens when our learning labs only focus on learning as representational models?  Early primary students may learn how to draw straight lines on a page but the lines have no meaning beyond the page.  High school students may pass the test about the solar system but leave school with a misconceived private universe, unable to explain why it is hot in summer, cold in winter, or in the case of Barranquilleros, why the seasons do not change.  

Freshman college students will balk at the idea of writing for an authentic purpose because they have only been taught to satisfy the metrics of a rubric in high school.  

Grown professionals will solve the simplest of logic problems, working from rote memory examples without delaying the interpretive mind and work from a beginners mind to see the uniqueness of the problem.  


Aging voters will respond with emotional reflexes to loaded media without thinking through a system for what is best for all.


Our “schooling” is much to blame in the removal of learning from an embodied context.  In the case of international schools where I have spent most of my professional life, the import of curriculum and content extends this disconnect while the same concepts and skills can be learned through local context.  Embodied learning explores this space between mental representation, enacted experience, and cultural context.

Farr Out There


As Hectalina and I finished our tour of her learning spaces, I recognized a couple of parents from our former school, coming to pick up their kids.  It dawned on me, the age of these parents - they had graduated out of her initial Reggio Emilia spaces, and now wanted their kids to have the same constructivist experience, the cultural brackets becoming more defined.  I remembered our former director, Dr. Farr, someone I believe is a living, breathing proponent of embodied experience.  An example, upon arrival, any new teacher who was interested in buying a motorcycle, Farr would personally take us all to the shop.  In so many words, the instructions were, go out and explore Barranquilla and Colombia - something we should all do with our surrounding world to truly learn about it.  

References
Abbott, E. A. (2019). Flatland. Blurb.

Albers, J., & Malloy, V. (2015). Intersecting colors: Josef Albers and his contemporaries. Amherst, MA: Amherst College Press.

Davis, C. (2019, April 13). Hectalina Donado on Childhood and Constructivism. Retrieved from https://soundcloud.com/chris-davis-276158228/hectalina-donado-on-childhood-and-constructivism?in=chris-davis-276158228/sets/journeys-in-podcasting-1

Decades TV Network. (2018, February 19). 1950s: HULA HOOP. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58j1np0WpxA

Edwards, C., Gandini, L., & Forman, G. (1998). The hundred languages of children: The Reggio Emilia approach - advanced reflections. Greenwich: Ablex Publishing.

Gardner, H. (2011). The unschooled mind: How children think and how schools should teach. Basic Books.

Gettybfree. (2009, February 22). Hula Hoop by Wham-O Commercial. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9U_nz1lgwvY

Gibson, J. J., & Gibson, J. J. (2015). The ecological approach to visual perception. New York: Psychology Press.

Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Science Education Department, Science Media Group. (2016). A Private Universe. Retrieved April 14, 2019, from https://www.learner.org/vod/vod_window.html?pid=9

Hendrick, J. (1997). First steps toward teaching the Reggio way. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Merrill.

Hula hoop. (2019, April 09). Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hula_hoop

Karsenti, T. (2019, April 21). Minecraft can increase problem solving, collaboration and learning - yes, at school. Retrieved from https://theconversation.com/minecraft-can-increase-problem-solving-collaboration-and-learning-yes-at-school-113335

Ramma, Y. (2018, November 22). Physics is taught badly because teachers struggle with basic concepts. Retrieved April 14, 2019, from https://theconversation.com/physics-is-taught-badly-because-teachers-struggle-with-basic-concepts-86083

Sagan, C., & Andrews, T. (2012, January 13). Carl Sagan: Flatland Animated. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wv0vxVRGMY

Schmidt, F., Phillips, F., & Fleming, R. W. (2019). Visual perception of shape-transforming processes: ‘Shape Scission’. Cognition, 189, 167-180. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2019.04.006

Strauss, V. (2019, April 23). Yes, we know what great teaching looks like - but we have an education system that 'utterly fails to support it.' What's wrong and how to fix it. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2019/04/23/yes-we-know-what-great-teaching-looks-like-we-have-an-education-system-that-utterly-fails-support-it-whats-wrong-how-fix-it/

Talks at Google. (2011, November 10). Daniel Kahneman: "Thinking, Fast and Slow" | Talks at Google. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjVQJdIrDJ0&t=1461s

Coen, J. (Director), Coen, J., Coen, E., & Raimi, S. (Writers), & Coen, E. (Producer). (1994). The Hudsucker Proxy [Motion picture]. United States: Warner Bros.

Torres, C. (n.d.). Mindfulness Won't Save Us. Fixing the System Will. Retrieved May 8, 2019, from http://www.ascd.org/publications/newsletters/education-update/may19/vol61/num05/Mindfulness-Wont-Save-Us.-Fixing-the-System-Will..aspx

Varela, F. J., Rosch, E., & Thompson, E. (2016). The embodied mind: Cognitive science and human experience. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

 Warner, J. (2018). Why they can't write. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Wikipedia. (2019, May 04). Affordance. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance

 Wilson, R. A., & Foglia, L. (2015, December 08). Embodied Cognition. Retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/embodied-cognition/

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Saturday, December 22, 2018

JECC Reflection 2b: Learning Product and Belief, the Writing Workshop


“Students have to make something of value to themselves and to their community, they cannot only engage in the process.  They will never master anything and have a sense of what they are capable of.”

Ron Berger (paraphrased), Expeditionary Learning


The Good
Writers’ Workshop believes in the child’s ability to construct their own writing.  Students immerse in a genre through an anchor text and through whole class and peer discussion unpack the piece together.  Over a month or longer students move through a writing cycle - Prewriting, Drafting, Revising, Editing, Publishing. An hour each day is dedicated to the writing process, each day following a similar rhythm of teacher mini-lesson, a quick practicing of the skill, and the rest of the time is spent writing alone, in small group, or conferring with the teacher.  Students regularly read their work aloud in rough form to peers, get feedback, and go back at it. The cycle ends in a publishing party where ideally the learning community beyond the walls of the classroom join to validate student work.

The good is student choose their own topics and are taught through the process that text is not merely something we decode but something we create from life experience, alone, with peers, and whole groups. Students repeat the cycle of a writing process throughout the year. Each cycle culminates in a published piece of work.


 The Bad
The bad is that anything scaled to such a degree is bound to lose its essence.  Lucy Calkins in Lessons From a Child and The Art of Writing goes deep into child writing as a constructivist process with near total freedom in time to complete a writing piece.  Over time, through Columbia Teachers College, the “program” was implemented across New York State, across the country, and into many international schools.  Adaptations had to be made to survive No Child Left Behind and Common Core. What began as a ground up constructivist method morphed into a robust “program” incorporating a reading block as well.
Although the research and training intensified, the program has grown into a corporate hierarchy where districts unload mammoth amounts of money to send “select” teachers, coaches, and administrators for trainings at Columbia (insert image of cult like frenzy on NYC subways any given morning of trainings).  A well-intentioned grassroots development that was supposed to empower students and teachers grew into a top down approach to literacy. Like Ron Berger, quoted above, author of An Ethic of Excellence, and creator of Expeditionary Learning Schools, the “program” has grown into something unrecognizable from its origins.  In such a heavily monitored system, the creators would not be able to enter as a teacher themselves. I am a proponent of preserving “old growth” in schools, and the slash and burn approach to implementing the new, even when the philosophical core is correct, damages the profession.



As one colleague who had worked in three different TC schools explained, the “program” was different in each school indicating there was plenty of flexibility to the design, but at the school we were working, there was steep competition to be selected to get sent to NYC for training.  Terms like “that’s not Lucy” were thrown at those that attempted to project collaborative documents around the room to engage in some of the practices described in the TC literature - buddy editing, dialogue journals, co-creating, writing with and for professionals, etc. Project schools are on a scale, year 1 to year 8 where different components of the program were released each year.  “Mastery” it was whispered, something akin to the farcical “pedagogical automaticity”, takes 12 years. Asinine in a school fighting to maintain an average teacher retention rate of two years.
Please read the above not as bitter, but as absurdly comedic.  I am a promoter of all constructivist learning and personally piloted the program for two years before it was officially adopted at my school.  I mixed in student created video presentations of writing, integrated with Arts, led whole class interactive raps around an Afro-Colombian drum, and led call and response campfire editing sessions demonstrating how one computer, one projector, and one wireless keyboard (or one long chord) brought in projected text as a living, breathing, constructivist tool.  I spent one hour every day on four to five student writing pieces preparing for the conference the following day (separate from the weekly on the spot conferring sessions). During parent conferences, the grades were on the table, but all we would talk about is the adventure in writing development their child was having as we reviewed artifacts from the writing portfolio.  When the formal adoption of the program began, a coach was brought in and we all started from square one. Teachers who previously integrated drama, hand puppets, mask making, and song into their writing stopped all of this for fear of being seen as not following the program.

 The Ugly
The ugly is resistance to the multimodal inputs surrounding the construction of language.  To use the example of philosopher painter Kazimir Malevich and his 1915 Suprematism moment with Black Square, after the complete deconstruction of centuries of illusory painting into the non-objective world, Malevich stopped painting for five years, and only wrote.  

“…it seems as if it is not possible to obtain with the brush what can be obtained with the pen.  The brush is tattered, and can obtain nothing the twists and turns of the mind; the pen is sharper.”  


 Dare I say I somewhat disagree with Malevich.  The brush is sharper in communicating precisely and remains the predominant literacy goal.  The graphic, physical artifact, reach around language into the a wider array of cognition and even beyond into our emotional core.  

 In Art and Experience, Dewey explains,
"When a flash of lightning illumines a dark landscape, there is a momentary recognition of objects. But the recognition is not itself a mere point in time. It is the focal culmination of long, slow processes of maturation. It is the manifestation of the continuity of an ordered temporal experience in a sudden discrete instant climax."
Engineering backwards through the painting/object uncovers the stages of concentrated thought, the intent to solve a hypothesis through the medium, the social construction surrounding the artist, and the contributing cultural context. Forward through the painting the constructivism continues as we decode and contextualize the painting/object. How many layers of words have been spoken, arguments written about Black Square since 1915? Why would we remove this construction of language from the teaching and learning of writing, this opening up of other channels of packaging communication?



My 20 years of teaching have always been in classrooms where 90+% of the students do not speak English as a first language. Language both broadens and deepens by lowering the threshold of engagement with the decoding and construction of graphic, physical artifact, or other nonverbal participatory experience.  These are gateways to the metaphoric mind, the “life” of language. The UX design world can attest, you don’t want your designer to “write copy” as the specializations between the creation of powerful imagery and sharp, concise language demanded in today’s media world are different. But, we DO want our students to cross back and forth between these worlds of graphic and text, to experience a more “grounded cognition”.
Multimodality exists within the program in “episodic” form, sketching an idea for second language learners, collecting written perspectives around an evocative image, or playing with prosody in reader’s theater, but there lacks the “critical event” where students develop language at the same time as developing other modalities over time as the learning product.  To compare this to the IB program, the literature and performance course or the exhibit space within PYP, would be an example of this interdisciplinary product.
Belief:
Children by nature are communicators across any medium necessary and while mastering the symbolic form of writing is a demanding discipline, this is not a long, dark tunnel children must walk alone.  Meaningful writing comes from meaningful language through oral, social, multimodal experience. When given choice, time to move through multiple interactions of writing, having peer and teacher feedback, exposure to master works in the specific genre of study, and performing the final product before an authentic audience, children are capable of mastering complex forms of writing.

I have reflected here on the Lucy Calkins version of Writing Workshop since that is what I have had experience with.  Even through the frustrations of how the program was implemented, I also saw great student writing produced, the product being the true measure.  We took Ron Berger's words seriously and made the writing celebrations school wide events. This idea of celebrating product of student work is a repeated theme from Rachel Fink's description of the JECC Reggio Emilia approach where student learning artifacts are on constant display, to Expeditionary Learning's celebrations of student projects, to IB PYP's "exhibition".

There are also many variations of Writers Lab worth exploring such as the Bard College Institute for Writing and Thinking, and the National Writing Project.  But aside from expensive programs, I believe one of my former principals had the best method of moving writing forward. She picked up notebooks and published writing from your class once a month, spent the evening reading through all of them, took notes, gave feedback, and together helped plan the next move. And this highlights a major flaw in the Edu-corporate marketing of programs. As Rachel Fink made explicit in repeating Loris Malaguzzi's call for equity in education, that all children should have access to quality learning environments. That does not get any easier when access is beyond the budget of most districts, or when only the handpicked favorites are sent for training.



Work Cited
Berger, R. (2003). An ethic of excellence: Building a culture of craftsmanship with students. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Calkins, L. (1983). Lessons from a child: A case study of one childs growth in writing. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Calkins, L. (1994). The art of teaching writing. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Calkins, L. M. (2010). Constructing curriculum: Alternate units of study. Firsthand, Heinemann.

Davis, C. (n.d.). Reflection, Conversation, and Socratic Spaces. Retrieved from https://www.edutopia.org/blog/reflection-conversation-and-socratic-spaces-chris-davis

 Dewey, J. (1934). Art and experience. London: G. Allen.

Goldberg, G., & Serravallo, J. (2007). Conferring with readers: Supporting each students growth and independence. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

 Herren, J. A. (2019, February 8). Don't try to hire a designer who will also write copy. Retrieved from https://www.invisionapp.com/inside-design/designer-write-copy/?fbclid=IwAR1r2m1VmjPU_aZi_phrskZv4o7A-AvN8c8rehANTUGJDsnlyxeOEhlr8uE

Journeys in Podcasting. (2015, March 06). 2015 03 05 Journeys in Podcasting 5: Student Critiques. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=GCqEaxGHpLw

Judd, D., Judd, F., & Murray, C. (2017). Malevich 1973-1974. In Donald Judd Writings(pp. 254-266). New York, NY: Judd Foundation.

 Malevich, K. (n.d.). Black Square, Second State. Retrieved from https://www.artic.edu/artworks/196088/black-square-second-state

Malevich, K., & Hilberseimer, L. (2003). Kasimir Malevich: The non-objective world, the manifesto of Suprematism. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications.

Marcade, J. (2012). Malevich, Painting and Writing: On the Development of a Suprematist Philosophy. New York: Guggenheim Museum.

Prescott-Griffin, M. L. (2007). Writer to writer. Heinemann.

Wikipedia. (2018, November 22). Writing Workshop. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writing_Workshop


Wilson, R. A., & Foglia, L. (2015, December 08). Embodied Cognition. Retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/embodied-cognition/
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Friday, December 14, 2018

JECC Reflection 2: Learning Product and Belief, from Restorative Practices to Project Based Learning


Backwards from Learning Product
“Children are a central part of life and family here. Children are very visible and are very seen. We use the terms 'citizen' and ‘fully developed human’.”

In a podcast conversation with Rachel Fink on why she was attracted to the Reggio Emilia approach to learning for The Journey: Early Childhood Center in Tel Aviv, she mentioned the above.

Fink told the story of a frustrating search through the early childhood centers of Tel Aviv seeking the right environment for her child.  In one early childhood center, children where each given identical outlines of a tree and told to fill it in.  This clashed with what she believed children are capable of.  She questioned…

“What is childhood?  What is the image of child?”

Then she explained...

“You make the shift to understand children not as empty vessels to fill up with our own learning, but as competent, capable learners who are interested and motivated to learn.”


Using Fink’s example of learning product, of a group of young learners all producing near identical results and how that clashed with her belief system, I reflected on my own practices, research, and conversations with educators to create a list of approaches and methods that validate children as “competent, capable learners who are motivated to learn”.  I think that by working backwards from learning products, productions, artifacts, and evidence of process through documentation, we can work with and around institutionalized learning metrics, and unlock true meaning within our belief systems and school mission statements.  In this post, building from my notes, I will compare Restorative Practices and Project Based learning, how their products of learning differ, and how they contribute to a constructivist belief system.



Restorative Practices

Restorative practices builds from traditions in ancient and indigenous cultures around the world.  In modern justice systems, offender and victim are separated and the social capital of community is not restored.  Through informal interaction and formal meetings such as circle talks, students and teacher facilitators work through conflicts with the cooperative goal of building an integrative learning network where peer relations are a critical element.

We have to accept that conflicts in classrooms will arise and the goal of restorative practices is not a replacement of a punishment system, rather an investment in positive proactive measures in order for students to spend less time on disciplinary office visits.  The product of learning is a long game in that over time students feel part of a group and responsible for its well being.

In an extreme case, I witnessed a group of third graders share their experiences with death in order to console an emotionally walled in student who had lost his father.  A year later I watched this same student read his carefully written poem about his father in front of the whole learning community of students and parents.  Restorative practices are not just about conflict resolution, but address how a community responds to crisis and moves forward.  The week this student came back to school, one of his classmates stood up in the middle of a circle talk and gave him an outpouring of empathy and compassion.  While the immediate product was the bursting of the guerrilla in the room, the long term product was establishing the school as a safe place for the student to process grief.




Restorative practices reflect a belief that children are living participatory parts of community, and with facilitators are capable of the restoration of conflict, even in the most extreme cases.  The language barrier often distorts our perception of children’s abilities, and how moral judgement develops before linguistic expression in children.  This belief overlaps with Morton Deutsch inspired Johnson and Johnson’s work with collaborative learning, that learning is not just an internal cognitive process but a social construction.  Cary Roseth continues this research showing that when peer relations and cooperative goals are the focus over individualized or competitive goal structures, learning improves by multiple forms of measurement.  Another core building block in this belief is Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development in which the community of learners present are critical tools in extending a learner’s grasp.



Project Based Learning

This is a confusing term in the spectrum of hyphenated learning approaches.  Here project based learning refers to extended periods of time, two weeks to three months or more where students begin by immersing in an experience or interact with an artifact intended to spark inquiry.  A student created driving statement for a project overrides teacher dictated essential questions, although they can all be present in the process.  The key is validating student inquiry and understanding that without it there is no project.  Unlike STEM/STEAM approaches that also contextualize learning with interdisciplinary constructivist challenges and emphasize the “behavior of scientists”, PBL in its purest form has no boundaries normally confined by set curriculum.  John Larmer explains the spectrum of PBL as being dependent on your school’s climate.  When asked how much student inquiry, time for projects, constructivist approach to curriculum is appropriate, his response… “As much as you can allow.”


In working towards the creation of a product, service, or experience, projects feed off of peer relations, distributed teaching and learning, cooperative goals, interaction with real world professionals, and an authentic audience.  A writing piece, graphic, oral performance, or other artifact go through repeated cycles of prototyping, each iteration presented before peer or whole class for critique and reflection.  Some describe this environment as a safe space to fail fast and often.  For me, this ensures learning will not only happen, but will go deep.  Good projects crescendo, often only ending because of a deadline.  Projects design for intrinsic motivation, engagement, and “need to know”, deemphasize the extrinsic motivation of grades.



Differentiating PBL from STEM and STEAM: challenge-based approaches contextualize learning and could become project based, but often draw tighter parameters around voice and choice in order to get at specific curricular objectives.  Like Fink’s frustration with cookie cutter individual products, the voice and choice may only be evident within the mold of the final product.  Fink observed kids choosing colors and patterns to include in a predetermined shape, much like the middle schoolers I have observed chose their problem solving methods of wingspans and flaps, but they all created model wooden gliders.  This is not to say that such challenges are not important within learning environments and they can easily be modules within larger projects, just as teacher read-alouds and lectures have a definite place, even within project environments.

Buck Institute and New Tech Learning also show the wide spectrum within PBL.  BI says that any project work is good, while NTL applies a more rigorous approach to whole school adoption of project method.  BI promotes rubrics that create reflections on learning objectives difficult to quantify (ie those too subjective to be taken seriously by many schools), while NTL grades are based on communication, collaboration, agency, knowledge, and thinking.  The spectrum of how much project based learning goes back to the Dewey/Kilpatrick debates on "the project method", Kilpatrick arguing for unrestricted student choice and motivation, while Dewey promoted the role of the teacher and curriculum in developing student critical thought.



Beliefs: Learning is far more complex than a series of inputs and outputs of cognitive processes.  Starting with inquiry and working toward a product of learning creates a kind of narrative bracket to learning where purpose and choice drive student motivation to master skills and content.  Early learners come ready with three types of agency - individual, proxy, and collective - that projects should provide space for.  Children with scaffolded guidance and continuous cycles of feedback are capable of managing their own learning.

Building a Product

Restorative practices and Project Based Learning show how very different products of learning can be, from the utilitarian product of a project developed over a specific period of time with specific learning goals in mind, to the long game open ended construction of a classroom and school culture of restoration, one informal or formal interaction at at time.  Each complements the other in the belief in children as capable, co-constructors of their learning environment.  I hope that by walking through each approach and reflecting on how product unlocks belief, it may shed light on how the branding and marketing of learning approaches distract from the more important goal of identifying what our beliefs are about what children learn, how they learn it, and why.


In the next post this strain continues with Writer’s Workshop, Maker Centered Learning, and Design Thinking.
Work Cited

Bandura, A. (1999). Social Cognitive Theory: An Agentic Perspective. Asian Journal of Social Psychology,2(1), 21-41. doi:10.1111/1467-839x.00024

Costello, B., Wachtel, J., & Wachtel, T. (2009). The restorative practices handbook: For teachers, disciplinarians and administrators. Bethlehem, PA: International Institute for Restorative Practices.

Davis, C., Lopez, D., & Leon, N. (2015, February 17). Paul Curtis from New tech Network on Student Inquiry. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pzig32AQxE

Davis, C. (2016, April 01). Testing #prototypes & gathering feedback #designthinking #dchat #dtk12chat #makerEd #edchat #pblchat pic.twitter.com/FmUt3xwNez. Retrieved from https://twitter.com/chrisdaviscng/status/715753654809141249

Davis, C. (2016, April 24). The Teacher's Lens. Retrieved from https://celebratecng.blogspot.com/2016/04/why-tweet-part-3-documentation-process.html

Davis, C. (2017, March 28). The Teacher's Lens. Retrieved from https://celebratecng.blogspot.com/2017/03/you-are-what-you-do-maker-empowerment.html


Davis, C. (2017, May 11). Dr. Cary Roseth: Motivation and Purpose in Learning Environments. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywZIS7OZ0kY

Davis, C. (2018, November). Rachel Fink on Reggio Emilia in an Israeli Context. Retrieved from https://soundcloud.com/chris-davis-276158228/rachel-fink-on-reggio-emilia-in-an-israeli-context?in=chris-davis-276158228/sets/journeys-in-podcasting-1

Davis, C., Lopez, D., & Leon, N. (2015, January 22). Interview with John Larmer of Buck Institute: Student Inquiry. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgWAcxrDm68

Hallermann, S., Larmer, J., & Mergendoller, J. R. (2016). PBL in the elementary grades: Step-by-step guidance, tools and tips for standards-focused K-5 projects. Novato, CA: Buck Institute for Education.

Howe, J. (2002). The Kuna gathering: Contemporary village politics in Panama. Tucson, AZ: Fenestra Books.

Johnson, D. W., Johnson, R. T., Tjosvold, D., & Roseth, C. J. (2018). Morton Deutsch: Celebrating His Theorizing and Research. Negotiation and Conflict Management Research. doi:10.1111/ncmr.12122

Larmer, J. (2014, October 1). PBL Blog. Retrieved from http://www.bie.org/blog/the_importance_of_project_based_teaching

Sharp, J. (2018, December 10). #NewTechNetwork schools grade Ss on Communication, Collaboration, Agency, and Knowledge and Thinking ... much more meaningful than a simple A-F! https://t.co/apG1lHRkW9. Retrieved from https://twitter.com/JessicaSharp/status/1072126865995902977

Sills, L. (2017, August 21). Design Thinking at Mid-Pacific. Retrieved from http://www.midpac.edu/designthinking/2017/08/design-thinking-at-mid-pacific.php
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