Room 18
Working Together to Understand...
Project Zero: Visible Thinking is a project through Harvard's Graduate School of Education. Along with a small group of teachers, I acted as a teacher researcher on this project for 2 years for the key researchers from Harvard. It was an amazing experience from which I gained a lot of strength and reflection as an educator. I am very proud of the work that we did, and the articles below are examples of work that I did with my students that still exists as examples for the project. My hope is to bring components of this project to my classroom in California. I would very much like to work, again, with the consummate professionals from Project Zero.
http://www.pz.harvard.edu/vt/VisibleThinking_html_files/VisibleThinking1.html
Circle of Viewpoints: Pictures of Practice
What does the routine look like in action?
Using the Routine to Explore a...
Jenn Aza, grade 6 International School of
As part of their study of the history of the slave trade in western civilization students in
Jenn Aza's social studies class examined a picture of an apparent slave trade
involving an ambiguous negotiation between the central characters in the image.
Students were asked to think of various perspectives connected to the image.
Who would be interested in this image? Who might care about it?
What people might be affeced by what you see in the image?
Individually, students brainstormed various perspectives of the image and topic of slavery. They chose a single viewpoint and used the routine's script skeleton to investigate the perspective more deeply, imagining what the character might be experiencing or thinking. Students were also asked to generate a question from the perspective of their character. Click images at left to view example of students' thinking.
Here Now There Then: Pictures of Practice
What does the routine look like in action?
Using the routine to explore perspectives from different points in time
Jenn Aza, International School of Brussels, grade 6
The Here Now/There Then routine was used in Jen Aza's classroom to
encourage and challenge students to think from the perspective from
different point in time about the intsitution of marriage.
The documentation presented here illustrates some of the historical
perspective taking centered around the issue of marriage and women's rights.
The students paired up to discuss what they might have thought then
(a century ago) versus what they think now. Students worked in pairs
and made their thinking visable on paper. The charts documented the group's
thinking about this issue and were used to help the students to reflect on the
differences in perspective between then and now.
