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"This book is a much needed reminder that workbooks, patterns, and cutting and tracing lines is largely a waste of children's time," writes Mary Lane, professor emerita at San Francisco State University, in the foreword to the book Engaging Children's Minds: The Project Approach. "Such activities are teaching the five-year-old that school is a dull place, having little in common with real life."
In their 1999 book from Ablex Publishing Corporation, authors Lillian Katz and Sylvia Chard argue for uniting the excitement and novelty of real life with the activities young children do in school. The way to do that, they say, is through projects. The approach, they write, "emphasizes the teacher's role in encouraging children to interact with people, objects, and the environment in ways that have personal meaning to them. As a way of learning, it emphasizes children's active participation in their own studies."
When searching for an appropriate topic for a project, teachers don't need to look far. The best projects, Katz and Chard assert, are drawn from the world that is familiar to the children. "Thus one might expect projects in a rural school to focus on animals and crops cultivated on the nearby land," they counsel. "Children in a fishing village might be engaged in projects about boats, fishing, and fisheries. In an urban area, children can undertake projects about types of buildings, construction sites, factories, traffic patterns, vehicles, and the workers involved."
The book offers practical ideas on designing projects for young children along with detailed suggestions for carrying them out. It walks the reader through the project process, from start to finish, and offers ideas on all kinds of possibilities, from dramatic play to investigation to group discussions. For ordering information, contact Greenwood Publishing Group at 1-800-225-5800 or on the Web at www.greenwood.com
In eloquent language that conveys their excitement for the learning process, Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe lay out their vision of effective educational practice. In Understanding by Design, published in 1998 by the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD), the researchers tackle some of the most critical questions in education today—What is understanding and how does it differ from knowing? What do we want students to understand and be able to do? What enduring knowledge is worth knowing? How will we know that students truly understand and can apply knowledge in a meaningful way? How can we design our courses and units to emphasize understanding?
"Wiggins and McTighe offer us a framework for teacher planning quite different from the one we know all too well," writes Ron Brandt in the foreword. "Designing lessons for understanding begins with what we want students to be able to do."
Six "facets" of understanding—explanation, interpretation, application, perspective, empathy, and self-knowledge—should underpin and inform lesson design, the authors say, noting that "teaching for understanding is not the same thing as teaching for skill or recall of facts."
For ordering information, contact ASCD at 1-800-933-2723 or on the Web at www.ascd.org.
The findings of a five-year study funded by the U.S. Department of Education are detailed in a 1996 book from Jossey-Bass Publishers. In Authentic Achievement: Restructuring Schools for Intellectual Quality, Fred Newmann of the University of Wisconsin at Madison presents data that suggest students' academic achievement benefits greatly from lessons grounded in real-world applications—what he calls "authentic pedagogy."
Writes Newmann: "The kind of achievement required for students to earn school credits, grades, and high scores on tests is often considered trivial, contrived, and meaningless by both students and adults. The absence of meaning breeds low student engagement in schoolwork."
Using examples of actual projects and instructional strategies, the author presents a picture of a successful school—one that encourages kids to delve for true understanding rather than merely skim over the surface, one where kids construct their own knowledge through disciplined inquiry into issues that matter outside the classroom.
For ordering information, contact Jossey-Bass Publishers at 1-800-225-5945 or on the Web at www.josseybass.com.
—Lee Sherman
