Keeping up with old school stuff

I've been reading Tony Wagner's The Global Achievement Gap, a loan from a colleague. That prompted me to thumb back through Ratzer & Jaeger's Toolkit for Implementing Inquiry Learning. Both of them helped me enjoy the thrum of unearthing and then posting a 1997 Art/Library ten-week project I did with 8th graders: Winter Night.

Those ten-week projects entailed 1) brainstorming & visualizing content ideas for our group project, then deciding how to decide which one to do, 2) identifying and placing on a time-line the research and presentation tasks we assigned ourselves for pulling it off,  3) doing the research (often letter-writing, interviews, guest experts, experiments, and 4) compiling what we found out and presenting it effectively to parents and invited guests at an after school event; in this case: Winter Night.

These Art/Library projects were wonderfully student-directed with room for individual interest to take hold and blossom. After the first 2 or 3 weeks, the library was truly a many-stationed workshop. My job was the "what if" guy, the attention to detail guy ("if you use a ruler you can be sure that is centered"), and the recap and "try it" guy.

Here are some artifacts of those weeks; facets of our Winter Night:

These student astronomers studied the Winter sky to construct a wall-sized chart of constellations. (Love the dot-matrix print job!)

Our naturalists contacted area vendors with SASEs and graphed birdseed sales to get a handle on the scope of that market.

This group contacted area residents for their recollections of memorable Winter storms; corroborating those memories with snowfall data at Link Field in Binghamton.

Our snowboarding crew designed small boards of various surfaces, time-tested them on a ramp of their own design, graphed results, and drew conclusions.

While our meteorologist made daily photo documentation as well as temperature, humidity, and barometer readings to try their hand at forecasting.

Inquiring, researching, writing, interviewing, selecting appropriate tools, problem-solving, critical thinking, craftsmanship, data collection and visualization, community resources, celebrated accomplishments.