This past summer, Denise Mastroieni, Lake Drive School’s art educator attended the Project Zero Classroom Institute at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. The Institute, lead by world famous Harvard professor Howard Gardner (author of the Theory of Multiple Intelligences and many best selling books on learning, thinking and teaching for understanding) and his colleague Professor David Perkins (a best selling author in the areas of cognition, artificial intelligence and thinking dispositions) drew approximately 400 people from around the globe. Participants included teachers (from pre-school through university levels) of math, science, art, history and literature as well as administrators and many business leaders. They came from Europe, Australia, Japan, China, Africa, India and South America as well as the United States. Within this wide range of topics, Mrs. Mastroieni focused her studies on the Teaching for Understanding model with particular emphasis on the areas of Making Learning Visible and Making Thinking Visible. The Teaching for Understanding model develops a framework that stresses in-depth learning. It provides teachers with a language and structure for emergent curriculum approaches by seeing both students and teachers as part of learning groups and focusing on open ended long term projects.

Making Learning Visible

At its center is the use of documentation by teachers to support and shape learning. Documenters become researchers and are able to focus on what the children are understanding and can shape the curriculum accordingly. Teachers document student learning (both in visual and written format) and share this documentation with students and the school community. If you enter the Lake Drive art room this year, you will see photos and notations of every class as they engage in their projects. Mrs. Mastroieni also uses this documentation at the beginning of each class on the Smartboard to help students internalize what they are learning, see themselves actively engaged in their own learning and in many cases see where they may need to change or modify what they have been doing.

Making Thinking Visible

It’s hard to argue against classroom practices that teach students to think. Why go further and argue that students’ thinking should be made visible? Well, for one thing, visible thinking has a diagnostic function. By providing a visible record of children’s thinking, it allows teachers to see what students are learning and where they need help. But it also goes beyond diagnosis to actively support good thinking in a number of ways.