Wait a second, I thought. Julie Diamond? Could it be that Julie Diamond?
Sure enough, when I googled the book and the author, up popped my own kindergarten teacher from decades ago, with her short, gray, cropped hair. I immediately ordered the book from Amazon and patiently awaited its arrival.
On Wednesday, I went to a dog park with Phoebe while P taught a private soccer session, and began reading.
The gorgeous cover with Estelle’s bookmark gift peeking out.
I couldn’t put it down. I read, wishing I’d brought a pencil to underline and take notes in the margins. I reluctantly dog-eared the pages, swearing I’d unfold them as soon as I got home and write the notes I’d been meaning to (which I did).
In a serendipitous way, I discovered, through reading Julie’s words, that my first elementary school teacher had a teaching philosophy truly aligned with my own. Progressive, project-based, child-centered, Reggio-inspired.
How much of my educational career, both as a student and now as a teacher, can I attribute to that first year of my schooling at PS 87 under her tutelage?
As Julie explains how she (and you, the teacher-reader can) truly listens to children and lets them guide their own learning, providing practical advice for setting up and running a classroom, I find myself affirmed, inspired, and impassioned. I am a sponge, soaking up as much teaching as she has left to share with me, some 28 years later.
Kindergarten me
I feel more excited about heading back to work in August than I have been in years, and I’m curious about setting an intention to write about the upcoming school year: “a teacher, her students, and a year of learning.” What a beautiful idea.
Perhaps the SOL community is a good starting place to hold me accountable.
In October 2020, Natalie and I presented at Bank Street’s Language Series. The theme that year was Anti-Racist Language Teaching. Our workshop, “Taking an Anti-Racist Stance as a Teacher-Researcher” focused on the question: What stories need to be told in the community where I teach and how will I center them?
Natalie and I are both white teachers who, at the time, were teaching dual-language in The Bronx (Natalie still does). In our workshop, we got vulnerable and spoke about our status as outsiders to that community — Natalie is from Ohio, and I grew up in Manhattan, which may as well be worlds away from The Bronx. We discussed the strategies that helped us get informed, with the aim of doing soul-affirming, language-rich, student-centered social studies. Learning the history of the South Bronx changed our vision of the neighborhood, correcting our deficit/racist views. We crafted a unit that privileged community voices, shrinking our presence and promoting the agency of students. Our goal with the workshop was to provide participants with tools to start similar journeys. My goal with this post is to give my readers those tools as well.
Our fifth graders discovered how community members came together to rebuild The Bronx
The Importance of Teacher-Research for PBL
I believe that becoming a teacher-researcher and building your own expertise, particularly if you are an outsider to a community (and even if you have been living in the community your whole life!), is essential not just for anti-racist teaching, but also for PBL. In order for projects to take on a life of their own through student interest and “unexpected detours,” as my coworker Lizzie calls them, teachers need to be knowledgeable about the content and flexible enough to facilitate this learning, no matter the direction the detour may take. This doesn’t mean you need to be an expert or prepared for 100 different scenarios, but it does mean you should have a good amount of knowledge under your belt to feel comfortable answering student questions and guiding them towards next steps.
For me, moving to Miami meant I was, yet again, an outsider. For this unit, I knew I wanted to teach about South Florida’s ecosystems, but I needed to learn about them first. I had a lot of questions: What’s a mangrove? Why is the Everglades so special? Isn’t it just flat swampland? Is Miami doomed to be underwater in the next few years?
I got to work.
Research Strategies for Getting Informed
A successful research project uses multiple sources and multiple types of sources. Here are some that are my go-to’s for teacher-research:
Books
Photo trove (many libraries and museums have digital collections; you can also find specific photographers’ projects or exhibitions on artists’ or museums’ websites)
Podcasts
Talks at local universities
Museums
Interviews with community members
Newspaper and magazine archives
Community and nonprofit organizations
The Henry Chalfant exhibit
For our Bronx community project, I pored over photographs from the NY Public Library Digital Collections of our school neighborhood in the 40s, 60s, and 70s, finding intersections that we’d be able to place on the map and juxtapose next to photos of what stood there today. I geeked out over a three-part episode from The Bowery Boys about the history of the South Bronx. The Bronx Museum of the Arts had an exhibit with Henry Chalfant’s photographs of the graffitied trains from the 70s and 80s, so we booked a field trip. Natalie, Bryan, and I attended a talk at MCNY to learn about the Young Lords.
Here in Miami, I ordered a few books to learn more about the history of the Everglades: River of Grass by Marjory Stoneman Douglas and The Swamp by Michael Grunwald, as well as a bunch of picture books for interactive read aloud. I found blogs with old political cartoons and photos, some of which I used for our first provocations. I followed community and nonprofit organizations on Instagram and reached out to some of them for interviews and field trips. I also talked a lot with my coworkers who grew up in South Florida (shout out to Estelle and Josue).
The Beauty of Place-Based Learning: Discoveries for Both Insiders and Outsiders
I think one of my favorite aspects of place-based PBL is that both insiders, who’ve lived in the community forever, and outsiders, who’ve either recently moved there or just commute there from another neighborhood, end up learning so much about their community.
We learned about the resilience and strength of the mangrove forests, and how the Everglades has so many different ecosystems within it. We literally got our hands dirty in order to see this for ourselves.
5th Graders climb up a red mangrove’s roots in Key Biscayne
At the crossroads of Brickell, Little Havana, and The Roads, our school sits alongside I-95, where Xavier Cortada and his 800+ volunteers painted the Miami Mangrove Forest, which we all see every day as we come to work, but never knew the story behind.
We built relationships with organizations that are fighting for the survival of Miami’s ecosystem well into the future, for the benefit of plants, animals, and humans who call Miami home.
Every day that I live and teach here, I grow a deeper appreciation for this city. Through this project, I have gained more faith than before that it will continue to thrive. Watching the fifth graders present to the younger students about mangroves and why we should care about them showed me that they have too.
Anyone who knows me knows that I am very organized. (Yes, I do tend to get cluttered. I’m working on it.) I especially value organization when planning Project Based Learning units, which, without some structure, can just seem like a bunch of floating ideas. My three favorite tools for planning PBL units are curriculum calendars, Dr. Gholdy Muhammad’s Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy (CHRL) framework, and Thinking Maps.
Curriculum Maps
I’d used pacing calendars prior to Samara at my first school for math. Our math coach handed us a stapled pack of pages that outlined which math lessons we should be covering each day of the year in order to teach them all before the NY State tests. That’s not what I mean here when I refer to a curriculum map.
A curriculum map is an at-a-glance overview of your whole year — every month, every subject — so that you can see how all of the pieces of the puzzle fit together. At Samara, where each grade has a theme/essential question, we made sure to include essential questions for our 3 major PBL units, as well as field trips and culminating projects.
Our 5th Grade Curriculum Map for 2020-2021
Curriculum maps are extremely helpful. Not only can you see EVERYTHING, but you can also easily see how to integrate the various disciplines. For example, in the fall of 2020, our 5th grade PBL unit focused on government and the presidential elections. We saw a window here for teaching multi-digit operations as well as decimal fractions, since we’d be analyzing different infographics with population, demographics, voting percentages, budget, etc.
Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy
If you’re a teacher and you haven’t heard of Dr. Gholdy Muhammad’s Cultivating Genius, do yourself a favor and buy the book RIGHT NOW. I won’t be able to do it justice in this short blog post. So I’m going to quote from Jennifer Gonzalez and the Cult of Pedagogy, as well as direct you there and to Dr. Muhammad’s website to learn more.
Muhammad believes we’re not reaching many of our students, especially Black students, because our curricula and standards are lacking. The emphasis in our current standards is mainly on skills—skills that can be measured easily on standardized tests—and not a whole lot else…
But there was a time in history when a more complete, more human form of ‘curriculum’ did exist, and it energized and inspired its students—all of them Black men and women—to read, write, speak, and publish with the kind of passion and dedication we would want all of our students to have about learning. This curriculum evolved within the Black literary societies of the 19th century…
These societies were the inspiration for Muhammad’s Historically Responsive Literacy framework, a four-layered pedagogical model that places skills on an equal plane with three other learning pursuits: identity, intellect, and criticality.
Though Cultivating Genius only outlines four learning pursuits, Dr. Muhammad has stated in various workshops and interviews that there is a fifth: joy.
I love using Dr. Muhammad’s framework to guide my PBL planning because it ensures that the unit will connect to students’ lives, teach them the skills and knowledge they need to know in 5th grade, help them to think critically and question “power, equity, anti-racism, and other anti-oppressions,” and provide them with opportunities for joy. It also increases the rigor of any unit. I’ll show you exactly how I use the framework after I talk about Thinking Maps.
Thinking Maps®
In the spring of 2019, I was trained in Thinking Maps, “a set of 8 visual patterns that correlate to specific cognitive processes” (thinkingmaps.com). Unlike regular graphic organizers, of which there are thousands that are usually chosen with no real rhyme or reason (like a sequencing map in the shape of an S for a snake?), there are only eight Thinking Maps. Each Thinking Map is aligned to one specific thinking process: defining, classifying, describing, comparing, sequencing, cause and effect, whole to part relationships, and analogies.
For Samara, a dual language school with ICT classes, Thinking Maps were a no-brainer. And me? I totally drank the Kool-Aid. I still use Thinking Maps all the time in my personal life: for to do lists, grocery lists, packing lists, even when Alberto and I were planning our move to Miami! They are unbelievably useful, and honestly, they just make sense.
The way I use Thinking Maps for planning PBL units is as follows:
Brainstorm with a circle map. Get down ALL of the ideas I have. Ideally do this with a thought partner.
A circle map we made for an end-of-year/end-of-unit project
Categorize all of the ideas according to Dr. Gholdy Muhammad’s CHRL framework.
Backwards plan and sequence the unit: What needs to be taught first so that students arrive to the final project?
I can then input the sequence into my curriculum map and work on holding myself accountable as well as staying flexible for student choice and voice.
Putting it into Practice: Our Current Unit of Study
In December, I roped Josue, our tech teacher, into brainstorming for our ecosystems unit with me. We created a circle map that overflowed onto a second page.
Over winter break, holed up in NYC at my parents’ house during the omicron wave, I researched resources and field trips, adding to the map and bothering Josue with my constant texts. On the plane back to Miami, I organized the ideas into a tree map with the CHRL framework.
I revised and reworded the essential question until I finally got it right: How can we encourage our KLA community to take a more active role in caring for South Florida’s ecosystems?
Then I paced it out: How would I launch the unit with the students so that they could come to this question on their own? When would the field trips make the most sense? What would students need to learn about and build expertise in before starting to take action? How could I align math, reader’s workshop, and writer’s workshop units so that they supported the flow of the project?
Into the curriculum map the ideas went:
January – launch and start initial research on ecosystems; start informational writing unit
February – deeper investigation into ecosystems, including virtual and in-person field trips to the mangroves of Key Biscayne and the Everglades; final informational writing bend = quick-write brochure about the Everglades habitats and endangered species
March – begin conversations about taking action, interview eco-artists, urban designers, nonprofit employees, etc; start opinion writing unit
Since January, the unit has taken on a life of its own. The students really grabbed onto mangroves more than any other ecosystem. A request for an interview with eco-artist Xavier Cortada led to us participating in his Plan(T) project school-wide, bringing mangrove propagules to KLA. An interview with Anna, our atelierista, sparked criticality and gave seed to a community urban design culminating project that integrates math and art, which we’ll launch after spring break.
But having that organizational plan? It’s like a road map. You may end up taking an alternate route, but having the map in front of you helps you keep the final destination in mind.
When my husband and I decided to move to Miami, I was sure about one thing: whichever school I taught at would need to embrace inquiry, integrated studies, and project based learning. I was lucky to find KLA, which has allowed me the same creative freedom that Samara did in designing curriculum that is meaningful and relevant for my students.
The way I approach project based learning is heavily influenced by my time at Samara and the professional development I received while teaching there, as well as by what I’m seeing and learning at KLA with its Reggio-inspired model.
My first Samara 5th graders observe a photo of their Bronx neighborhood in the 1970s, when The Bronx was burning
A disclaimer: I am in no way an expert on project based learning. I do, however, think I have a knack for it. Planning projects is fun (if you’ve ever planned one with me, you know how excited I can get), and it’s probably the only part of planning that never truly feels like work, because I am learning so much in the process.
I know that I’ve learned the most about effective teaching through other teachers—talking to them, observing them, reading their blogs/social media. So my goal is to document and reflect on my planning process here in bite-sized blog posts, in case it helps anyone out there.
What is Project Based Learning?
Before I launch into this blog series, it’s important that we ground ourselves in a definition for project based learning. PBLWorks, the leading provider of professional development for project based learning, defines project based learning as “a teaching method in which students learn by actively engaging in real-world and personally meaningful projects” (pblworks.org). That said, project based learning (PBL) is NOT simply “doing projects.” I particularly like this explanation from their website:
“We find it helpful to distinguish a ‘dessert project’ – a short, intellectually-light project served up after the teacher covers the content of a unit in the usual way – from a ‘main course’ project, in which the project is the unit. In Project Based Learning, the project is the vehicle for teaching the important knowledge and skills student need to learn. The project contains and frames curriculum and instruction.”
PBLWorks
Seven Essential Project Design Elements – PBLWorks
I was lucky enough to receive a full day of professional development from PBLWorks before leaving Samara, and I still have a lot to learn from them, particularly in terms of assessment and student reflection, critique, and revision. I already know these are my next steps as I look toward planning future PBL units. Onward.
Depth Over Breadth
One of the first things I learned at Samara about PBL is the idea of valuing depth over breadth; when you decide to do thematic units or projects, you simply have to give up the idea of being able to teach everything.
This can be a tricky concept to swallow.
But I have to teach all the things!
Take a look at any social studies or science scope and sequence and you’ll see what I mean. There is so much that states and cities and districts want you to teach in a single year for a single subject that it can be overwhelming, if not downright impossible. The teachers who do try to cover it all usually end up sacrificing depth in favor of breadth—students get a little sprinkling of everything, but don’t get a chance to linger and build their expertise. Not very effective.
With PBL, we want students to think critically, problem solve, collaborate, and communicate their newfound understanding in meaningful ways. This means we need to go deep.
Where to Begin
I like to begin by looking at the standards and the scope and sequence. NYC has a beautifully designed, easy to understand social studies scope and sequence. Florida? Not so much. Either way, get familiar with what your state wants students in your grade to learn. Focus on science and social studies, as these are the subject areas that often get “sprinkled” throughout the school day/year, pushed aside in favor of literacy and math, which are absolutely necessary in the primary grades.
Once you’ve gotten an idea of the standards, look inward:
What do you see in the scope and sequence that you are passionate about?
If you’re passionate about something, it will be contagious — others will get excited about it because you are.
Next, look at your students:
What do you see in the scope and sequence that they are or might be passionate about?
Get to know your kids really, really, really well. What questions have they already asked that connect to these topics? What are their interests, their passions, their strengths?
Finally, look at your community:
What issues in your neighborhood/town/city relate to the topics you and your students are passionate about?
I’ve found that project based learning is most effective and meaningful when it’s place-based too. What resources exist in your community to bring this learning to life?
Starting with a Seed
Here’s how I followed this for our current unit of study.
What do I see in the scope and sequence that I’m passionate about?
I am passionate about the environment and combatting the effects of climate change. I see this in the Florida State Standards SC.5.L.17 about Interdependence.
What do I see in the scope and sequence that my students are passionate about?
Many of my students love animals and wildlife. Some of them who moved here from another state have asked why our school doesn’t recycle. Most of them love being outside and are very active.
What issues in my neighborhood/town/city relate to the topics we are passionate about?
Miami is a city built on top of what was once part of the Everglades. Climate change is impacting Miami immensely because of sea level rise. Lots of flooding issues. There are many organizations working to combat pollution of Miami’s beaches. However, there’s a lack of easy/cheap recycling, and hardly any composting.
I had the seed of an idea for the unit. Now I just needed to start planning for it. To be continued.
An installation of mangrove propagules in our classroom window. We are currently participating in Xavier Cortada’s Plan(T) project as part of the community engagement portion of our project.
Ana suggested I start blogging about my experiences teaching, so here I am.
I’m Amy, a born and raised New Yorker-turned-Miamian. After 5 years teaching Spanish dual language in NYC public schools in both Washington Heights and The Boogie Down Bronx, I find myself now at an independent, Reggio-inspired school in Brickell. Quite the jump, bringing with it a ton of change.
That said, in a strange way, I’m in somewhat familiar territory: founding a new grade for the third time in my short teaching career. Founding a grade brings with it the expected fear and anxiety, but also unforeseen joy and excitement. Through this blog, I hope to document this rollercoaster ride and reflect on what’s gone well and what could go better.
For, after all, founding a grade is in its way a shitty first draft, as the title states. There will be much to add and cut and revise for next year. I hope to give myself grace, quiet the perfectionist within me. You’ve got to write the whole thing before you can fix her up!
So here’s to it, and to connecting with other educators along the way.
Writing With Abandon 