My 7th grade classes have been working on a project based around the early explorers to the New World, from Columbus to Magellan to de Soto. I divided them into pairs and presented them with the challenge of creating a ship’s log, complete with a daily log, a biography of the explorer, a map of the journey and a drawing of the ship. I adapted it from a project that I found here: “An Adventure to the New World Project.” They also had to research one of the areas where the explorer landed, its flora and fauna, to see what might have returned to Europe as part of the Columbian Exchange. They had almost total freedom to decide how they would create their log. They could use Pages on their Macs, use Word docs or they could handwrite and draw the images. They had a total of 6-7 hours of class and homework time to work on the project.
I put together a list of initial research sites and showed them where to look in our libraries online databases. They also knew that they could use SweetSearch for any other research questions they developed and Creative Commons for images. Then I just let them go, and what followed was silence, hour after hour of focused silence. Occasionally, there was quiet whispering between the partners, or one of them would ask to go to the printer to pick something up or to take a walk to help her think. For the most part, however, they simply worked.
Sometimes they were drawing; sometimes they were typing. Then someone would come for help with research terms or to ask if a new idea would fit in. At every turn, I shifted the decision back to the student. “What do you want to learn about? What other words might you use to describe that?” “How will that add to your log?” My most common response was simply, “What do you want to use to tell the story?” With a smile, though often with a slight look of frustration that I wouldn’t simply tell them what was “right by the teacher,” she would go to figure out what she wanted without me.
It felt a bit like a miracle, students working independently, totally engaged with very little need of my interaction, hour after hour. I wandered around at times, but for this project, it almost seemed to distract them from what they were doing. It clearly made them think about what I, the teacher, might want, and they immediately started asking questions to verify that their work was alright by me. They lost their own assessing and creating momentum. Without me, they were investigating, doing, making. The project clearly had shifted from being my assignment to their independent task.
When I asked them to come up with a list of aspects that they would want to have evaluated for this project, they wrote: independence, creativity, collaboration, effort, commitment. So, I wrote up a self-reflection where they can discuss what they did and the learning itself. I don’t want to take the power of the project away in the grading process. I don’t want them turning over the importance of their work to me. I want them to articulate the steps that they followed and how well they did on each one, as well as to figure out what they would do differently the next time.
Last night, the designated last night of the project, my InBox was filled with emails requesting one more day. Over and over, the student said she was so close, but it wasn’t exactly what she wanted. She wanted to make it show how much she had learned and wasn’t quite there yet.
So I emailed the class to tell them that today’s class would be one more work day.
And it was another hour of silent, focused work!
What was my role in all of this? Was I, as the teacher, even necessary? Definitely! As teachers, we plan and create. We listen and learn. We create a safe environment within which each student can learn. We model learning, and we affirm it when we see it. Student independence only happens when we create and sustain it.
Middle School Matrix 
I’ve had the same observation, if the work the kids is doing is interesting enough and engaging enough, I feel slightly useless while they work on it. I’ve had the same thing happen many times during my project work, and I’ve decided that my role during this time is to document what the kids are doing, and to act as a reporter for the class on the progress of the group.
I like those roles, David. Thanks for sharing them. Hadley
Hear hear !
Similar experiences in language class. I think the social part of these lessons is very empowering too… especially when it’s not forced group work, but something fun and interesting to share.
thanks for the post. cheers, brad
Brad, how have you used socialization in language class? Were you studying grammar or stories? Dee
just now checking back here… 🙂
wow… examples are endless, so I’ll choose the first one that came to mind. I taught Chinese University students who needed more than anything to EXpress their english. They had it all in the brains, but had existed in an almost solely passive reception of the language.
So, my task in that environment was to be the silent teacher with interesting lesson plans that would engage them with their natural interests, and get em’ jabberin’. Many of the students were concerned with what job they would or wouldn’t find after graduating, so my favorite lesson (and probably most successful one) was a job fair.
They had to write their own resumes as job seekers, and also assume the role of a boss and write questions for prospective candidates. It was fun too, though, because I told them they could “make-up” a fake resume to practice and also the “bosses” were encouraged to run companies of a abnormal nature—- they would thus be seeking placements for a spy, a rock star, a nuclear engineer, a president, a garbageman….
It was fun. 🙂 Thanks for asking. Cheers, brad
Again, I’m a student from Dr. Strange’s EDM 310 class at the University of South Alabama. Dr. Strange suggested that I read your blog. There is so much that I like about this post and the project that you designed for your class. First of all, I like the title of your post. I think too often that we think of teaching as a classroom of students sitting and listening to a teacher teach or ask guiding questions. I definitely think that when learning is silent, students are discovering the information themselves and truly learning. I also like how you assert that the teacher’s role is definitely necessary. I think it’s important that we encourage our students to be confident in their work and not rely on what others judge as valuable. Thanks for the post!
Thank you for your thoughtful comment, Lauren. I am glad that you liked the post. Hadley