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PART I:
Six Learning Portraits
Chapters 1 through 6 depict six learning portraits from kindergarten through twelfth grades in several disciplines. It is not necessary to read through the portraits sequentially before moving onto other portions of the book; rather, feel free to read those portraits that speak to your interests. If, later in the book, you come across a reference to a portrait that is unfamiliar to you, we encourage you to return to that chapter and read the portrait.
As you read the portraits, we invite you to consider the following questions:
- In what ways do you see learners and learning being made visible?
- How do the practices of group learning and documentation support each other?
- What roles do the teachers and students play in supporting their own and each other's learning?
- How do the practices in these classrooms reflect or extend the ways you make learning visible in your classroom?
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Chapter 1
The Yellow Door
Turning Problems into Projects
in Kindergarten
Teachers
Nicole Chasse and John Walker
Children
Amelia, Ava, Betel, Durjoy, Hakim, Sajan, Tamar, and William
This learning portrait describes how two teachers use student conflict in a play area of their kindergarten classroom to promote children's collaborative inquiry, social and artistic development, and mathematical reasoning.
Children in Nicole Chasse's kindergarten class at the Edward Devotion School* liked to build in the block area. They built and rebuilt sturdy ramps for trucks to speed down and homes for the wooden animals. The only problem was that everyone liked to use the yellow door. As one child named Durjoy explained, āThe yellow door was better than the red windows because it was tall enough for the black horse to walk through. But we only had one door and people were having trouble sharing.ā Consequently, the yellow door led to lots of arguments.
Growing tired of children's increasing arguments over the door, one morning Nicole asked Hakim, Durjoy, and Sajan, āDo you think the block area would be more fun without the door, because it seems like the door is causing too many problems for you to enjoy yourselves?ā
Unhappy with the prospect of losing the door, the boys were motivated to find another way to solve the problem.
āBuy more doors!ā one boy shouted. Nicole explained that this idea would require money they did not have and encouraged them to keep thinking.
āMake more doors!ā
Nicole was intrigued by this idea. She could imagine many opportunities for learning as well as challenges that she posed to the boys: āHow could we make doors just as good as the yellow door so people would use them?ā Hakim, Durjoy, and Sajan suggested asking John Walker, the assistant teacher, to help because he was an expert woodworker and the yellow door was made out of wood. Later that day, the three boys presented the idea to John and the rest of the class. The idea was received enthusiastically and the door project was born.
The Planning Phase
All the other wood projects we did, John Walker thought up. But this project, we actually worked on the beginning plans.āAmelia
The children's desire to make a door exactly like the cherished yellow door offered many opportunities to advance the children's learning and make connections across several strands of the kindergarten curriculumāincluding arts, English language arts, and math. Because the children had already done some observational drawing, John suggested interested students make sketches or āplansā for the doors based on careful observation of the yellow door, which he could then use to make the door ākits.ā The children would then help with the finishingāsanding, choosing colors, and painting.
Eight children volunteered to make plans. Some students sketched freestyle, whereas others such as Tamar chose to be more precise by measuring the original door with a ruler to find its exact dimensions. Tamar's idea inspired others to use the ruler so John explained the concepts of length and width. They discovered the door was exactly 5Ā½ Ć 4 inches.
The āDoor Huntā: Collecting Data on Doors
While waiting for John to build the door kits, Nicole took advantage of children's increased interest in doors and asked if anyone wanted to explore the school to see what other kinds of doors they could find. The children loved the idea. Not only did it tap into their fascination with doors but also, as Ava later said, they were able to āgo to places that kindergartners don't [usually] get to go to.ā Nicole suggested children count and record the different types of doors they saw but did not provide specific instructions on how to record.
Each child took a clipboard, paper, and pencil to record the information. Nicole and John alternated accompanying the small groups, taking pictures or video to document the different doors and children's observations along the way.
The children's notations reflected the different features they noticed about doors as well as the different methods they each invented to record the data.
Some children recorded the order in which they encountered specific doors, others recorded the number of doors they found with particular features, and still others recorded observations in writing. Sajan recorded the doors he found by writing pairs of contrasting features, āRed and not red, two [doors] and one [door], things [on the door] and no things [on the door].ā
In one group, Amelia (who dubbed this part of the project āthe door huntā) organized her paper into a graph to make room for all the doors she found. When children shared the data they collected with the whole group, the other children found Amelia's method very appealing. The next day, another group followed suit and created similar grid patterns on their paper.
Organizing and Sharing the Data
When Nicole and John looked at the children's data, they noticed the children naturally gravitated toward identifying the doors' different attributes. Because counting, describing, and comparing measurable attributes and classifying objects are important parts of the kindergarten math curriculum, they approached Ms. Boss, the school's math specialist, to seek help on planning next steps that would continue to deepen these skills. The next day, Nicole, John, and Ms. Boss presented the class with a new provocation: āCan you choose one attribute and collect a new set of door information based on only that one attribute?ā
Ms. Boss gave the students a blank piece of paper, demonstrated how to draw a graph, and reviewed the question she had posedādiscussing the meaning of āattributeā by using examples from the data the children had collected (size, color, material, unique features, etc.). Before setting off with clipboards and graph paper, each child chose an attribute on which to record information. Tamar, Sajan, Ava, and Amelia all decided to record color; Ethan W. chose size.
After the children collected their data on color and size, Nicole took them to the fourth grade hallway to look at the fourth-graders' graphs of āleaf fall data.ā She pointed out how they could clearly see which trees lost the most or least leaves in certain weeks. The kindergartners noticed that the fourth-graders used labels and organized the graphs around the types of trees, the weeks they were observing, and the number of fallen leaves. Nicole proposed a new challenge: āCould we take the information we collected from our door graphs and make it into a graph that others in the school could read?ā
The group was up for the challenge. Nicole worked with small groups in the hallway while John helped out with the rest of the class. Nicole gave the first group of five a choice of working alone or with a partner and a choice of paperālarge lined chart paper or blank white drawing paper. Sajan and Tamar decided to merge their data into one graph. Betel, who had opted out of the door hunts, worked with Ava to transfer her data into a graph on the chart paper. Durjoy decided to work on his own. Here we follow Ava and Betel as they work.
Ava, who seemed to understand the concept of graphing and what it was for, first explained to Betel, āIt's lines going that way (indicating horizontally across the page) and lines going down with things in the midd...
