CASE FILE
Specialists: Susie Orr, Betsy New-Schneider
School: Fairfax County Public Schools
Grade: 5th Grade
Topic: Global Awareness Technology Project
Thinking skills explicitly taught: D, S, R, P
Challenge: Asked to start an innovative project with their teachers, these two specialists met resistance from some classroom teachers. From the teachers' point of view, the project was too demanding for students and teachers. Students found the research questions difficult, and teachers struggled to assist students with such a huge variety of projects.
Executive Summary: Using the Patterns of Thinking Method and looking for patterns among the projects, these specialists gave their teachers guiding questions to help them find commonality within diversity. These guiding questions also gave teachers a way to scaffold students' learning, bring those ambitious research questions within their grasp.

Related Resources:

Lesson Plan - Leadership
Lesson Plan - Comparing Art Forms

A teacher's point of view:

Hear a teacher introduce this project.

What happened?

Because of its many benefits - motivation, developing student independence, etc - student-led research has become part the curricula in many schools. But these projects can seem difficult to manage. With diverse research questions and a variety of content, the teacher's role can seem that much more difficult.

For example, one school district recently instituted a Social Studies project for all of their 5th grade classes. Students find and research the interrelationships among cultures they study throughout the year. Students direct their own research, choosing a topic (leadership, geography, math, etc) and the cultures (Mesopotamia, Classical Rome, Ancient China, etc).
In addition to the challenge of teaching to the wild diversity of topics, each research question is no slouch. Questions like "Why do cultures create governments?" and "What is the impact over time of geography on a culture?" are challenging, regardless of age.

With a huge range of topics and such ambitious questions, some teachers felt overwhelmed by the project. How did they make this project more manageable? They looked for patterns that connect the projects. Once they recognize these patterns, teachers and students can find commonalities in the diverse projects. And it helped teachers scaffold students' learning. Those ambitious research questions could be broken down into manageable chunks.

Guiding Questions

Teachers used guiding questions specific to this project to scaffold students' learning and find commonalities among projects. They started with these questions:

• How has one culture's relationship to the world changed over time?
• What is the impact over time of geography on a culture?
• What conclusions can be drawn about world cultures by comparing and contrasting art forms?
• How do the leaders of yesterday and today compare? How do they contrast?
• How have cultures benefited through interdependence with others?
• Why do cultures create governments? How do these systems differ across cultures and through time?
• How does literature demonstrate the similarities and differences of cultures?
• How have math and/or science achievements of classical cultures affected your life today?

Stripped of their content, these diverse questions showed structural similarities. A pattern emerged, and this pattern was written into guiding questions. By following this pattern, a student could answer any of the original questions. The guiding questions are




At the heart of every project, students study the relationships among cultures. Those relationships can take many forms: similarities/differences, influence, cultural borrowings, etc. The key is that students not simply study ideas in isolation
but look at the relationships between ideas

and among ideas.

Once students related the parts of this system, they gave the whole system a name.
Next, they could repeat the process at a larger scale.

and look for relationships between and among those ideas.

And they can repeat this process over and over...

A teacher's point of view:

Hear a teacher describe the benefits of using the Patterns of Thinking and ThinkBlocks to teach these lessons.

Related Resources:

Lesson Plan - Leadership
Lesson Plan - Comparing Art Forms