Project Season
You may have noticed; it's project season in the Lower School!
Spring often means our students are out in the wetlands observing bugs for a classroom insect study or that they are spread across floors and tables madly writing scripts and stories. They may be kindergartners creating masks to bring their characters to life or second graders rehearsing their hero speech. Our fourth grade students just cleaned up their water-themed presentations from the International Fair and disassembled their stage from their World Water Day play in time to make way for third graders to practice their own original play about the 'hidden' stories in Oregon History. There is some paint on the new floors and cupboard doors, a bit of paper mache stuck to tables. Everywhere there are signs of the productivity, collaboration and innovation that thrive in project season.
This winter, courtesy of your auction contributions, several faculty had the opportunity to go to San Francisco to a Learning and the Brain conference. One of the keynote speakers was Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, author of Becoming Brilliant: What Science Tells Us About Raising Successful Children. In her book Dr. Golinkoff reminds us:
As anthropologist Kim Hill added, humans are not special because of their big brains. That's not the reason we can build rocket ships--no individual can. We have rockets because 10,000 individuals cooperate in producing information...the ability to collaborate is not just important for learning in classrooms or for global commerce. It is arguably the very foundation on which the human experience is built. Everything we do is influenced by our living in the social soup.
Project season (which really can happen at anytime at OES, not only in spring) is the heart of both collaborative and individual learning. The students have spent their year acquiring new skills: ways to write more independently or effectively, strategies for solving math problems, techniques for using art media to communicate their thinking. Those skills are only meaningful, however, when they are applied. And they are limited to the scope of one child's skill, one child's imagination, until they are contributed to something larger. This is the magic that is school; our ability to build on one another's gifts and learn from each others' challenges until our own knowledge and skills expand beyond what we knew was possible. Until something...a play, a movie, an exhibit, a sculpture, a constitution, a speech, a mural or some other representation of our collective thinking...is born in to the world that didn't exist before.
When we say that our ultimate goal at OES is for our students to use their power for good, it requires that the years leading up to their departure help them develop an understanding of how to build, hone and utilize their various modes of power. They have to learn through many experiences what it means to use their powers effectively and what it means to them to use them for good, enhancing whichever communities in which they find themselves. This is what project season is all about, and why we couldn't do without it.
For further reading, check out the recent NYT article: Why We Believe Obvious Untruths by cognitive scientist Philip Fernbach and Steven Sloman, professor of cognitive, linguistic and psychological sciences. From that article: "What really sets human beings apart is not our individual mental capacity. The secret to our success is our ability to jointly pursue complex goals by dividing cognitive labor. Hunting, trade, agriculture, manufacturing--all of our world-altering innovations--were made possible by this ability."
Spring often means our students are out in the wetlands observing bugs for a classroom insect study or that they are spread across floors and tables madly writing scripts and stories. They may be kindergartners creating masks to bring their characters to life or second graders rehearsing their hero speech. Our fourth grade students just cleaned up their water-themed presentations from the International Fair and disassembled their stage from their World Water Day play in time to make way for third graders to practice their own original play about the 'hidden' stories in Oregon History. There is some paint on the new floors and cupboard doors, a bit of paper mache stuck to tables. Everywhere there are signs of the productivity, collaboration and innovation that thrive in project season.
This winter, courtesy of your auction contributions, several faculty had the opportunity to go to San Francisco to a Learning and the Brain conference. One of the keynote speakers was Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, author of Becoming Brilliant: What Science Tells Us About Raising Successful Children. In her book Dr. Golinkoff reminds us:
As anthropologist Kim Hill added, humans are not special because of their big brains. That's not the reason we can build rocket ships--no individual can. We have rockets because 10,000 individuals cooperate in producing information...the ability to collaborate is not just important for learning in classrooms or for global commerce. It is arguably the very foundation on which the human experience is built. Everything we do is influenced by our living in the social soup.
Project season (which really can happen at anytime at OES, not only in spring) is the heart of both collaborative and individual learning. The students have spent their year acquiring new skills: ways to write more independently or effectively, strategies for solving math problems, techniques for using art media to communicate their thinking. Those skills are only meaningful, however, when they are applied. And they are limited to the scope of one child's skill, one child's imagination, until they are contributed to something larger. This is the magic that is school; our ability to build on one another's gifts and learn from each others' challenges until our own knowledge and skills expand beyond what we knew was possible. Until something...a play, a movie, an exhibit, a sculpture, a constitution, a speech, a mural or some other representation of our collective thinking...is born in to the world that didn't exist before.
When we say that our ultimate goal at OES is for our students to use their power for good, it requires that the years leading up to their departure help them develop an understanding of how to build, hone and utilize their various modes of power. They have to learn through many experiences what it means to use their powers effectively and what it means to them to use them for good, enhancing whichever communities in which they find themselves. This is what project season is all about, and why we couldn't do without it.
For further reading, check out the recent NYT article: Why We Believe Obvious Untruths by cognitive scientist Philip Fernbach and Steven Sloman, professor of cognitive, linguistic and psychological sciences. From that article: "What really sets human beings apart is not our individual mental capacity. The secret to our success is our ability to jointly pursue complex goals by dividing cognitive labor. Hunting, trade, agriculture, manufacturing--all of our world-altering innovations--were made possible by this ability."
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