Imagine 8th grade students highly motivated and engrossed in the pursuit of learning, their teacher rarely having to implore them to “Pay attention” or “Get to work.” Imagine a classroom where students determine what they will learn, how they will learn it, and how they will demonstrate what they know.
Education researchers dream about such a classroom, write about the possibilities, and encourage teachers and administrators to use such approaches as student choice, curriculum integration, differentiated learning, and self-assessment to engage students deeply in learning (Beane, 1997; Brandt, 1998; Sarason, 1997; Tomlinson, 1999). Most educators, however, find it difficult to bridge the gap between theory and practice.
Mark Springer, an 8th grade teacher in Radnor, Pennsylvania, has broken the mold of traditional learning environments. After 11 successful years coordinating the nationally known Watershed program (Springer, 1994), he secured permission from administrators and parents to design a curriculum integration program with student-generated learning at its core. Each year in three of the past four years, forty 8th grade students have created this meaningful learning environment with guidance from Springer and his colleagues.
The program, titled Soundings, involves students in developing their own curriculum, study methods, and assessments, built around questions that are important to them (Beane, 1993). The name of the program reflects several relevant meanings. The word sounding connotes probing and measuring depth, and the Soundings program encourages students to explore the topics they study deeply. The name also refers to the sounds of students who have a voice in their own education and opportunities to share their learning with the community. Finally, just as whales sound for fresh air, students and teachers in this program are revitalized and refreshed as they experience the benefits of the program's self-directed, integrated curriculum.
Choosing Students
When I describe Soundings, colleagues often suggest skeptically, “This program could only work with high-ability, self-motivated students who can work independently.” But Soundings successfully operates contrary to that belief. From the 65 to 100 students who apply in the spring of their 7th grade year, 40 are selected randomly to participate in Soundings in 8th grade. No criteria are imposed on students except that they obtain their parents' permission to participate.
The selected students represent a wide variety of academic abilities. The academic demographics differ each year but tend to reflect the general school population—approximately 25 percent are identified as gifted, and about 10 to 15 percent are students with special needs and individualized education programs. Most students experience success in Soundings, and levels of individual success do not appear to correlate with the students' previous academic performance.
Students who participate in Soundings spend half of each school day in a room with two Soundings teacher coordinators, where they cover content that would traditionally be taught in reading, language arts, social studies, and science. Students receive their instruction in mathematics, health, foreign language, and physical education from other teachers each day.
Setting the Stage
Each year of the Soundings program begins with the same priority—development of a safe and trusting community with strong student-to-student and student-to-teacher relationships. During the first few weeks of school, students engage in several socialization and trust-building exercises.
The school year begins with students interviewing and then introducing one another to the class. Students also interview the teachers. Students engage in discussions and negotiations as they develop class guidelines for behavior and create affirmations—characteristics that the group wants to embody.
Cooperative games help build a community spirit. Success is defined in these exercises by everyone's willingness to cooperate, to communicate clearly, and to be concerned about and react to the safety needs of others. These activities provide students with the social and emotional tools that they need to engage in meaningful learning experiences with one another.
The initial days of the year also focus on developing the habits of mind needed to engage in genuine learning. Students must learn to accept responsibility for developing topics that interest them. This personal responsibility for academic growth requires a paradigm shift for many students, who have not experienced this much responsibility for their learning in previous years. Therefore, the teacher coordinators lead activities designed to train students to ask meaningful and insightful questions.
Why do we eat breakfast?
Who decided which foods would be breakfast foods?
Do people in all cultures eat breakfast?
Do people in all cultures eat the same foods for breakfast?
Where does cereal originate from?
How is orange juice processed?
The list of questions can continue endlessly, illustrating to students that they can begin virtually anywhere and make connections through the questions that they develop.
Determining What to Study
Move into small groups to compare their list of questions with those of their classmates;
Identify common questions during their small-group meeting, which they will eventually share with the rest of the class in a large-group discussion; and
Write their questions on large sheets of newsprint and post them on the walls for others to view.
Each group's questions remain up on the walls to study throughout a two-week period for reflection and discussion.
In the whole-group discussions that follow, students share their lists. Then they group similar topics and identify main themes. Following several days of this work, students engage in further discussion and debate to establish a prioritized list of potential themes to study throughout the year. This arduous, time-consuming process requires students to compromise and negotiate to reach a mutually satisfying list of items to study. The exact amount of time required depends on the number and complexity of the potential themes. But each year, the class eventually chooses two or three themes that the students agree will be worthwhile, manageable, and enjoyable to explore. Figure 1 shows the themes developed by the 2001–2002 Soundings students.
Figure 1. Themes Developed by Soundings Students
Figure 1. Themes Developed by Soundings Students
1. Violence in our culture
The causes of violence, from psychology to poverty, and from greed to genetics
Major types of criminal violence (murder, rape, robbery)
Global violence and historically violent figures
2. Medical issues affecting our lives
The history of biomedicine
The effects of medicine on cells
Modern alternatives to conventional biomedicines
3. Surviving alien environments
Understanding different environments
Developing communities in alien environments
Examining the environmental impacts of communities placed in these different environments
Striving for sustainability
The two Soundings teachers (known as coordinators because their roles differ from those of traditional educators) present the instructions that students need to begin the planning process of designing the curriculum. They moderate discussions to ensure that all students get ample and equitable opportunities to express their ideas. Occasionally, the coordinators ask questions designed to help students clarify their ideas or seek new directions. Once the discussion phase of choosing curricular themes is complete, the coordinators help direct the discussions as students reach genuine consensus and establish a curriculum framework for the year.
Students develop a tentative yearly time line for studying the specific themes they have identified, and they block out time periods on the calendar for chosen topics. Students then self-select into small groups of those interested in studying a specific theme. Each group generates more specific questions associated with their chosen theme to guide their learning. Part of the challenge for students is choosing topics that interest them and finding a niche of fellow students with whom to work.
The roles and responsibilities for each member of the team;
How to identify and collect resources associated with their topic;
Strategies for presenting knowledge of their growth in authentic ways; and
How to create assessment tools for describing ways to improve in future endeavors.
A Typical Week
In any given week in the Soundings program, students are engaged in writing in their daily logs. These logs serve as a record of each student's yearly progress through responses to daily questions posed by the coordinators, daily and weekly goals established by the student, and the student's descriptions of daily accomplishments. Students take field trips, guest speakers come in to discuss pertinent issues, and students conduct telephone interviews with experts in certain fields to collect data. Each day, student groups meet to assess their progress toward weekly objectives, gather new information, write reports, develop demonstrations, or design projects to display their learning.
A violence awareness day for the entire student body, with a presentation for parents and community members in the evening;
A banquet designed for 250 people to culminate a study of the role of technology in our lives;
A mock trial of Galileo involving famous figures from Aristotle to Clarence Darrow; and
A “Big Bang” museum with exhibits illustrating how the universe, humans, and human cultures started and developed.
Positive Attitudes Toward Learning
The Soundings program incorporates many elements that researchers recommend to increase student engagement—differentiated learning activities, integrated curriculum, and authentic assessment. Comparisons of standardized test scores show that Soundings students perform about the same as similar students who have not participated in the program—but test scores are not the whole story. Parents overwhelmingly endorse the program, citing their children's increased positive attitudes toward learning. And high school teachers say that former Soundings students appear able to discuss curricular topics at a more sophisticated level than non-Soundings students.
Adolescents need opportunities to ask the serious questions that arise from their own cognitive growth and accompanying social consciousness. Soundings students develop a curriculum based on their interests, construct their own knowledge, use social interactions to exchange ideas, and design learning products and demonstrations that represent their growth. Three years of Soundings have shown that students have the ability to engage in serious inquiry about significant and timely issues in a manner that results in powerful learning.
Sample Topic: Violence in Our Culture
In light of the tragic events on September 11, 2001, we were not surprised when last year's students decided that they wanted and needed to explore the issues of violence in our culture. The class broke into six working groups to investigate crime, terrorism, violence in schools, violence in the media, violence in history, and the causes of violence. Each group did research in preparation for a schoolwide Violence Awareness Day, which we held in December.
As part of their investigation, the students first learned about definitions of culture and how cultures are related to value systems. As a class, we read The Giver and discussed how the culture in Lowry's novel dealt with violence. We also provided supplementary readings, including excerpts from the writings of Sigmund Freud and Daniel Quinn. Each student prepared a research paper based on an aspect of violence represented by the subgroup he or she had elected to join. In addition, the class held a series of debates on violence-related issues. Every student participated in the debates.
For Violence Awareness Day, each group prepared a presentation on its special topic. The Soundings students gave six sets of performances to their schoolmates. Then they repeated their performances in the evening for parents and other interested adults. Performances ranged from live skits to PowerPoint presentations. Every group had designed and constructed a display area to augment their presentation. Central to the program was a 12-foot-tall figure that the class built to represent humanity. Every person who visited our Violence Awareness Day program was asked to write at least one compliment and at least one negative comment he or she had received. The positive comments were then pasted to the front of the statue. The negative ones were put through a shredder, and the strips were pasted on the back, symbolizing that we can walk away from negativity and approach a kinder, less violent lifestyle. The day and evening were a tremendous success, and the statue went on display in our township building's lobby for Martin Luther King, Jr., Day.
—Contributed by Mark Springer
