An Ethic of Excellence

Second Meeting (7/9/08):
We had a little trouble with the books. One arrived at the end of June. I read to page 92 where I discovered a printing error. The book returned to page 62 and reprinted pages 62-92, then began again at 125! Very disappointing. The other books and the replacement book arrived today for our second meeting.

I shared what I had read so far. Not surprisingly, Ron Berger's expectations for his students take place in a school with equally high expectations. The town he lives in also supports these expectations and provide support as well. He emphasizes the need for a culture of excellence throughout the school. His students do seem to produce amazing results. We were on the right track though when we had decided to try project work. It seems part of what inspires his students to work so hard is that their work is done for a real audience and that they have been expected to do this kind of quality work since kindergarten.

We find some of the projects to be beyond the scope of what we can do. One example: the students took on a project in their town to measure and determine the safeness of the radon levels of the homes in their town. They learned about how to do this, how to track and graph the results, and how to report these results to every household they tested! Another fourth grade class decided to design their own desks. This included growing their own wheat to harvest so they could grind it and make bread to sell to raise the money for the supplies to make the desks. It was even more involved than that, but you get the idea.

We decided to start a little smaller. We want to help the students to learn to research and present information on topics of their own choosing. We're basing some our ideas on another book, Best Research Reports Ever, by Lois Laase and Joan Clemens. For one language arts block in a six day cycle, students will find resources, read them, take notes, and then present what they have learned. We will start by introducing reading strategies that will be necessary for effective reading of the resources they choose. These include learning how to use text features effectively, how to choose the appropriate resources, and how to take notes in their own words. We will model how to do this, then have them work in pairs to practice before having them try to work on their own.

We also decided that by the time we model all this we would not have time for everyone to do a whole project for the first quarter. Instead we will work together to design a class project that the teacher and students will work on together. This will also provide a model for the kind of quality work that would be expected in the future For the second quarter, students will work as partners to do a second project that they will share with their younger reading buddies in kindergarten or first grade. The last two projects will be independent, the third to be shared with the whole fourth grade, and the last to be shared with the whole school and/or parents. We are still working on the details for this.

We're also going to try to transfer these expectations to the daily work of the students, but we need to slow down the pace to do this. We're going to take time during the other five days of our language arts time to work on other reading strategies, and to set the standard of quality work in all areas of our day. We will meet again in August, but we know this will not be enough. This will definitely be an ongoing process.

Ethic of Excellence

Karlie, Christine and I met in early June. We are planning a study group for over the summer based on An Ethic of Excellence by Ron Berger. We still didn't have our book yet, but we discussed trying to set up an academic choice time so students have time to work on independent learning projects over the course of the year. We thought we would need to take time at the beginning of the school year to start building a sense of community in our classrooms to help students feel safe. We also will need to take time to set expectations for excellence for these projects. We want students to develop a sense of pride in their work. They also need to build up their endurance to work on projects that cannot be finished in a day or two. Our goal, at this time, is maybe one project per quarter.
We also discussed designing a common poster for all three classrooms which would detail what quality work would look like for fourth graders.