Designing projects with the QEP in mind

"The challenge posed by cycles of instruction is [...] the major shift that they represent, especially for teachers and principals:
* a pedagogical shift from the transmission of learnings (knowledge transmission) to the construction of knowledges (knowledge construction)
* [...]. "(1)

The pedagogical shift
At the core of the cycle teams' preoccupations this year was their need to understand what impact the QEP has on what to teach and how to teach it.

According to Principal Atkinson, the QEP can only be implemented to its fullest if instructional strategies change. It's therefore important for teachers to question the way things are done, to become more familiar with and put into practice alternative instructional strategies, (like cooperative learning) and different types of instructional tactics (like think/pair/share, Round Robin, PMI, etc.).

Designing significant projects became a way to tackle this issue. The teams approached project building from different perspectives. Sometimes, they started from the core elements of the QEP: Broad Areas of Learning, Cross Curricular Competencies and Subject Area Competencies. However, sometimes this process got in the way of good ideas so that they started also with an exciting idea which they revisited and retrofitted with a view to the QEP to make sure that competencies were addressed and process was consistent.

Whether the projects they designed related to the Circus theme or others, they were really endeavouring to understand the impact of the QEP on the concept of project.

"We had done school or cycle projects before. They were really themes, a unifying idea and the thread was something the students produced. Like our Geography project, in which each class adopted a country and then we made passports and visited each class to learn about that country." (Cycle 3)

So what was different here? This year's projects revolve around an essential question... which, in the words of the teachers, was quite difficult to do. This essential question really drove the project. They learned, and the students learned, that it was the element that kept the project on track. They always looked back to that question to make sure that the project activities and the directions that the research was taking remained subservient to that driving question.

"In the clown project, we had our essential question "What is a clown? What is the role of a clown in the circus". Then we made a KWL chart. In the end we talked about what we learned, and did we answer our question?" (Cycle 1)

Something old, something new
What stands out also is that for many teachers, the QEP is a validation of the teaching practices that they have been implementing for many years already: project-based learning, a preoccupation with multiple intelligence, differentiated learning, cooperative learning, etc. Those elements of classroom practices were already present when, several years ago, the whole language approach to teaching English Language Arts was introduced.

"Slowly but surely, we are changing our practices and the whole language approach was just a first step." (Cycle 1)

With the introduction of the new QEP, the concepts are still there, but the structure is clarified and carries with it an element of obligation.

Video Clip (QEP-Research)