School Organisation:
The anatomy of a Social Studies project.

This page illustrates how a cycle team of teachers planned and implemented a common project in which students from different classes in the cycle worked together in multi-age, multi-class collaborative teams.

The context
Having done little Social Studies for the first part of the year, cycle 2 teachers Karine Leclerc, Patty Leonard, Renée Halmos along with French special, Julie Simard, chose to plan an intense project around the Social Studies Curriculum that would involve all three cycle 2 classes. Their intention was to find a way to allow students across the classes to work together.

The team

Julie Simard (French Specialist), Karine Leclerc,
Patty Leonard, Renée Halmos.

Teacher planning and process

Knowing the students would be working in groups with students from another class, the team chose to focus on the Cross-Curricular Competency "To co-operate with others" . They planned their implementation strategy around the demands of that competency.

Because this was a first major incursion into the program, together they chose to work on the first Social Studies competency: "To understand the organisation of a society in its territory" as it applies to the Iroquoian society around 1500.

The French immersion teacher had the choice to support the study of this competency but, after discussion, it was deemed more interesting for her to take a different perspective and to focus on competency 3: "To be open to the diversity of societies and their territories". Therefore, in French Class, the students studied the Inca society. More ground could be covered in this way.

The teachers planned the framework for the project during a cycle team meeting. After this initial planning, their experience working together paid off by making informal idea sharing and reflection easy to continue throughout the project implementation phase also, so that the project was enriched as it developed. With shared common goals and similar strategies clearly set, students could move freely from one class to the other while feeling secure in a recognisable environment.

Organising the groups
From the onset, it was planned that student groups could be working in any one teacher's class. It was therefore essential to block common time in the teachers' six day schedule. By doing so, they found that they could sometime have up to 3 hours a week to dedicate to the project in chunks varying form ½ hour to 1 hour.
"So we had time to do a lot of things, a lot of information sharing, a lot of writing, a lot of creating. It became an intense and concentrated project which really moved us forward in our Social Studies program. With the advantage that from one class to the next, we didn't have time to loose the thread of the work, so there was little wasted time overall." Karine Leclerc.

The project process
Engage: The teachers inspired the students by reading the Iroquois creation story of the Sky Woman.

Explore prior knowledge: through brainstorm activities, KWL charts, place mat activities, each class produced a list of categories of things they knew or believed about the Iroquois. To clarify the baseline of their knowledge, they were asked to write a short story, on the model of the Story of Sky Woman, in which they incorporated their current understanding. Meanwhile, the teachers worked together to regroup the categories under six labels and each one chose two of them to work with.

Investigate and share: In their respective classes, each student chose a partner and together they selected one of the 6 themes. They were then paired with a like-minded team from another class. This group of 4 then met and worked in the class whose teacher had chosen that theme. To each team member fell the responsibility to research and then share information with the entire team. Together, they decided what they would delve into and what form their sharing with the entire class would take.

Evaluate: Student were asked to demonstrate their understanding in many ways at different times throughout the process: model building, writing, presentations.

Moreover, comparing to a base-line was found to be a good way to see progress in students at many levels. "If we compare their prior knowledge on Iroquois to what they produced during or at the end of the project, we see the progress they made. They might produce a longer text, or a better organised text, or a text that better brings in the content or shows improved writing. We can see the improvement. And it's something we can do along the way, not just at the end." Patty Leonard

Mind-mapping was another strategy they used to help students represent their understanding. As a culminating activity, students were asked to go over all the smaller documents and productions they have created along the way and, from them, produce a map to represent their current knowledge.

Evaluation and differentiation : the teachers deal with evaluation in the different grade levels in the cycle in two ways. First, they are aware that their expectations for first year students' work and for second year students' work must be different. Second, yet foremost, they mostly assess students on the progress they make.

"We are moving from an artificial age-based group evaluation to child-based expectations, working along a continuum of learning for the child. I always tell the child 'I expect the best. But I'll accept your best.' " Patty Leonard