Project Zero Sparks

Behind Their Screens: Supporting Students’ Digital Well-Being and Citizenship in and after the Pandemic

Digital technology use was a consistent part of everyday life before the pandemic. In 2020-21, it became a near-constant by necessity. Our students’ learning, social lives, and entertainment were (and in many ways still are) happening largely ‘behind the screen.’ How do we help them re-assess and reset their digital habits as we prepare to move forward? How can we build dispositions they need for mindful engagement with peers and the broader world?

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Building Community in Our Classrooms

How can we build authentic communities with our students whether we are teaching on-line or in-person? Feelings of trust and connection are essential to teaching and learning. After the large shifts we've experienced in our lives over the last year, fostering relationships becomes even more important. Tina Blythe, Project Zero’s Director of Learning and Outreach, and Kurt Wootton, Co-Founder of The Habla Institute, will offer approaches to help you and your students to connect and work collaboratively online and in-person. In this highly interactive workshop, you will participate in activities that can be easily transferred to your classrooms. This course is recommended for primary and secondary teachers of all subjects.

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Cultures of Thinking in Action: 10 Guiding Principles

Transforming schools and classrooms into cultures of thinking is more than merely instituting a set of practices. As useful as practices like thinking routines, documentation, and effective questioning can be, culture runs deeper. Culture is built on our values and beliefs and embedded in the messages we send. Thus, deep and lasting transformation must begin by embracing a set of beliefs about teaching, learning, and schooling. In this workshop, we will explore through active, interactive dialogue with our peers the 10 principles that we use in the Cultures of Thinking project to drive our action. These principles motivate and guide our actions and provide the touchstones we need as we create places where thinking is valued, visible, and actively promoted.

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Educating for a Complex World

How can we deepen and broaden learning for the lives today's learners are likely to lead? In our era, the demands of a rapidly changing world on education urge us to reach beyond the traditional agendas of achievement, information and expertise. In more adventurous school settings, innovations thrive when learning is reimagined using big understandings and big ideas. This workshop explores how teachers and schools can define their own visionary directions, drawing on a flexible framework about learning that matters and ways of fostering and leading it, developed collaboratively between Project Zero and Independent Schools Victoria. It shares this general approach along with examples from Australian settings of how educating for big understandings and big questions can become powerful levers for teacher and school development.

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Humane Dispositions: New thinking routines for a diverse, unequal and moving world

The year 2020 showed the resilience of educators committed to student learning under most unsettling circumstances. It also shed light on the need to understand our students in context and to eliminate the pernicious inequities permeating our societies. In this session, we will ask: What dispositions might be worth nurturing to empower our youth to live fulfilling lives and construct more inclusive and equitable societies? What concrete practical tools might help us move in the right direction? Participants will (a) become familiar with our new Re-Imagining Migration Dispositions Framework; (b) experience our newly developed Socio-Emotional-Civic Thinking Routines; and (c) familiarize themselves with the Smithsonian Learning Lab interactive platform for digital learning. Along the way, we will connect ideas and tools to our own practice.

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Interpreting and Navigating the Three O’s: Supporting young people to engage with human complexity

In this two-hour workshop, participants will be introduced to ongoing work from Out of Eden Learn, an online learning program and research project that connects young people from around the world to share stories and engage in thoughtful dialogue with one another. The workshop will focus on the Three O’s: overgeneralization, overconfidence, and othering—a framework that supports students to thoughtfully interpret and navigate the world and to avoid common pitfalls when engaging with difference, such as making assumptions, stereotyping, or viewing one’s own culture or perspective as the norm. After being introduced to the framework, workshop participants will be invited to find examples of the Three O’s in their own lives. They will also examine student work and consider how the Three O’s might be useful in their own teaching and learning contexts. Participants will exchange ideas and explore new tools. The workshop is intended for educators of elementary, middle, and high school-age students, as well as adult learners.

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Pedagogy of Play: Supporting learning through play from preschool through middle school

Play is at the heart of childhood. Through play, children learn how to collaborate, how to negotiate rules and relationships, and how to imagine, create, and dream. They learn to solve problems, think flexibly and critically, and communicate effectively. Whether playing with objects, engaging in pretend play, or tinkering with ideas and testing theories, children’s play is essential to their social, intellectual, physical, and emotional growth. In this interactive workshop, we will discuss what it means to embrace play as a core resource for learning in schools. What is playful learning and what does it look like? What are the core principles that help set the conditions for a pedagogy of play? Join Project Zero researchers Mara Krechevsky and Megina Baker as they share resources for cultivating a pedagogy of play: a suite of practices, strategies, and tools co-created with teacher-researcher partners on the Pedagogy of Play project. Participants will have an opportunity to test some playful learning tools, considering the role of play in their own teaching and learning context.

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Sparking civic inquiry through looking at and making art: A practical introduction to the Arts as Civic Commons project

The Arts as Civic Commons (ArtC) project offers strategies and resources to help learners explore civic life through looking at and making art. ArtC materials can be used in person or online, and are suitable for use in school, museums, galleries, or anywhere else people of any age gather to explore art together. In this workshop, participants will learn about the core ideas behind ArtC, and engage in a series of activities and reflections that bring the ideas to life.

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Teaching Good Work

Over the past 25 years, The Good Project, based at the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Project Zero, has investigated individuals and institutions that exemplify “good work.” We define “good work” according to three criteria: it is 1) excellent (high quality), 2) ethical (socially responsible), and 3) engaging (meaningful).

It’s clear that new challenges have emerged that may hinder the encouragement and achievement of “good work.” Despite calls for the development of “21st century skills” in adolescents necessary for success in employment, few educational outlets allow students to grapple with ambiguity, complexity, and their own opinions and beliefs.

In this workshop we will review our research on “good work” and offer an introduction to our Lesson Plans, which attempt to fill this gap by giving young people the skills and strategies to flourish as future workers. We expose adolescents to real-world dilemmas, reflective activities, and guided conversations that will help to prepare them for the working world of today. Our contention is that students who are exposed to our materials will develop the skills, understandings, and repertoires to effectively navigate their future work lives.

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Welcoming Uncertainty By Supporting Children as Agents of Change

Learning is most powerful when the social, emotional, intellectual, and aesthetic dimensions of experiences are integrated. How can we make schools places where children gain hope and heal from trauma; environments where academic learning is meaningful, playful, and has a friendly relationship with uncertainty? Drawing on a collaborative research project involving the Center for Playful Inquiry, Opal School and Project Zero, this workshop focuses on three of the project’s principles in creating classrooms where children learn the wholistic skills they need to thrive:

• Having clear and explicit values about the purpose of schools
• Relying on play as a strategy for learning within a conflict-rich environment
• Using a variety of materials and media to catalyze children’s thinking, extend it, and make their thinking visible

We will unpack these principles with classroom examples, and provide tools to take back to the classroom to actualize these principles. This workshop is most suitable for early childhood and elementary teachers and school leaders.

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