Project Zero

Update on Current Work, July 2007

at the Harvard Graduate School of Education

Artful Thinking Cultures of Thinking GoodWork Project Interdisciplinary Studies Project Learning in and from Museum Study Centers Learning Innovations Laboratory Making Learning Visible Qualities of Quality in Arts Education ROUNDS at Project Zero Teaching and Learning in the Visual Arts Understandings of Consequence

Project Zero at 40
Project Zero turns 40 years old this year and we proudly prepare to enter our fifth decade of research into how people learn and how that learning might best be encouraged and supported. Since 1967, when Nelson Goodman first convened an interdisciplinary team to explore how children and adults learn in and through the arts, new projects and teams of researchers have been emerging from those that have come before, pushing further in explorations of the nature of intelligence, understanding, thinking, creativity, and other essential aspects of human learning. Over the years, we have conducted dozens of major research initiatives, published over 85 books and hundreds of articles and reports, collaborated with countless schools, museums, and other partners, and worked with thousands of teachers. In our annual summer institute alone, we have hosted several thousand educators from around the world. The range of our work is so broad and the constant evolution of our projects so continuous that we recognize it is hard for many of our friends and collaborators to stay up-to-date with our work. (Indeed, those of us working here often worry that we arent current with our colleagues latest efforts and ideas!) Most people are familiar with the Theory of Multiple Intelligences or the Teaching for Understanding framework. Others may have been introduced to Project Zero through Arts PROPEL or Arts Survive, Visible Thinking or Studio Thinking, Understandings of Consequence, or Understanding for Organizations. Whatever the entry point or as many times as you may have visited our website, there seem always to be new aspects of our work to discover and explore. Even our week-long summer institute only presents a fraction of our catalogue of work. To that end, we felt it was important to try to provide some snapshots of our current investigations. In this publication, the Principal Investigators and Project Managers on 10 different in-process projects offer a glimpse of what they are exploring and where they see these projects heading. In some cases, these projects have already published books and articles; in others, the publications are coming. I hope you will agree that this end of our fourth decade appears as exciting and generative a period as any in our past, and I hope this little guide helps you navigate the new ideas emerging from our work. Steve Seidel Director, Project Zero Harvard Graduate School of Education

For more information on any of our projects, please visit www.pz.harvard.edu

Artful Thinking
If a picture is worth a thousand words, a painting must be worth two thousand.Arianna Bonnes, 9th grade In New Bedford, Massachusetts, Chris Jones history class has been studying the Renaissance. Ariannas comment follows a discussion about a painting that was guided by three simple questions: What do you see in this painting? What do you think about that? What does it make you wonder? Ariannas wonderful insightthat works of art are dense with meaning and rich with communicative power is evidence that the class discussion was deep and far-ranging, filled with questions, ideas, and meaningful connections. This shouldnt be surprising. When young people engage in extended explorations of works of art, they find it quite natural to do such things as ask provocative questions, make careful observations, explore multiple viewpoints, and uncover multiple meanings. Not only are these powerful forms of thinking in the arts, they are also powerful forms of thinking in other areas of learning. This is the basic idea that underlies the Artful Thinking programthat exploring works of art can help students learn how to think in ways that empower learning across the curriculum. Artful Thinking is a program that helps students learn how to think by looking at art. Developed by Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Artful Thinking is designed to be used by teachers in any grade and in any subject. The purpose of the program is twofold: To help teachers create rich connections between works of art and their curriculum; and to help teachers use arts experiences as a touchstone for developing students thinking dispositions. The program focuses on looking at art rather than making art, and it is part of the Visible Thinking Network at Project Zeroa research-based approach to teaching thinking that links several Project Zero initiatives and a growing international network of schools and other learning organizations. From good thinking to good thinkers: A dispositional approach Most educators believe that its important to teach students to think. Traditionally, efforts to teach thinking foreground the teaching of thinking skillsreasoning skills, problem solving skills, and the like. Thinking skills are certainly important. But if we want students to use their skills frequently, in diverse and novel contexts, then simply teaching skills isnt enough. Research at Project Zero and elsewhere has shown that motivation, values, cultural context, and alertness to opportunity are also important factors in developing the intellectual behaviorsthe thinking dispositionsthat are characteristic of good thinkers. The Artful Thinking Palette There are many thinking dispositions worth cultivatingcuriosity, open-mindedness, reasonableness, to name just a few. Artful Thinking focuses on a set of six thinking dispositions that have special power for exploring works of 3 art and other complex topics in the curriculum. They are: questioning & investigating, observing & describing, reasoning, exploring viewpoints, comparing & connecting, and finding complexity. Each of these dispositions has specific intellectual behaviors associated with it. As a set, the six dispositions are synergistic: Observing naturally leads to reasoning, which connects to questioning, which in turn links to connection-making, and so on. Artful Thinking uses the image of an artists palette to express this synergy.

Thinking dispositions and thinking routines Dispositions are formed when people routinely engage in specific patterns of behavior. Accordingly, in the Artful Thinking program, thinking dispositions are developed through the use of thinking routinesshort, easy-to-learn procedures that help students enact thinking-dispositional behavior in and across the six areas of the palette. For example, recall the three discussion questions that prompted Ariannas insight about a painting being worth two thousand words: What do you see? What do you think about that? What does it make you wonder? These questions comprise a thinking routine that connects to two dispositions on the paletteobserving & describing and questioning & investigating. Other thinking routines encourage exploring multiple viewpoints, forming careful interpretations, finding complexity, and so on. Thinking routines are designed to be used flexibly and frequently. Students can use them solo or in small or large group settings, they can be used across subject THINK / PUZZLE / EXPLORE A routine that encourages questioning and inquiry Consider an artwork/topic: What do you think you know about this artwork or topic? What questions or puzzles do you have? What does the artwork or topic make you want to explore?

CREATIVE QUESTIONS A routine for creating thought-provoking questions Brainstorm a list of at least 12 questions about the artwork or topic. Use these question-starts to help you think of interesting questions. Why What are the reasons What is the significance of What if How would it be different if Suppose that What if we knew What would change if matters, and they can be used with a wide range of topics and works of art. Above all, they are designed to deepen students thinking about the topic at hand, whether it is a painting, an historical event, or a mathematical operation. Artful Thinking and Visible Thinking Too often, students are exposed only to the final, finished products of thoughtthe finished novel or painting, the established scientific theory, the official historical account. They rarely see the patterns of thinking that lead to these finished products, yet it is precisely these habits of mind that students need to develop. A key part of Artful Thinking involves making students thinking visible by documenting their unfolding thought processes as they use thinking routines. Making thinking visible in the classroom provides students with vivid models of what the process of good thinking looks like and shows them how their participation matters. CLAIM / SUPPORT / QUESTION A Reasoning Routine Make a claim about the artwork or topic. Identify support for your claim. Ask a question related to your claim. Artful Thinking and visual art Thinking dispositions, thinking routines, and visible thinking are emphasized in all Visible Thinking initiatives at Project Zero. Though all Visible Thinking initiatives are art-friendly, Artful Thinking is distinctive in that it was developed to explicitly bring out the connection between art and thinking. There are two reasons for this. The first has to do with how works of art make us think, and the second has to do with what they make us think about. In terms of how art makes us think, consider the kinds of things we have in mind when we talk about teaching thinking. We want students to learn to ask thoughtful questions, to construct careful explanations, to explore new viewpoints, to see the complexity and dimensionality of the topics they study, to find puzzles worth pursuing, and so on. 4

These forms of thinking come naturally when looking at art, because art naturally invites them. When Arianna tells us that a painting is worth two thousand words, shes telling us that works of art are packed with meaning. And shes right: Works of art are metaphorical, often multi-layered and ambiguous, often full of detail. They express artists intentions and their un-intentions and they condense many meanings and purposes. Moreover, works of art are made with the purpose of engaging our attention. Artists generally want us to look and ponder and explore. So one deep connection between looking at art and learning to think is this: By both design and default, art naturally invites deep and extended thought. Of course works of art are more than simply a powerful vehicle for teaching thinking; they are also important things to think about. The second reason to connect looking at art and learning to think has to do with the meanings of artworks themselves and the multiple ways they connect to the curriculum. Works of art provoke rich, multilayered meaning-making in ways unlike other disciplines. They raise questions, evoke connection-making, and in many ways transform the shape of inquiry. In doing so, they have the power to transform students historical inquiry into a personal and contemporary one. There are many ways to connect art to the curriculum, from targeted connections between the content of artworks and specific topic or themes, to more open-ended approaches that leave loose the directions in which a work of art will lead. Artful Thinking is in favor of any and all curricular connections, so long as students are invited to think directly and deeply about an artwork itself. Art gets shortchanged when it is used superficially merely as illustrative aid to a set of facts, such as when a painting is used simply to illustrate the costumes of a particular era or the geography of a particular region. Artful Thinking avoids this shortfall because thinking routinesthe mainstay practice of Artful thinkingare designed to engage students in thinking deeply about the artwork or topic at hand. They allow for the superficial read, which after all is part but not all of an artworks meaning, but they also push students to unpack the depth and complexity of works of art by inviting them to ask creative questions, make diverse observations, explore multiple viewpoints, and seek personal connections. Artful Thinking research For the most part, Artful Thinking is a development and dissemination project. Its purpose has been to create a program for use in schools and other educational contexts. The program has its roots in Project Zeros long history of research on thinking dispositions, as well as in previous Project Zero projects on teaching thinking, such as Art Works for Schools and Innovating with Intelligence. However, there is also an ongoing research component to Artful Thinking. Our research agenda currently has two goals: To help us understand the effects of the program on student thinking and learning and to help us better understand the nature of thinking and learning more generally. For example, through the use of student-generated concept maps, we are currently investigating how Artful Thinking affects students ideas

about good thinking: What it looks like, what its for, and the kinds of things students believe count as good thinking. Additionally, we are investigating how the program affects students ability to explore and interpret art and whether these abilities transfer to non-art contexts. We are also investigating how the program affects both students and teachers concepts of artfor example, their ideas about arts purposes and meanings, and their ideas about arts connection to learning and to their own lives. Artful Thinking past and present Artful Thinking was developed in collaboration with Traverse City Area Public Schools (TCAPS) in Traverse City,

Michigan, as part of an Arts in Education Model Development and Dissemination grant from the US Department of Education. It is also being used in New Bedford, Massachusetts, in Montgomery County, Maryland, and many of its practices are being used by Visible Thinking sites worldwide. Current Project Staff Shari Tishman, Patricia Palmer Funding for this project has been provided by Traverse City, Michigan Area Public Schools through an Arts in Education Model Development and Dissemination grant from the U.S. Department of Education

Cultures of Thinking
The Cultures of Thinking project at Bialik College (located in Melbourne, Australia) extends the long line of research in the area of thinking dispositions conducted at Project Zero over nearly two decades. This research has shown that the teaching of thinking is more than the development of skills; it must also attend to the nurturing of students inclination and motivation to think as well as their awareness of opportunities for using their thinking abilities. This development is not a matter of direct instruction, but rather the enculturation of thinking through students immersion in a rich school and classroom culture where thinking is highly visible and apparent. At Bialik, the Project Zero team uses the Visible Thinking approach developed as part of the Innovating with Intelligence project to explore how a whole school can develop a culture of thinking that nurtures students, teachers, and administrators dispositions toward thinking. A key premise of the Visible Thinking approach is to seek ways to uncover and document students thinking so it can be discussed, reflected upon, and pushed further. Consequently, teachers employ various strategies for documenting the thinking students do. In so doing, teachers develop and use a language of thinking. They make the classroom environment rich with the documents of thinking (both processes and products). They look for opportunities for student thoughtfulness. They use thinking routines to support and nurture students thinking. They model and make their own thinking visible, and they send clear expectations about the importance and role of thinking in learning. We refer to these componentslanguage, environment, opportunities, routines, modeling, and expectationsas cultural forces. These forces shape a classroom and a school to give it its unique feel. As a research project into the development of thinking dispositions and the creation of cultures of thinking, we seek to better understand changes in teachers and students attitudes and practices as thinking becomes more visible in the school and classroom environment. Toward this end, we will develop measures of school and classroom thoughtfulness to capture these changes as well as conduct case studies of 5 teachers. In addition, we will look at how teachers and students conceptual understanding of the domain of thinking develops. As a development project that seeks to serve the needs of the school while creating materials for broad educational use, we plan to form classroom portraits and pictures of practice that exemplify the principles and practices of Visible Thinking and Cultures of Thinking. In addition, we plan to develop classroom-based strategies that teachers can use to enhance student awareness of opportunities for thinking, as well as specific thinking routines that teachers can use to enhance students abilities and inclination. We are currently in our third year of the project. At this point we have learned much about the power of these ideas to transform classrooms and schools and to reinvigorate teachers. These might be summarized along three major lines: 1) development of professional learning communities, 2) the use of thinking routines, 3) understanding students conceptualization of thinking. In our work at Bialik, we began by forming two focus groups of eight teachers with whom we would work intensively. We have since added five more groups. These groups are all heterogeneous, including teachers from K12 and of various subjects. This is a departure from traditional forms of professional development that target subject area or a particular level. We have found that by working with a diverse range of colleagues, teachers perspectives on teaching are broadened and a sense of shared mission develops. Team teaching efforts have emerged out of the group that might otherwise never have arisen. In addition, the group helps teachers gain a developmental perspective on students thinking. During the first semester of their involvement with these ideas, the focus groups meet weekly for a semester. Each week a teacher brings a sample of student work that is analyzed in terms of the thinking it reveals. We use a specially designed protocol to guide this analysis. We are currently in the process of documenting these groups to better understand the dynamics that develop. During the second semester, teachers engage in action research around one of the

cultural forces. These projects help teachers move beyond a focus on thinking routines to look at their broader instructional practices and the messages that these practices send students about thinking and learning. The third and fourth phases of teacher participation involve them with classroom observations and in-depth study of one of the cultural forces. Throughout, the goal is to deepen teacher learning of what it means to create a culture of thinking in their classrooms. A key instructional practice of the project is the use of thinking routines. We have drawn on the thinking routines developed by the Visible Thinking team during its work in Sweden and have created some new routines as well. As researchers, we are looking at which routines teachers naturally gravitate towards in their work as well as the trajectory of a routine over time. We are finding that while the routines are indeed very accessible to teachers and often work extremely well initially, they are also nuanced. For example, the See-Think-Wonder routine provides a simple structure for looking at an object or image, making interpretations, and posing questions. However, teachers may still wonder how they can use the routine to get students to go beyond superficial responses and to delve deeply. This kind of selfquestioning may lead teachers to investigate just what kinds of responses they would like to see from students, which may in turn lead to class discussions about thinking, curiosity, and inquiry. These and some of our other findings about thinking routines are presented in a paper presented at the American Education Research Association conference in 2006, which is available on the Project Zero website. The purpose of developing a school-wide culture of thinking is ultimately to foster students dispositions toward thinking. As a starting place, the project set out to better understand students conceptualizations of thinking and then to see how these conceptions change over the course of the project. To do this, we asked students to complete concept maps of their thinking about thinking. We then analyzed these responses to try to create a general sketch of students thinking of thinking by grade level. We found that while there was no step-wise progression in students thinking about thinking, there was a somewhat additive aspect. For younger students, their focus was often on the objects of their thinking. That is, what it was they were thinking about. By the intermediate grades, we saw more strategies emerging in students responses. These strategies were often focused on memory and the management of schoolwork as well as strategies to motivate oneself. By middle school, students generally began to identify more specific strategies for thinking, such as considering things from more than one

perspective or connecting something new to something they already know. In some students we also saw an awareness of emotions arising from their experience in thinking, such as the ah-ha moment or the feeling of satisfaction that comes from solving a problem. We have collected post-test data after one year of the schools involvement with the project to look for changes in students conceptions of thinking. We have seen that at all grade levels there is a reduction in what we call associative categories of thinking, that is, what students are thinking about when they are thinking, and general comments like the brain or my head. Similarly, at all grade levels there is a dramatic increase in the number of strategies reported by students (about 20 percent), indicating that students awareness of what it means to thinking and their repertoire of strategies, has increased. In our analysis, we also scored all the student concept maps holistically, giving a composite score that reflected both the number of responses a student gave as well as the sophistication of those response. Responses that were merely associative did not contribute to the overall score and strategies that were about thinking were given more weight than those about memorization and knowledge retrieval. Based on these scores, we found that groups of students at all grade levels had a significant increase in their the overall sophistication of their conceptions of thinking as shown by their concept maps. This work will be presented more fully in an upcoming paper. As we look ahead in this project, one of our key questions is how do we sustain teachers engagement and interest with these ideas over time? Our goal is not to train these teachers in a set of practices, but to change the classroom and school culture for the long haul. Toward this end, we will be presenting a Cultures of Thinking Conference in Melbourne for 400 teachers in July of 2007. Here, Bialik teachers will present their findings from their action research projects. Teachers from other schools working with the ideas of a Visible Thinking and Cultures of Thinking in Australia and around the world will also present their work, highlighting their understanding of students thinking and the classroom culture they are creating. Current Project Staff Ron Ritchhart, David Perkins, Terri Turner Funding for this project has been provided by Bialik College (Melbourne, Australia) under the patronage of Abe and Vera Dorevitch

For information about Project Zero publications, please visit our eBookstore: www.pz.harvard.edu/ebookstore

The GoodWork Project

The GoodWork Project is a large-scale effort to identify individuals and institutions that exemplify good workwork that is excellent in quality, socially responsible, and meaningful to its practitionersand to determine how best to increase the incidence of good work in our society. The project began as a social scientific investigation of how both young and veteran workers confrontor fail to confrontthe various ethical challenges that arise at a time when conditions are changing rapidly, our sense of time and space is being radically altered by technology, market forces are very powerful, and few, if any, counter forces exist. Our chosen method has been to conduct extensive indepth interviews with leading professionals across a range of sectors. In these interviews, we probed for the individuals personal goals, the mission of the profession, the strategies being used to achieve goals and mission, the obstacles that are encountered and how they deal with these obstacles, and the individuals sense of the major trends in their profession. We also probed a number of ancillary areas, which include formative influences (such as mentors and anti-mentors), the role of religion or spiritual orientation, attitudes toward technology, and the entities to which the individual feels most responsible. In many cases we also used more targeted methods, such as an inventory of values and responses to ethical dilemmas. From 1996 to 2006, members of the research team conducted over 1200 interviews with leading professionals in journalism, genetics, theater, philanthropy, law, business, medicine, pre-collegiate education, and higher education. Complementing our study of leading professionals, we undertook a second line of study that involves budding young professionals (Fischman, Solomon, Greenspan, Gardner, 2004). We interviewed secondary school students, college students, those enrolled in professional schools, and individuals at their first job in a number of areas, including theater, biology, journalism, and social entrepreneurship. We also spoke with some individuals who are at the close of their careers. We consider the most illustrious of the individuals to be trusteesindividuals who are concerned with the overall health of their domain and its role in society. We dedicated our first collaborative book, Good Work: When Excellence and Ethics Meet (Gardner, Csikszentmihalyi, Damon, 2001), to John Gardner, the American public servant who exemplified both the role of the good worker and that of a domain and a societal trustee. This first book explored the work of professionals in the domains of journalism and biogenetic science. Our findings have been reported in numerous articles and papers, as well as the following books: Taking Philanthropy Seriously: Beyond Noble Intentions to Responsible Giving (Damon, Verducci, eds., 2006); Making Good: How Young People Cope with Moral Dilemmas at Work (Fischman, Solomon, Greenspan, Gardner, 2004); The Moral Advantage: How to Succeed in Business by Doing the Right Thing (Damon, 2004); Good Business: Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning (Csikszentmihalyi, 2003); 7 and, as noted above, Good Work: When Excellence and Ethics Meet (Gardner, Csikszentmihalyi, Damon, 2001). Our forthcoming book, Responsibility at Work (Gardner, ed.), explores how professionals delineate the territory of responsibilityhow they conceptualize and act upon their various responsibilities. While we continue to write and speak about good work, at present most of our attention is focused on the following: 1) The application of our ideas. The project has launched several practical initiatives aimed at encouraging good work, including a Traveling Curriculum for Good Work in Journalism and a GoodWork Toolkit. The Traveling Curriculum in Journalism engages practicing journalists in guided conversations about the core mission of their field, the pressing challenges and obstacles that make that mission elusive for many, and various strategies for achieving good work in the present climate. The Curriculum is a collaboration with Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel of the Committee of Concerned Journalists and consists of 12 modules, among which newsrooms select three for workshops that last a day and a half. The GoodWork Toolkit is a series of materials that introduces and raises consciousness about concepts of good work; in working with these materials, young students and veteran professionals alike explore, discuss, and articulate core responsibilities, beliefs and values, and goals for work. The Toolkit provides a framework for individuals to consider the kind of workers they are now and the kinds of professionals they want to become. 2) A set of studies of Trust and Trustworthiness. One of the recurrent themes in the GoodWork Project has been the demise of trustees: individuals within a profession who are well known, widely respected, and seen as being disinterested and nonpartisan. Veteran professionals mentioned trustees (like Edward R. Murrow in journalism or Edward Levi in the law), while younger professionals lamented the loss of mentoring and more generally, of admired senior members of the profession. This finding has stimulated a set of studies of trust and trustworthiness. We have been exploring the individuals and institutions within American society that merit or do not merit trust; the reasons why individuals invest or withhold trust; and the means by which trust can be earned and retained. Our methods range from large-scale surveys of the general population to in-depth interviews and observations of young persons. 3) A set of studies on the New Digital Media. Thanks to a recent grant from the MacArthur Foundation, we launched The GoodPlay Project. In this project, we are applying our good work lens to play in the digital media, a new domain of activity in which youth in particular are becoming leading participants. Far from being passive consumers (or, as some fear, victims) of media, young people are actively contributing to and defining the new media landscape through sites

such as MySpace, Flickr, YouTube, and Second Life, as well as blogs and multi-player games. While we believe that young people are invoking and nurturing important skills through such creations, we must also ask, Are they also developing an ethical sense regarding their online activities? In this investigation, we seek to understand how young people conceptualize their participation in virtual worlds and the choices they make as they interact with one another. We are studying young people (ages 1525) who regularly participate in online games, social networking sites, and other online communities. Our methods include in-depth interviews, the posing of hypothetical ethical dilemmas, and observations of youth participating in online communities. Through these methods, we seek to uncover strategies for good play, and ultimately, to develop tools to encourage it. In addition to our study of GoodPlay, we are now embarking on a broader investigation of the various ways in which the new digital media is affecting young peoples minds. We have also begun a project investigating the place of quality in a consumerist era and the new digital age. 4) Good work in a global context. Having focused until now almost exclusively on the context in the United States, we are seeking knowledge, collaborations, and the collection of data in other countries and regions of the world. Howard Gardner is collaborating with Marcelo Suarez-Orozco of

New York University on this issue. Hans Henrik Knoop has underway a parallel study in Scandinavia. Current Project Staff Howard Gardner, Lynn Barendsen, Wendy Fischman, Andrea Flores, John Francis, Carrie James, Mary Lancaster, Lindsay Pettingill, Margaret Rundle, Margaret Weigel, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Claremont Graduate University), William Damon (Stanford University), Jeanne Nakamura (Claremont Graduate University) Funding for this project has been provided by The Atlantic Philanthropies, The Bauman Foundation, The Carnegie Corporation, The COUQ Foundation, The Nathan Cummings Foundation, Judy Dimon, The J. Epstein Foundation, Count Anton Wolfgang Graf von Faber-Castell, The Fetzer Institute, The Ford Foundation, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, John and Elisabeth Hobbs, The Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Foundation, The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, The John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, Thomas E. Lee, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The Jesse Phillips Foundation Fund, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, The Louise and Claude Rosenberg Jr. Family Foundation, The Ross Family Charitable Foundation, The Spencer Foundation, and The John Templeton Foundation

Interdisciplinary Studies Project

There are questions that simply cannot be addressed within the confines of one disciplines set of tools: How can a monument as a work of art communicate a rich understanding of an historical event? How should individuals and societies respond to pressing dilemmas like economic globalization and climate change? The Interdisciplinary Studies Project examines the challenges and opportunities of inter-disciplinary (ID) work carried out by researchers, college faculty, secondary-school teachers, and students in a variety of research and education contexts. Building on an empirical understanding of cognitive and social dimensions of interdisciplinary work, our project develops practical tools to guide quality interdisciplinary education. The Rise of Interdisciplinarity Decisive shifts in how knowledge is produced characterize the turn of the twenty-first century. Consider the way that the collaboration of medical doctors, engineers, computer scientists, and molecular biologists is revolutionizing medical care through new, minimally invasive surgery technologies and artificial human tissue development. In addition, pressing social issues like poverty, terrorism, and environmental sustainability challenge scientists, historians, psychologists, and artists alike to converge on solutions that defy the limits of a single discipline. Interdisciplinary 8 understanding (i.e., the ability to integrate knowledge from two or more disciplines to create products, solve problems, or produce explanations) has become a hallmark of contemporary problem-solving and discoveryand a primary challenge for educators today. Our Project: Studies, Goals, and Outcomes Since October 2000, we have been exploring the cognitive, organizational, and pedagogical qualities of interdisciplinary work as it takes place in exemplary expert institutions and in collegiate and pre-collegiate educational programs. The project involves a collection of studies and initiatives geared toward understanding and promoting quality interdisciplinary education. Experts study A close examination of the work of experts in leading interdisciplinary research centers enabled us to produce preliminary characterizations of the interdisciplinary mind at work. The resulting portrayals include descriptions of the more or less explicit strategies that expert researchers and teachers use to cross disciplinary boundaries and negotiate gaps across very different ways of knowing, and assess the quality of their work. Our research also addresses the qualities of intellectual character exhibited by these professionals (e.g., a disposition to tackle risky and ill-defined problems and to consider alternative perspectives).

Assessing interdisciplinary work at the frontier In collaboration with the American Association for the Advancement of Science we have gathered leading science policy makers, administrators, researchers, and funders of interdisciplinary research to examine innovations in assessment of interdisciplinary work. Collegiate/Pre-collegiate study Our study of exemplary collegiate and pre-collegiate interdisciplinary educational programs has allowed us to establish preliminary parameters for a pedagogy of interdisciplinarity. We have identified a series of strategies that teachers use to integrate disciplinary views in the classroom. We have characterized successful approaches to assessing student progress. Our analyses of in-depth, semi-structured interviews with teachers and students have allowed us to gain a sense of the purpose of interdisciplinary teaching and learning, the tensions and continuities between disciplinary and interdisciplinary education, and the common misconceptions revealed. The Teacher Seminar: Exemplary experiments For two years we have worked closely with twelve teachers to replicate the action-research approach that characterized Project Zeros much heralded Teaching for Understanding projecta research design geared to yielding usable knowledge about how to teach for interdisciplinary understanding, assess student outcomes, and support professional development. As a result we have formalized the elements of education for inter-disciplinary understanding at the pre-collegiate level. Interdisciplinary teaching in the International Baccalaureate Building on the teaching for interdisciplinary understandings framework we are currently documenting exemplary interdisciplinary teaching practices in the International Baccalaureates Middle Years Program to develop a teacher guide to inform quality planning and practice. Highlights and Lesson Learned We are currently developing a series of books and other publications intended for teachers and those who support their professional development. In what follows we note a few highlights of what we have learned in the course of this project: The Importance of Integration Typically, scholars of interdisciplinary work have had a difficult time defining exactly what integration of disciplines looks like in the context of interdisciplinary work. Our work identifies the way that powerful interdisciplinary learning is built around meaningful complementary relationships between the knowledge tools of different disciplines. With a clear sense of the different types of integration in interdisciplinary work, we believe that teachers can more effectively design interdisciplinary experiences and determine what teaching best supports distinctive forms of interdisciplinary work. 9

Teaching Globalization In our work, we give special attention to teaching for understanding about the big issues that face our societies and our students in a time of unprecedented global cultural, economic, environment, and political change. We have studied how teachers can prepare students through interdisciplinary learning for a globalized future. Crucial issues like climate change and genocide demand interdisciplinary understandings. As we have seen, the promotion of a sense of global citizenship benefits from teaching for interdisciplinary understanding. Connecting Exemplars and Student Work In our research, we have observed the important links between expert interdisciplinary work at the frontiers of knowledge production and student interdisciplinary work in high school. We highlight the way in which our participating teachers anchor their students interdisciplinary performances in the work of integrative exemplarsexperts who do interdisciplinary work in the real world (e.g., monument designers, climate-change policy advisors). In demanding interdisciplinary learning, the meaningful and successful work of experts can, with the right teacher scaffolding and support, help to orient students own interdisciplinary efforts. The Role of Purposeful Work We have discovered that interdisciplinary work requires a special sense of purpose on the part of teachers and students, for without a clear sense of why they are pursuing interdisciplinary teaching and learning, teachers and students fail to see the point of engaging in what may be, in many cases, more complex and more challenging work than single-discipline learning. Our participating teachers have helped us understand that teachers should pursue integrative work, at best, when there is a genuine need for interdisciplinarity to accomplish valued understanding goals. Also important is the translation of teachers sense of purpose into students own sense of purpose in their work. That is, interdisciplinary work succeeds to the extent that students are not merely compliant but rather are themselves purposeful in their learning across disciplines. Challenge of Assessing Interdisciplinary Work Our research addresses the dilemma of assessment in interdisciplinary contexts. In particular, we offer a model for assessment tested across multiple levels of interdisciplinary workexpert work and collegiate and high school learning. In particular we focus on three fundamental ingredients of high-quality interdisciplinary work: a clear sense of purpose, credible grounding in the relevant contributing disciplines, and meaningful integration that advances understanding beyond what would be possible with the tools of a single discipline. A Framework to Guide Interdisciplinary Teaching Our research has also yielded a framework intended to help teachers plan and guide interdisciplinary learning in their classrooms. The framework provides a coherent model for shaping instruction for interdisciplinary understanding, highlighting the role of topic selection, disciplinary understandings, integrative understandings, performances of

understanding, and assessment in the creation and delivery of interdisciplinary instruction. Impact and Future Directions Our work is having an impact in various national and international conversations about interdisciplinary teaching and research. For example, we are contributing to the World Knowledge Dialogue initiative to support collaborations between scientists and humanists. We have partnered with leading schools and university centers such as Boston Arts Academy, Newton Public Schools, and the Washington Center for Quality Undergraduate Education to support

teaching innovations in practice. In 2007-2008 we look forward to continuing our collaboration with the International Baccalaureate Organization and institutional partners and a new empirical study of expert collaborations with the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. Current Project Staff Veronica Boix Mansilla, Howard Gardner Funding for this project has been provided by The Atlantic Philanthropies

Learning in and from Museum Study Centers:

A research collaboration between Project Zero and the Harvard University Art Museums
The Harvard University Art Museums (HUAM) and Project Zero are engaged in a collaborative research project to investigate the nature of visitor learning at HUAMs two study centers, the Agnes Mongan Center for the Study of Prints, Drawings and Photographs and the Study Room of the Busch-Reisinger Museum. The Agnes Mongan Center specializes in works on paper from the collection of the Fogg Art Museum. The Study Room of the Busch-Reisinger Museum brings together works of all media, including sculpture and decorative arts, as well as research materials on modern art and design. Both centers are open to the public. More dynamic, participatory, and self-directed than the museum galleries, the HUAM study centers allow visitors to view a far greater variety of objects than appear on display in the galleries and to focus on works specific to their individual interests. This increased accessibility to works in the collection expands the possibilities for close, intimate encounters with objects in their full complexity. It also invites greater interaction with museum staff and other visitors, fostering opportunities for critical thinking and looking that complement gallery experiences. Though HUAM has long known that the study centers are powerful places of learning, there has been little systematic research on their educational benefits or potential. What kinds of learning occur in the HUAM study centers? What makes the learning powerful? How can study center learning be enhanced and extended to new contexts and audiences? To answer these questions, Project Zero is engaged in several strands of research, including interviews with HUAM curators and staff, observations and interviews in the study centers, and interviews with faculty from Harvard and local other universities across a variety of disciplines. Though some of the research is still in process, here we share highlights from findings in two of the research strands: Findings from observation and interviews about how people learn from objects, and findings from the faculty interviews about the special characteristics of teaching in the study centers. Learning from objects Starting with wow. When people talk about their study center experience, they usually begin by describing their 10 feeling of surprise when they first encountered their chosen object. Maybe the paper was heavier than they expected, or perhaps more fragile. Maybe they didnt anticipate how vivid an image would look close up. Perhaps they were surprised by the tangible evidence of the artists hand, by an objects quality of everydayness, or by its aura of rarity. Whatever the source of surprise, this initial wow serves to quickly draw people into close and prolonged observations of works of art. The how of learning. Although what goes on in peoples minds as they look at these art objects is invisible, our interviews reveal that they are often engaging in what Project Zero sometimes calls high end cognitionforms of thinking and learning that are characteristic of sophisticated disciplinary and interdisciplinary inquiry. For example, they describe making nuanced discernments, asking generative questions, posing sophisticated problems, making rich comparisons and connections, and constructing complex interpretations. These kinds of cognitive processes make for powerful learning in any discipline, and it is noteworthy that the study centers seem to evoke these patterns of thinking in all types of visitorsthose who are professional art scholars as well as those who are not. The what of learning. What are people actually learning in the study centers? First and foremost, of course, they are learning highly specific things about highly specific objects. But at a more general level we notice an interesting trend: When people talk about what theyve learned, they typically mention many kinds of things. For example, people talk about learning about specific artistic materials and methods, and about artistic and creative processes more generally. They talk about learning about the meanings of particular works and about the different disciplinary lenses the pursuit of meaning invites (how would a scientist, historian, or artist look at this?) They talk about learning about the process of critical looking itself, and about gaining visual understandings that cant be put in words. Put simply, the singularity of objects in the study centers, combined with peoples intimate and direct encounters with them, seems to inspire complex learning across multiple dimensions.

Faculty teaching in the study centers Student learning. When faculty teach with objects, most encourage discussion, allowing students to develop their own interpretations and to take an active role in course conversations. Unlike the many instructional settings where texts, slides, and lectures are dominant experiences, classes held in study centers facilitate dynamic instruction and dynamic encounters with objects. Echoing the findings from the visitor observation/interviews, faculty trust the aesthetic, material, and other dimensions of objects to surprise, excite, and engage students, and to draw them into careful, critical looking. They also report that working with objects and collections helps students to understand the composition and boundaries of a field of study, to identify its areas of contention, and to participate in its debates. Faculty learning. Students arent the only ones who learn when faculty teach in the study centers. Encouraging student observation often causes faculty to see new things in the objects, too. Further, faculty note that participating in conversations with museum staff (and with Project Zero interviewers) encourages them to envision new ways of using objects in their courses and often causes them to reconceptualize their courses. Faculty also note that teaching in the study centers encourages them to approach topics with multiple disciplinary lenses, and to envision inter-faculty collaborations. Study center challenges Along with the many strengths of study center learning, there are also some challenges and obstacles. Perhaps most noticeable is the challenge of access. Study center learning has the potential to be powerful if (a) you know where the study centers are (many people in the university community dont know of their existence); (b) you know how to find out whats in them and how to choose objects to view (the

study center databases are idiosyncratic, incomplete, and not always online); and (c) you know what to do once youre inside the study center with an object in front of you (it can be hard to figure out the conventions of comportment, the rules about handling objects, and even, for newer viewers, the appropriate learning expectations). Additional challenges for the study centers have to do with strengthening the connection between the study centers and the museum galleries, increasing study center learning opportunities for all Harvard University undergraduates, strengthening the connection between study centers and the public, and strengthening the study centers role in catalyzingand participating incross-disciplinary faculty collaborations and interdisciplinary research. These challenges come at an exciting time. Over the next few years, 32 Quincy Street, the site of the Fogg and the Busch-Reisinger museums, will be totally renovated and re-envisioned and the two study centers will feature prominently in the renovations. Simultaneously, Harvard will build a long-awaited new museum at the heart of its new Allston campus. The new museum will focus on modern and contemporary art, and also be home to a new study center, open as always to the public as well as the university community. The collaboration with Project Zero is part of the preparation for HUAMs new future. Its explicit intent is to help HUAM take advantage of this opportune momentto understand how to leverage what the study centers already do well, to clarify what they could do better, and to help set new directions for innovations and improvements. Current Project Staff Shari Tishman, Alythea McKinney Funding for this project has been provided by The Harvard University Art Museums

PZs Learning Innovations Laboratory (LILA)

Founded in 2000 at Project Zero, Learning Innovations Laboratory (LILA) is a collaborative learning community of organizational leaders and Harvard faculty that shares problems, innovative practices, and research that speaks to the challenges of learning in todays organizations. LILA creates a confidential environment in which members help one another solve the complex and practical problems related to organizational learning, innovation, and collaboration. LILAs vision is to cultivate a learning community that: Creates Usable Knowledge: Members explore methods and models that can be adapted to suit a variety of organizational contexts. Has Practical Impact: Members support one another in making real advances in the challenges they face in their organization. Collaboratively Finds and Solves Problems: Members share innovative practices and build strategies to solve the challenges they face across a variety of contexts. 11 Captures Insights: The community harvests key lessons from research and the practical experiences of its members. Who is LILA? The LILA community involves members from three perspectives: Organizational Leaders. Business leaders representing a dozen different sectors comprise the main body of LILA. These seasoned practitioners hold titles such as Chief Learning Officer, Vice President of Human Resources, or Chief Knowledge Officer and are responsible for enhancing the performance, learning, and innovation within their organizations. Past and present member organizations have included Cisco, Deloitte, Federal Reserve Bank, Hewlett Packard, Humana, IDEO, Johnson & Johnson, McDonalds, Motorola, MTV, Pfizer, Raytheon, SAS, United Bank of Switzerland, Saudi Aramco, United Way, US Department of Defense, US Army, the World Bank, and the YMCA. Harvard Faculty. Researchers and professors from the

Harvard schools of Business, Education, Government, Law, Medicine, Public Health, and Departments of Psychology and Sociology, participate in LILA. David Perkins of HGSEs Project Zero convenes and is the lead facilitator of the LILA community. LILA has included faculty such as adult development expert Bob Kegan, organizational learning pioneer Chris Argyris, and an authority on the topic of organizational change, Rosabeth Moss-Kanter. Visiting faculty has also included John Seely Brown, Etienne Wenger, Warren Bennis, and Ed Schein. Harvard Researchers. Project Zero researchers and HGSE doctoral students work closely with the group to analyze relevant and cutting-edge research, synthesize practical findings, and create topics of exploration that address member needs. What does LILA do? LILA convenes organizational leaders with Harvard faculty in order find solutions to the ongoing organizational challenges members are facing. Project Zero researchers work with members to create an inquiry process in which colleagues can share cases, exchange methods, and learn new models of action. The three current areas of inquiry are: Knowledge & Learning. How do organizations understand and enhance knowledge creation, capture, sharing, and application? What are the cutting edge practices and supporting technologies that foster learning throughout an organization? Recent LILA discussions of this topic have produced articles and insights into challenges such as: Learning at the Organizational Edges Embedding Learning in the Workflow Harvesting Tacit Knowledge Creating Learning Cultures Knowledge Sharing through Storytelling Innovation & Change. What practices initiate and sustain innovation in organizations? How do organizations foster a culture of and capacity towards change? What are the roles of leadership and technology in successful innovation and change processes? Recent LILA explorations into this topic have produced articles about challenges such as: Leading Organizational Transformation Bridging the Idea-Action Gap

Developing Quality Decision Making Sustaining Change Innovating across Organizational Boundaries Collaboration & Community. What are practices and technologies for initiating and sustaining collaborative environments? What are the factors that establish trust and enable helping behaviors in organizations? How do organizations support and gain value from communities of practice? Discussions of such questions have rendered insights into challenges such as: Leveraging Social Networks in Organizations Developing Intelligent Helping Behaviors Designing Collaborative Technologies Fostering Trust in Organizations Tapping the Power of Communities of Practice Membership guidelines LILA members follow three general guidelines that shape the collective learning: High Trust: Members treat all ideas, experiences, and wisdom that are shared in strictest confidence. Continual Representation: Member organizations send two representatives to each quarterly meeting. Organizations may choose to rotate their representatives from meeting to meeting. Active Participation: Members share ideas, discuss experiences, and give feedback to others during the meetings. In between meetings, members are accessible to LILA researchers as they customize research briefings and design relevant topics for future exploration. In addition to the meetings and materials, LILA members receive a quarterly newsletter, invitations to participate in online discussions and conference calls on critical topics, and have access to LILAs complete online library of resources. Current Project Staff David Perkins, Daniel Wilson, Lia Davis, Betsy Campbell Funding for this project has been provided by Corporate Sponsorship

The Making Learning Visible Project

Most of us are in groups all the time. But are these groups learning groups? When does a group become a learning group? Can a group construct its own way of learning? Can documenting childrens and adults learning lead to new ways of learning? These are some of the questions addressed in the research project, Making Learning Visible (MLV). MLV draws attention to the power of the group as a learning environment and documentation as a way to see how and what children are learning. MLV is based on collaborative research conducted by Project Zero researchers with teachers 12 from the Municipal Preschools of Reggio Emilia, Italy, and preschool through high school teachers and teacher educators in Massachusetts. The overall goal of Making Learning Visible is to create and sustain powerful cultures of learning in and across classrooms and schools that nurture and make visible individual and group learning. Often when people first encounter the MLV work, they describe it as a project about documentation, perhaps because it is the most tangible aspect of the worksomething people can see. Then, after spending more time with the ideas, they say its a project about group learn-

ing. But in the end, they say MLV is a project about culture, values, and democracy. Learning in groups not only helps us learn about content, it helps us learn about learning in a way that fits with the kind of people we want to become and the world we want to create. Learning in groups develops critical human capacities for participating in a democratic society: The ability to share our views and listen to those of others, to entertain multiple perspectives, to seek connections, to change our ideas, and to negotiate conflict. MLV addresses three aspects of learning and teaching: What teachers and students can do to support individual and group learning in the classroom. How observation and documentation can shape, extend, and make visible childrens and adults individual and group learning. How teachers, students, and others are creators as well as transmitters of culture and knowledge. Highlights from Our Recent Research The following are some highlights from our MLV Seminar with 26 teachers and teacher educators in Massachusetts. The Critical Role of Listening The ability to listen is an essential foundation for the exchange and modification of ideas, yet many seminar teachers talked about the poor skills of their students as listeners. Lindy Johnson, a high school English teacher, said that while her students could name many of the elements that make for good discussion, they did not include listening on the list. Lindy characterized her students views as more one of I dont like you so I dont need to listen to you. Lindys social studies colleague, Heather Moore Wood, described most of the discussions in her class as, This is my opinion, thats your opinion, rather than a genuine exchange of ideas with the possibility of modification. Moreover, Heather and Lindy realized that many of their students had so little confidence in their own ideas that it was difficult for them to engage in a healthy exchange of ideas. Finding ways to help their students listen to each other became a focus for Lindys and Heathers documentation. The role of the teacher as one who listens also emerged as significant. Students seemed to recognize the connection between documentation and what Carlina Rinaldi refers to as the pedagogy of listening. Students tend to respond thoughtfully when their teachers demonstrateoften through documentationthat they are listening. MLVs focus on group learning in conjunction with documentation holds great promise for supporting deep thinking and the practice of democracy in the classroom. Knowing that someone is listening, students may take more care to formulate their thoughts and to listen in return. Expressing and explaining ones own ideas, and listening and responding to those of others, are critical to students academic and future success as well as establishing a democratic culture in and outside the classroom. Creating a space in which people can offer, receive, and modify ideas becomes the very thing that the teachers and students are working on. 13

The Creation of a Collective Body of Knowledge When we talk about learning groups, we are always also referring to individual learning. In the U.S., we tend to focus on the individual and often see individual and group as an either/or propositionwe fear that if we focus on the group, we will somehow lose the identity of the individual. But MLV does not view group learning as replacing individual learning; rather, it enhances and builds on this learning. The notion that learning in groups extends beyond the learning of individuals to create a collective body of knowledge was exciting and intriguing to seminar members, yet its meaning was elusive. Most cooperative and other group learning techniques are still seen primarily as ways to help raise individual achievement. But we see the focus of learning in learning groups as advancing a collective body of knowledge as well as individual learning. Rather than simply completing a series of discrete tasks or activities, members of learning groups in school feel like they are contributing to a larger, more meaningful whole. This concept prompted much discussion about the nature of the task the group was working on and led teachers to reflect on what it is the group comes together to do. Some tasks are inspiring and compelling and provide reasons for a group to come together, whereas others are far less successful. A number of teachers identified many of their own tasks as the less successful kind and began to grapple with what is the nature of a promising task in this context. Some of the ideas that emerged in our seminar include: Tasks which cant be done alone Tasks in which everyone can be invested Tasks that invite multiple perspectives Tasks that spark the imagination Tasks in which there is a central focus on learning, rather than an implied or actual emphasis on the group completing work. (Although the completion of work can lead to learning, many students and teachers perceive collaborative tasks as opportunities to share labor, rather than learn together, as we note below.) Equating Learning and Work A number of teachers noticed that their students seemed to equate getting work done with learning. These teachers also realized that while they considered learning a priority, sometimes learning took a back seat to the work that was supposed to generate it. In the absence of alignment of many factors in the classroom, work gets equated with learning. Consider this reflection from a ninth grade student in Jennifer Hogues English class in response to a question about whether working or getting work done was the same as learning: Most times for me it is not about learning, but completing the project. Many times I just want to complete an assignment and do not care or even think about how it may affect my learning. I guess part of the reason is [due] to my education from my past. It wasnt until I hit 8th grade people started caring about how I learned. We learned some fancy word meaning understanding how you think. It was cool to talk about, but hard to get across in an actual project.

I am asking myself, Do I learn better in groups or by myself? What is the point of me knowing if I am learning? Shouldnt me working on something mean I am learning? Whos to say if I am learning or not? How do others learn? These questions are now in my head after this experiment. I feel these are good questions to better understand where people are coming from. For our seminar teachers, this discovery of the distinction between doing school work and genuine learning in the group was critical. It helped them to clarify goals and to focus on creating genuine learning groups, not just groups in which students get the work done. A Note about Documentation Documentation serves different purposes during different stages of learning. These purposes might include collecting documentation to aid ones own reflection, to use in the classroom with students and colleagues, and to share more widely in and outside the school. Throughout this process, it is easy to become so focused on learning to document that one forgets about the underlying goal of documenting to learn. Documentation makes learning visible when it focuses on learning, not just something we did, and

when it promotes conversation and deepens understanding about childrens thinking and effective teaching. Current Work Project Zero is collaborating with five charter, pilot, and district public schools in Boston, Cambridge, and Brookline to facilitate the creation of communities of learners. This collaboration builds on the work of PZ, the Massachusetts Charter Public School Association (MCPSA), and 12 district and charter public schools on documenting and supporting individual and group learning. PZ is also working with the Wickliffe Progressive Community School in Upper Arlington, Ohio on a similar initiative. Documentation from these collaborations was exhibited at a 2006 summer institute and can be found on the MLV Web site. Current Project Staff Mara Krechevsky, Melissa Rivard, Steve Seidel Funding for this project has been provided by The Atlantic Philanthropies, an anonymous funder, MA Department of Education, Wickliffe Progressive Community School through a grant from the Ohio Department of Education

Qualities of Quality: Excellence in Arts Education and How to Achieve It

What constitutes quality in arts learning and teaching experiences, as defined by the literature, theorists, researchers, and practitioners in the field? How do practitioners and policy makers achieve and sustain quality arts learning experiences for young people? Which decision makers and decision points may be critical to insuring quality in arts education? Our Project Qualities of Quality: Excellence in Arts Education and How to Achieve It is a multi-faceted study of how arts educators define and strive to create high-quality arts-learning experiences for children and youth, both in and out of school. What constitutes high quality arts learning and teaching and how to achieve and sustain itare questions that all arts education programs address to some degree. Efforts to define and achieve quality certainly take place on many fronts, including program design, professional development, program evaluation, student assessment, and others. There is no single way of defining and creating quality arts learning experiences across the broad array of programs serving young people in America. Through this study, we hope to synthesize the central challenges, identify effective practices, and distill policy and decision-making implications related to achieving and sustaining quality. The study is comprised of three strands of research: 1. a review of relevant literature; 14 2. interviews with leaders and key informants in arts education; 3. case studies of exemplary or illustrative sites. The Qualities of Quality project is commissioned by The Wallace Foundation. This study is part of a Foundation initiative to develop effective ways to bring high-quality arts experiences to more young people inside and outside of school. The Foundation has also awarded two major city planning grants to strengthen arts education in New York and Dallas. These city efforts are supported by technical assistance from EmcArts, which will map the local arts learning system in each city, facilitate communications, and document the work. The Foundation has also funded a study on how collaborative system-wide efforts can develop and sustain high-quality arts learning experiences for children in local communities. This study is being conducted by RAND Education. While the efforts of Project Zero, RAND, and EmcArts are aligned, they are independent studies. Research Progress The research team is currently conducting simultaneous and coordinated analyses of the three strands and synthesizing the findings across the components. Based on these findings, the team will develop a series of tools for decision-makers to provide practical assistance in their efforts to understand, establish, expand, and/or improve arts learning experiences for young people. This project is producing

a report aimed at decision-makers positioned to create arts learning opportunities for young people in any community in the United States. Nomination Process As part of this study we identified quality programs, leaders in arts education, and key theoretical writings on the issue of quality in arts in education. Our goal in devising a nomination system was to cast a wide net encompassing leaders in arts education, the academic fields, policy makers, funders, administrators, practitioners, and public officials. We sought diversity in terms of school and non-school settings, art forms, and local, regional, and national representation. We invited over 400 arts educators to make nominations in three areas: 1) relevant literature, 2) leaders in the field, and 3) exemplary programs and organizations. In each area, nominations directly related to strong perspectives on what constitutes quality in arts learning and teaching. The nomination process was conducted in the spring of 2006 and due to a response rate of over 40% we received hundreds of nominations in each area. We believe the high response reflected the relevance of the issue of quality to those in the field. Literature Review Strand The Literature review strand reviewed the key literature suggested by the field in the nomination process and completed a comprehensive search of the literature on arts education theory, arts programs, and arts assessment, including the following areas: The qualities of quality arts education identified by leading scholars through domain-based handbooks The qualities of the most well-known and well-regarded in-school, after-school, and community-based arts programs in theater, visual arts, music, dance, and mixed-discipline arts. Articles and books nominated by the field Major tests and assessment programs (e.g., NAEP, IB, AP) National and selected state standards for assessing learning in the arts Selected literature on community-based arts programs

The Interview Strand The interview nomination process yielded 465 possible interview candidates. The large number of nominations suggests that the field, as defined by this study, has widely varying views about who the leading figures are that think and write explicitly about quality. The interview strand team selected and interviewed 16 arts leaders about the nature and practice of high quality arts education. To do this, we developed selection criteria to help us identify a set of candidates that reflects the breadth and complexity of the field. Our criteria included: representation across art forms (dance, music, visual arts, theater, integrated arts), representation across roles (administrator, theorist, practitioner), and representation across contexts and sites (university/academic, school-based, out-of-school, museums, consultant, artist-practitioner). The data from these interviews are currently being analyzed. The Case Studies Strand The case studies strand team collected nominations from the field to find and highlight exemplary and/or illustrative sites of high quality arts education. We solicited nominations of organizations and programs that dedicated significant focus and resources to achieving what they believe are high quality experiences for young people. The Case studies strand sent out applications to over 200 nominated programs and organizations for interviews and selected 12 diverse sites as case studies. We investigated these twelve sites in the fall of 2006 and winter of 2007, conducting interviews with over 200 people. The data from these interviews are currently being analyzed. Current Direction We are finishing the individual strand work, synthesizing the findings across strands and analyzing the data for a final report by November 2007. Current Project Staff Lois Hetland, Steve Seidel, Shari Tishman, Ellen Winner, Patricia Palmer, Amy Brogna Baione, Jennifer Ryan Funding for this project has been provided by The Wallace Foundation

ROUNDS at Project Zero

All professions must address the problem of how its practitioners stay abreast of current developments in that field and continue practicing clinical skills. Most professions have various ways in which they do this, including journals, meetings of professional associations, conferences on specific issues, and so on. Medicine is distinguished by various forms of small professional learning practices known as rounds. Perhaps the most popular image of medical rounds is a small groups of doctors traveling from patient to patient in a hospital ward to discuss each patients 15

case. But medical rounds also include larger group gatherings, such as monthly meetings featuring short lectures on current research studies and protocols like the mystery case. In all of these settings, young and old physicians and other health professionals come together to share knowledge and practice clinical diagnostic skills. Education has far fewer opportunities of this kind for life-long professional learning. At Project Zero, we have been engaged in a decade-long effort to create a powerful learning community based on this medical model. Growing out of

efforts in the early 1990s to bring many teachers with whom we were collaborating together, we sought to find ways to sustain the lively discussions and sharing of practices that had developed in the meetings of the group we called the New England Regional Assessment Network (NERAN). In 1995, when funding for those larger conferences ended, we initiated a monthly meeting called Rounds. The intent was to create an opportunity for educators who shared an interest in Project Zero ideas, especially related to the practice of collaborative assessment of student work, to gather voluntarily on a regular basis to discuss emerging issues in educational practice, their personal puzzles about being teaching and learning, and to practice looking at student work together. It needed to be low-cost and to have a clear, but flexible structure, requiring minimal planning and logistics, to be sustainable. Expenses are limited to the costs of coffee and bagels for the approximately 30-40 people who come to most sessions and a work-study student who helps with the set-up and arrangements. Project Zero provides in-kind services (email services, etc.) and the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) provides the space for the meetings. Steve Seidel, who conceptualized ROUNDS, donates his time as facilitator of these sessions. Who Comes to ROUNDS? The ROUNDS mailing list has about 150 addresses. This group is made up mostly of teachers, administrators, and researchers who have either collaborated on Project Zero research studies or have been students at HGSE. Participants work in a wide variety of settings, ranging from pre-school through graduate schools, public and private schools, in-school and out-of-school settings, museums, worker education programs, and policy/research organizations. At most sessions, the group also includes educators in the start of their careers and others with well over thirty years in the field. This range of experiences is a significant factor in the vitality of the conversations. Everyone is considered to have special perspectives and expertise to offer the group. Participation is entirely voluntary and rewarded only with coffee, bagels, and serious, though spirited, dialogue about educational matters. Some participants come to most sessions; many come once or twice a year, while others come only rarely. All are welcome to come whenever they can, and there is a sincere effort to sustain a structure that makes it truly possible to enter the on-going conversation at any time. At the invitation of Project Zero, new participants are always joining the group. What Happens at ROUNDS? The structure of ROUNDS has changed little over the past ten years. With the group sitting in a circle, sessions start with introductions and then a volunteer (planned in advance) offers a question or issue from her work as an educator that will, hopefully, prove to be relevant to the rest of the group. These questions/issues represent a puzzle or challenge that the volunteer feels is especially perplexing in the context of his or her work. The purpose of this segment is not to help the presenter solve her problem or figure out what to do about this issue, but rather to open a dialogue about 16

that issue, drawing perspectives from the diverse experiences of the group. Questions that have been presented in recent sessions have had to do with how educational leaders can make their own learning public, the role of documentation in tracking the work of teacher inquiry groups, and the place of progressive educational practices in schools not showing adequate yearly progress on the MCAS tests. Sometimes the volunteer presents documentation in the form of photos, video or other artifacts from their settings as they present their questions or issues for discussion. After a break, the group reconvenes to spend approximately an hour engaged in the close examination of a piece (or pieces) of student work brought by another volunteer (again, planned in advance). The protocol used to structure this conversation is the Collaborative Assessment Protocol, developed by Seidel and others at Project Zero during work on the Arts Propel project in the late 1980s. This part of these monthly meetings also serves as a time for participants to practice their clinical skills of observation, interpretation, and analysisskills for which few opportunities to practice exist in collaborative and reflective settings. But in this way, ROUNDS has also been a laboratory for the further development of the Collaborative Assessment Protocol. Numerous adjustments and changes in the protocol have been pioneered over the years. Since many participants have been coming to ROUNDS for so many years, the group is highly sophisticated at designing, testing, and evaluating changes in the protocol. Since October 2001, following the events of September 11th, the structure of ROUNDS has been altered to create time at the end of every session for participants to openly reflect on what it means for them to be educators in a time of war. Usually only 10-15 minutes at the end of the session, this time has come to be an extremely important part of the experience of participating in ROUNDS. There is no specific structure for this conversation; participants speak only when and if they want and the group often sits in silence. In the last years, participants have started to question the frame for this part of the session, asking what we mean by war, who gets to say which conflicts are wars and which are not, how we can ever know how our students have experienced wars, and whether war is even the most important context for us to consider as the critical frame for our experience as educators. For the moment, the question, what does it mean to be educators in a time of war? continues as the frame for the closing segment of each session, but that may well change in the coming year. Plans are underway for the continuation of ROUNDS in the foreseeable future with the hope that it can continue to foster a rich dialogue for the current and future participants and also serve as a viable model of a voluntary, long-term learning practice for educators. Current Project Staff Steve Seidel Funding for this project has been provided by Private source

Teaching and Learning in the Visual Arts

Summary The Studio Thinking Framework describes three structures in which instruction occurs in studio arts classrooms (Demonstration-Lecture, Students-at-Work, and Critique) and eight Studio Habits of Mind that describe what art teachers intend to teach. The end-state of artistic learning (artistic mind) can be described through reference to these eight, flexible mental habits, and so the framework can guide art teachers planning and assessment. By facilitating rigorous conversations across mediums, positions, disciplines, and contexts, the framework is a promising support for rigorous pre-service and in-service professional development, the design of future research that tests arts learning and transfer, and increased understanding across the heterogeneous field of arts education. Three Phases of Research with Arts and Non-Arts Teachers and Students The field of arts education research is in an early phase of development (Deasy & Fulbright, 2001) and has not yet conclusively demonstrated whether or how arts instruction benefits learning, intrinsically or through transfer to other domains of learning. Generalizable causal arguments are still largely out of reach because art education research methods are skewed towards qualitative and correlational methods (Winner & Hetland, 2000; McCarthy, Ondaatje, Zakaras, & Brooks, 2004), and the field is skeptical of the validity and/ or feasibility of the double-blind experimental studies that might demonstrate causal benefits of arts education. In addition, a chronic lack of funding (compared to such research fields as mathematics and reading education) has certainly slowed the development of art education research questions from their initial, descriptive phases to later stages in which a greater proportion of replicable studies employ experimental designs. Skepticism is warranted, given the nature of arts education outcomes (i.e., not readily tested in standardized formats) and treatments (i.e., no widely accepted format for description that reveals differences across contexts). However, the field is left in a state in which the research lacks coherence in three broad areas of interest: description of program purpose, content, and quality; description and assessment of student learning; and description of mechanisms, both theoretical and empirical, to explain and predict how hypothesized benefits of arts education occur (Winner & Hetland, 2000; Hetland & Winner, 2004; McCarthy, Ondaatje, Zakaras, & Brooks, 2004). We need to find ways to move forward more systematically toward addressing these limitations in understanding. Small steps that lead toward generalizable causal arguments are necessary before experimental research is possible. One of these steps, as described in RANDs recent review of arts education research, is the need to develop language that adequately describes the intrinsic benefits attributed to the arts as a key step in advancing our understanding of the benefits of arts education (McCarthy et al, 2004, p. xviii). Eisner (2002) outlined a number of such benefits derived from his considerable experience as an art theorist and educator (which map readily to the framework described here), but we are not aware of any empirical studies that have addressed this need. It was to this end that we developed the Studio Thinking Framework. By analysis of data collected through sustained observations of visual artist-teachers in rigorous and supportive school contexts (Phase I), we developed the Studio Thinking Framework. That framework is presented for a teaching audience in the 2007 volume by Hetland, Winner, Veenema, and Sheridan, Studio Thinking: The Real Benefits of Visual Arts Education (Teachers College Press). Our model defines categories of learning that artist-teachers aim to nurture in students through studio arts instruction. It also describes three studio structures in which visual art teachers organize time and interactions in their classes. The model emphasizes learning dispositions: the habits of mind that artist-teachers want their students to internalize. Our focus on thinking and understanding in visual art (engendered by processes of making, perceiving, and reflecting, from Arts PROPEL, Winner, 1991) means that the model cuts across differences in media (e.g., ceramics vs. video) and perspectives (e.g., modernist vs. post-modernist). We argue that the model sets the stage for the kind of quantitative studies that could be synthesized into generalizable conclusions that would be trusted, compelling, and useful to practitioners and policy-makers alike. Research using the framework has been funded by the J. Paul Getty Trust, the Ahmanson Foundation, and the US Department of Education. In Phase II (20022007), we focused on arts learning and assessment using the framework. We gathered data from 28 high school students at the original research sites, including longitudinal data for six students from first through second, third, and/or fourth years

For more information on any of our projects, please visit www.pz.harvard.edu

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of art instruction. From this work, we have described a trajectory of growth that illuminates development within and across the habits. In Phase III (20032006), we focused on teachers uses of the Studio Thinking framework to assess student learning, gathering data from five art teachers and their students in Oakland, California (one K5, one K8, and three high school). Phase IV, 2003ongoing, in Alameda County, California, uses the framework in combination with the Teaching for Understanding Framework, ideas from Reggio Emilia, and concepts developed in the Making Learning Visible and Making Thinking Visible projects at Project Zero. Non-arts and arts specialists at the elementary, middle school levels, and high school levels, and arts

learning coaches, who are all arts partners from higher education and cultural organizations across the art forms (dance, drama, music, visual arts) work with teachers to design and deliver curriculum that focuses on developing student understanding and integrating arts rigorously with instruction in other disciplines. Current Project Staff Lois Hetland, Ellen Winner, Shirley Veenema Funding for this project has been provided by The J. Paul Getty Trust, the Ahmanson Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Education

The Understandings of Consequence Project

Phase Four: Learning to RECAST Students Causal Assumptions in Science through Interactive Multimedia Professional Development Tools Ask yourself some everyday kinds of questions Why do my bike tires look flat in winter, but not in summer when I havent added any air? How do planes fly? Why does dead matter decay even when no worms are around? Why do all the lights in a school hallway come on at the same time when you flip the switch? Why do traffic jams form? Why does it get so noisy in the school cafeteria when no one is trying to be too noisy? Why do I sometimes get sick if I am around a sick person and sometimes not? In order to answer these questions, you have to think about cause and effect in ways that may not be entirely familiar and in ways that you have never had an opportunity to learn in school. Understanding the nature of causality is critical to learning a range of science concepts from everyday science to the science of complexity. For the past nine years, with funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), our project has been studying how students think about causality when answering questions such as these. In the first phase of the project, we found that students hold default assumptions about the nature of causality. For instance, that effects follow causes in a simple linear chain, that causes are close to their effects in space and time, that causes tend to be obvious, and so forth. These assumptions can hinder science learning. In the second phase of the project, we found that curriculum designed to RECAST (REveal CAusal STructure) their assumptions while learning the science lead to deeper understanding. In a third phase of the project we found that learning about causal forms in one topic can transfer to other topicsthose that have similar and even those with dissimilar causal forms if students get the right kinds of support. Support for thinking about the causal forms, applying them to diverse examples, and engaging in metacognition were particularly helpful to students. 18 What does it sound like to hear students talking about the nature of causality? It is common to hear students refer to domino causality or cyclic causality. For instance when contrasting the processes of energy transfer through the food web and matter recycling, students are likely to talk about non-obvious causes and/or effects. The work is embedded in a pedagogy of scientific modeling. Students are engaged in developing scientific explanations that do the most powerful job explaining the available evidence. They are encouraged to trade up for better models as the evidence suggests. This puts the locus of responsibility for generating understanding with the student, and the teacher helps students discover discrepancies, areas that need clarification, and evidence that doesnt fit with the explanation at hand. We are now in the fourth phase of the work and are in the process of taking what we learned and applying it to professional development. With further funding from the NSF, the UC team and the Science Media Group (SMG) of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics are collaborating in a five-year iterative design process to create interactive, multimedia professional development tools. These tools will guide middle school physics and biology teachers in assessing the structure of their students scientific explanations and in using existing curricula and developing their own curriculum to restructure or RECAST students understandings to fit with scientifically accepted explanations. We have just completed the second year of this work. In order to develop the materials, we are working closely with teacher collaborators, some of whom have worked with us before and others who are working with us for the first time. They are helping us to think about what works and what doesnt in terms of their own learning of the concepts and what this means for professional development. We are also expanding the work to communities with a greater diversity of students in terms of ethnicity and socioeconomic status and figuring out the best ways to bring a diversity of learners into the concepts. While there have been challenges, one very encouraging outcome was the new teachers response to video we showed of students in RECAST classrooms dis-

cussing ideas. One of the teachers commented that it blew me away to see the way that those kids were talking and really pushing their understanding. She went on to say, I had those kids in sixth grade and they were one of the lowest [performing] classes ever. To see them doing that [as eighth graders] is amazing to me. The professional development products will consist of a series of interactive DVDs, a parallel website, and a support guide. We will use a range of formats including: documentary footage of real-life classrooms; interviews with teachers describing challenges and obstacles they faced introducing the curricula, how these were overcome, and, the benefits they obtained from using the materials; comments by students, which demonstrate the wide range of students prior thinking about specific causal forms as embedded in the science concepts; discussion questions, suggested hands-on activities, and short videotaped content explorations; examples of student written work and journals; and

design guides and questions to help teachers understand the features of and how to design RECAST activities, assessments, and assessment rubrics related to causal understanding in science. We expect that individual teachers working singly or in small groups will use the materials as a self-guided tutorial to learn more about students causal assumptions and RECAST activities either by adopting the existing modules or improving the effectiveness of existing curricula already in place in their classrooms. Teachers will bring different levels of understanding in science so we expect that they will find different paths through the materials. We plan to disseminate the resources over the Internet and through the Annenberg Channel. Current Project Staff Tina Grotzer, Amanda Heffner-Wong Funding for this project has been provided by The National Science Foundation

Other Current Staff at Project Zero

Core Administrative Staff Cindy Floyd, Nikki Hughes, Damari Rosado, Denise D. Simon, Tom Trapnell, Karen Uminski Core Summer Assistants Kirsten Adam, Aaron Ahlstrom, Maria Bermudez Faculty Support Staff Piero Buscaglia, Christian Hassold, Lorielle Mallue, Casey Metcalf Other Research Support Jessica Sara Benjamin, Cheryl A. Browne, Michelle Burdford, Rich Carroll, Connie Hoyen Choi, Flossie Chua, Jennifer Chua, Edward Clapp, Yiyang Joy Ding, Talya Dornbush, Liz Dawes Duraisingh, Hadas Eidelman, Khary Francis, Samuel Ogden Gilbert, Linor Hadar, Amy Hart, Jared Hughes, Shira Lee Katz, Sholeh Korjee, Kelly Leahy, Yee Ping Lee, Puay Yin Lim, Paula Ann Lynn, Ben Mardell, Guillermo Marini, Beau Garrett Martin, Lucy Morris, Marguerite Nicoll, Barbara Palley, Megan Powell, Alison Rhodes, Ashley Rybowiak, Joanne Seelig, Scott Seider, Kaelyn Sophabmixay, Celka Straughn, Maciej N. Sudra, Anna Kristina Tirovolas, Shirley Veneema, Seth Wax, Kailin Yang Special thank you to the extended Project Zero Community who make the Project Zero Classroom a success year-after-year! Scott Amy, Heidi Andrade, Amy Arntsen, Susan Barahal, Maria Barrera, Tina Blythe, Theresa Boyle, Annie Bruce, Malika Carter, Richard Chang, Anne Charny, Alice Chen, Anne Clarke, Rhonda Clevenson, Joe Davis, Sande Dawes, Faraday de la Camara, Jayeesha Dutta, Terry Edeli, Todd Elkin, Janet Field, Christina Gannon, Shehla Ghouse, Shehla Ghouse, John Harrigan, Constanza Hazelwood, Paul Hetland, Jennifer Hogue, Laura Howick, Bonnie James, Jane Jessep, Sharon Kerr, Tammy Lantz, Patricia Len-Agusti, Jim Linsell, Pete Lutkoski, Ben Mardell, Marian McCarthy, Mary McFarland, Doug McGlathery, Arzu Mistry, Janet Navarro, Suzanne ODonnell-Fuks, Marisa Odria, Kim Powell, Jim Reese, Nelly Ribot, Eileen Rodgers, Jessica Ross, Angela Salmon, Kim Sheridan, Joan Soble, Becca Solomon, David Spicer, Janet Stork, Amy Sullivan, Diane Tabor, Karrie Tufts, Julie Viens, Debra Wise, Par Wohlin, Ana Maria Woll Publication Design Denise D. Simon

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Best Sellers from the Project Zero Bookstore

www.pz.harvard.edu/ebookstore Five Minds for the Future Howard Gardner We live in a time of vast changes. And those changes call for entirely new ways of learning and thinking. In Five Minds for the Future, Howard Gardner defines the cognitive abilities that will command a premium in the years ahead: the Disciplinary Mind: mastery of major schools of thought (including science, mathematics, and history) and of at least one professional craft; the Synthesizing Mind: ability to integrate ideas from different disciplines or spheres into a coherent whole and to communicate that integration to others; the Creating Mind: capacity to uncover and clarify new problems, questions, and phenomena; the Respectful Mind: awareness of and appreciation for differences among human beings and human groups; and the Ethical Mind: fulfillment of ones responsibilities as a worker and citizen.

Teaching for Understanding Guide Tina Blythe and Associates This soft cover companion guide to Teaching for Understanding: Linking Research with Practice describes an approach to teaching that requires students to think, analyze, solve problems, and make meaning of what theyve learned. Brief case studies of teachers using this approach illustrate the process in action. Classroom examples from science, mathematics, language arts, and social sciences, show how teachers can choose topics that engage student interest and connect readily to other subjects set coherent unit and course goals create activities that develop and demonstrate students understanding improve student performance by providing continual feedback

Learning at Work Daniel Wilson, David Perkins, Dora Bonnet, Cecilia Miani, Chris Unger For four years researchers at Project Zero worked closely with the leaders and over fifty office managers of a university as they sought to cultivate a culture of learning and understanding throughout their organization. This book shares the story of this project along with the key lessons and practical strategies that helped to enhance understanding, deepen inquiry, strengthen leadership, and improve communication. Organizational leaders, group facilitators, or those interested in applying Project Zero concepts in the workplace will find this book of interest.

Making Learning Visible: Children as Individual and Group Learners Project Zero and Reggio Children In this richly-illustrated bookthe culmination of a two-year research collaborationteachers and pedagogistas from Reggio Emilia and researchers from Project Zero illuminate ways in which documentation can foster both individual and group learning, creating a relationship between them. They identify methods and processes that will enable educators to reflect not only on the learning processes of children but also on those of adults.