Frustration

Project work, researching and writing information in your own words - as a teacher and a parent, this expectation caused me a great deal of frustration. I remember the first time my youngest sister brought home a project she was assigned in year 5. She is much younger than I am, and I had started uni at the time so I was fully immersed in what sort of teacher I wanted to be and couldn’t wait to help her. Being interested in the project and the learning that was taking place, I sat with her and asked her which steps she should take in order to get to the the end goal, which was knowing all about koalas. She was not interested in the learning part, all she wanted to do was to choose the cardboard colour and begin designing the poster. When we sat down together to work on the information, which was a one page print out about koalas, all she wanted to do was to copy out parts of the information and thought that changing a few words meant that she had put it into her own words. The project became a family affair, where everyone pitched in and helped with writing, cutting, pasting, colouring and glittering! The main idea of showing her understanding of what she had learnt about koalas through her writing, had minimal importance to her and the rest of the family.

Once I became a teacher I vowed never to send a project home to be done because time after time I witnessed the efforts that parents went to to make it look amazing, losing sight of the fact that the work was meant to be a demonstration of the student working independently and showing that they were able to translate information into their own words. The whole project thing just put pressure on parents and on students. Some parents refused to give any help, others just didn’t have the time to help, some didn’t know how to help and then others just took over. When the due date came for the projects to be handed in, how then do I, as a teacher, determine how much of the work was done by the student and how much was done by adults? It would feel unfair to mark and compare the projects because they are incomparable.

I still believed in the importance of this type of project work, however all the planning and written work would be done in class and then taken home to be completed. This way I would be able to guide the students in their research and I would know what they were doing. Expectations had to be different for each student, but it is far easier to judge when you know their individual capabilities. It is because of this process that I understand the frustration of research. Children will tend to read two or three sentences and then switch it around to say that they have written it in their own words. They end up copying slabs of information and have obviously learnt nothing. When you ask them about the information, they tend to read it back to you and not explain it to you. If they struggle to understand the information then they have no chance writing it in their own words. In my project sessions with the children, working over a number of weeks on a scheduled one to one time, I emphasised that it was far better to have 2 or 3 sentences in your words, which demonstrated your understanding, as opposed to writing a paragraph of words that meant nothing to them.

Researching and writing in their own words stems from how well they are able to analyse text. This is an important part of comprehension that is not as easily valued and practiced as learning how to read is. ‘Comprehension skills’ need the same emphasis placed on it as learning ‘how to read’ skills has. The creation of PoP-O Books came out of this frustration. Children need to become better at interpreting, analysing and synthesising text and we as parents and teachers need to be able to support the reader’s learning by knowing how to ask the right questions when we listen to our readers read. It is a long term process just like learning how to read is but it is a true investment of time.