Dreaming of a Classroom of Wonders: A Reader's Response to Ladybugs, Tornadoes, and Swirling Galaxies

If Ladybugs and Tornadoes are doing anything to me, they are making me start to DREAM BIG.

I have a new fantasy.

My own Language and Technology classroom.

In my utopian teaching position, I see each class for an hour or longer every. single. day. They spend an hour in this Classroom of Wonders, perfecting the art of inquiry and letting their critical thinking skills explode. The walls will be filled with their questions, their thinking, and their learning on big proud poster board and chart paper, complete with their colorful drawings. There will be tubs and tubs of books, art supplies, and comfortable inviting spaces to delve into work. There will be computers, good ones, that work and have interesting and useful programs to expand their thinking and their creativity. May I dream slightly bigger still? There will be no less than 3 Macbook laptops (or dare I say, iPads?) complete with GarageBand, iMovie, and iPhoto. Depending on their age, students will use these programs to express their thinking process or create works of art. They will be immersed in technology, with iPads brimming with apps, and scaffolds to their learning, and other experiences to enchant and unlock their minds. They will talk with and exchange ideas with friends across the globe and learn techniques for pursuing the questions that interest them.

Obviously, when I call this dream-space a Classroom of Wonders, I do mean wonders in the Ladybugs, Tornadoes and Swirling Galaxiean manner of "I wonder?". As the authors of the book put it, "The purpose of using 'I wonder' is that it gives the student ownership of the question and therefore a reason for seeking the answer" (Buhrow and Upczak Garcia, 2006, L. 1408). In my perfect world, Language and Technology will be a daily exercise in critical thought, open exchange of ideas, student-driven learning, and meaningful engagement with the tools of knowledge seeking. Similarly to the way the authors of Ladybugs see it, "This is all natural. The kids are everywhere, spread out with their work, engaged in their thinking, working at their own pace. We move around the room conferring with kids, helping them move from one step to the next" (Buhrow and Upczak Garcia, 2006, L. 1567). THAT is what I want learning to look like in my dream classroom. There's just something about this description that gives me a visceral reaction; it feels right.

So many things squared with my thinking in these latest chapters of Ladybugs, if the inspiration for my dream classroom didn't make that clear enough. One thing in particular has been a huge area of focus and growth for me, and that is honoring student choice and promoting critical thinking in my lesson plans. I could not underscore the importance of such choice better than Buhrow and Upczak Garcia when they say "We let them choose topics, whether it is with their personal narratives or with inquiries, because choice energizes them. Choice generates curiosity and adventurous thinking. Choice creates momentum. Choice allows for more in-depth inquiry. Choice encourages independence and builds self-esteem. Choice makes learning matter to the kids. Choice encourages metacognition and reflection" (Buhrow and Upczak Garcia, 2006, L. 1708). The role of choice and ownership has been made abundantly clear to me, and now I am simply fine tuning the best ways to go about guiding and supporting students in these choices. After all, "rarely do we find that kids are distracted or bored when they are working on something that they've chosen" (Buhrow and Upczak Garcia, 2006, L. 1708).

Another aspect of Anne and Brad's classroom that I love is how interactive the kids' work is. This squares with my thinking because I also value the social role of learning, and how responding to others or being responded to can enrich your own thinking. I felt like patting myself on the back to read: "Recently we have been experimenting with simply writing our comments on sticky notes and putting them directly onto the work" (Buhrow and Upczak Garcia, 2006, L. 1936), because sticky notes are already a major part of our classroom flow. The idea of expanding their many uses to include responding to the work of other researchers is simply genius and a must-try.

At the same time my thoughts are squaring with the ideas in the book, the same ideas are also challenging me and pushing me to think in new directions. For instance, I completely acknowledge the wisdom behind the idea that: "the kids are deciding for themselves what to explore. We might provide ideas and background knowledge, but they choose. It is also their questions and learning that drive their inquiries. Our goal is for them to follow their wonderings and learning, not ours" (Buhrow and Upczak Garcia, 2006, L.1740). In my first inquiry-based project attempt, I am guiding students to create presentations about any topic involved in a UN country they chose to study a few weeks ago. I want to drive home the fact that this project should be something THEY want to learn about and share, but for some students it still feels like pulling teeth, and I get the sense they are trying to read from me some cue of what they should be doing. It's almost as if the students don't know how to run free with their own inquiry; for instance, one student knows he is interested in soccer players. But when I try to get him asking questions about this topic, I get blankness in response. Part of it I think is the (in his mind) loathsome task of so much writing that is making him balk. As I continue reading Ladybugs, I learn more ways to reach students like this and to get them as fired up about their inquiries as the students in Ladybugs. My reading has led me to understand that students like the one in question need to be taught the procedures of inquiry and can't be expected to walk in the door the first day knowing how to inquire. Extremely helpful have been the "Scaffolding Strategies for Inquiry Projects" (Buhrow and Upczak Garcia, 2006, L. 1583), which I should have used more liberally while I was sitting with this particular "stuck" student. I am pointed now in the direction of valuing the actual critical thinking taking place over the method of getting there; why not be his scribe if getting writing out of the way will help him get to the meat of his thinking and push him to new edges? He can practice the tedium of handwriting in other areas of his school day, but not when the momentum of his thinking is at stake! Scribes can be great for emergent writers as well as ELLs.

Another new idea that came to me was the importance of modeling to help students develop their budding inquiry skills. As the authors of Ladybugs remind us, "Through good modeling the students gain greater access to meaningful language" (Buhrow and Upczak Garcia, 2006, L. 1894). For instance, "We start out with very simple structures and routines for sharing that include oral responses that occur after someone shares...As time goes on, responses can be more complicated and can incorporate comprehension strategies such as making connections, questioning, or inferring" (Buhrow and Upczak Garcia, 2006, L. 1894). Providing those structures and routines are what my initial plunge into this inquiry project was lacking, and is something I will be sure to put thought into in the future. One technique I can try to do is more out loud thinking. Buhrow and Upczak Garcia sometimes like to "stop as we are reading and think aloud, although quite often the kids are making their inner conversations audible. They just start wondering and thinking aloud. We encourage this, because one child's question often leads to other kids thinking more about the topic" (Buhrow and Upczak Garcia, 2006, L. 1531). From now on I will find excuses to think aloud in front of students, and do what Brad and Anne do by turning it back onto the students with the question "what did you notice me doing there?"

With so much wonderful food for thought, I naturally have a lot of thoughts that continue to circle in my mind. I thought it was interesting the way Buhrow and Upczak Garcia pose the question: "Why constrict them? Why not help them share their thinking and make it big? For us, the thought of being neat translates into stifling creativity and inhibits our ELL's ability to communicate with us in various forms" (Buhrow and Upczak Garcia, 2006, L. 1621). My thought: How would parents react if I told them we would not be writing on lined paper or practicing the basics of letter formation this year? The bottom line is that ESPECIALLY in private school, there are just certain things parents expect to see. I'd like to find a compromise here because I value the perspective Buhrow and Upczak Garcia present here. I'm thinking that perhaps neatness and handwriting can be focused on during other parts of the day, but during LT in the Classroom of Wonders, students can be uninhibited by these concerns that come second to quality thinking. 

Being in a mixed age setting, I am constantly rolling over ideas of ways to get meaningful interactions across the grade levels. I love the idea that "Getting the kids to share their thinking in a big and bold way also inspires other writers in other grades" (Buhrow and Upczak Garcia, 2006, L. 1879), because that is exactly what I am trying to achieve. I would hope that through modeling, scaffolding, and practice, "The community becomes deeply involved in each other's work through presentations of research projects, making connections, asking questions, and writing comments..." (Buhrow and Upczak Garcia, 2006, L. 1916). Still circling in my mind is the question of "How?" How do these teachers keep track of all of this free-form learning and exploring, balancing this qualitative learning with the demands for quantitative results? I'd like to march in to my principal on Monday morning and declare my need for my own Classroom of Wonders, but how do I fit in the kind of data a principal or parent would expect to see from all this freedom and extra time with the students into this model of student-driven learning? I'm still grappling with this question as I fantasize about ways to make my dream a reality, or at least a closer approximation to my ideal teaching format. I want so badly to create what Ladybugs has created, "an environment and sets of routines that allow the kids to be in a comfortable place to share and respond" (Buhrow and Upczak Garcia, 2006, L.1916). I want to encourage the hum and the buzz of active, authentic learning, to be able to share in the feeling of success described when the authors say their classroom environment" is truly charged, and the pride in their eyes when they share their work is something we see frequently" (Buhrow and Upczak Garcia, 2006, L. 1936).

My next order of business is to take what I can from my dream classroom, the Classroom of Wonders, and make what I can of simply a class of wonders. Perhaps if I can prove my merit in this small space, a grander space for us to stretch out in will be on the horizons.