Prospect Center

Seven of us came to the first meeting September 11. We did not start with Prospect processes but we did start with student work on the table in front of us. We soon realized we would be looking at writing from all our classes, not just Diane's. Erin S. brought some of the dialogue journals she and her fourth-graders had begun the week before. We passed them around. In the following Wednesday sessions we looked at mint tea stories from Cheryl's room as well as more compositions from Diane's class. The group felt good. It was ours, not some administrator's. We would decide what to do with our time together. Lisa H. found it to be much more lively than the scripted new teacher inductions she was required to attend. Erin's dialogue journals looked like something she could try with her third graders. In our second meeting Lisa showed us a sample from her written conversation with Macdijon about his karate lessons. We also found out about Tracey's oral history project from reading her third graders' write-ups of the group interview with Ms. Dorsey, who had grown up in the neighborhood in the days when girls scrubbed the marble front steps and live chickens were sold at the corner grocery. Tracey and Cheryl enjoyed reading stories by former students, like the magic stories from Lynette's room. (Tracey remembered Rahtisha's special attachment to her high-fashion jackets and got a kick out of the magic jacket in the new story.)

By our November 6 meeting we were still enjoying the students' stories but we were beginning to feel a lack of direction. Tracey turned to me for a more formal process for the next session. If I had been wary of imposing the Descriptive format, I now felt I had permission. Tracey was curious about Keyontay. The day before our meeting she showed me several of Keyontay's stories. The word "notepad" struck me as a fruitful key word for group reflection. I invited our first-grade colleague Mattie to join us. We had initially focused on grades 3, 4, and 5, but I knew Mattie loves to describe work and I wanted to make sure we had enough people (Our CEO had initiated after-school tutoring that siphoned off two of our group members, and Diane was absent that Wednesday.)

Our reflection on "notepad" was a pleasure. Then we relished Keyontay's "One Scary Night," which surprised us with its narrative twists and engaged us with the protagonist's courage. I needn't have feared that the repeated descriptive rounds would weary us (impressions, then paraphrase, then larger patterns). We got more and more excited with how much we were seeing and stayed past our ending time to read another piece (Keyontay's response to Aunt Flossie's Hats.) Then we couldn't resist naming activities and books we thought would appeal to Keyontay (dressup! drama! sorting rocks, scientific method; 100 Dresses, Harriet the Spy, Amber Brown, Eyewitness Costume, Starring Grace, Cam Jansen, Encyclopedia Brown, Mr. Smeds and Mr. Heads).

Diane heard what fun we'd had without her and asked for a chance to describe Tameka's Thanksgiving story at our next session. Before we started on our key word reflection, Tracey just had to report what had happened in her class with the word “wild.� The word had emerged from a student's story. Tracey wrote it at the center of a chart paper. She asked the students to tell her what it made them think of. She recorded their ideas in a web around “wild.� Kevin was taken with the phrase “wild dog� and threw himself into an extended story. Before that, Kevin hadn't written more than a few connected sentences in Tracey's class.

For us, “meal� proved to be a word that evoked recollections, drawing a group of diverse acquaintances together in a warm bond. We'd been giving Terra Nova tests for three days and were ready for some human relief from our bizarre roles policing a series of unconnected multiple choice questions about random factoids that some publisher had put together to produce a bell curve of student achievement data. It was so good to talk about foods and families, within the disciplined structure of a reflection, and the word “meal� opened us to the delight of Tameka's fictional tale of a school Thanksgiving. We enjoyed seeing our morning line-up ritual through the eyes of a ten-year old: “The teachers came out and the kids went in.� As the setting shifted to the classroom: “My teacher counted really loud to three. 'One...two...three.' Everybody got quiet. Ms. Cole started to speak. 'Class, we are about to have our party and we won't be doing nothing all today, so hand in your homework and color until I get things ready.'�

We ended up appreciating what comfortable places school and home have been for Tameka. We mused about how we tend to overlook quiet contentment, how edgy we often are, distracted by complaints about schoolyard fights and low test scores. We stayed in a recollective mood. Major Morris began telling us about journal topics he assigned last year, and what surprises he got when he prompted kids to probe their memories (“Someone who used to be your friend but isn't anymore� “Something that happened over the past school year that made you sad�). We thought about how little we know about our students when we're standing up in front of them day after day, what surprising things we learn when we get to read their written thoughts.

Our study group continued to meet twice a month through winter and spring. We continued to make time and space for our children to write. “The more they do it, the better they get at it,� Major M. remarked -- a more encouraging message than we were hearing from the test score printouts. Rita's kids composed an original play about Harriet Tubman, complete with music, costumes, and sets for two stunning peformances for the whole school community.

Children's work had given us a lot to feel good about. Our efforts to save it to share with each other had borne fruit. For another year, we had kept alive our own sense of agency. We had sustained a delight in what our students were making out of the lives of our classrooms and their own individual take on the world.