Chris Ashley, Jim DellaCioppa, Linda Tilden, Danni Kleiman, and Joyce Bourdon got together recently to respond to a few questions about their Teaching For Transfer Across the Arts Project. If you have more questions for the teachers, visit the forum in the Thinking Classroom and send them a note.

1. What is it about infusing transfer into your curriculum that appeals to you as teachers?

Infusing transfer into our curriculum appeals to us because it allows us to see if students are seeing the "big picture." Of course, we like the idea of helping students become better thinkers. We see TTAAP as a way to get students to become more reflexive in their connection-making. We also see TTAAP as a way to foster students' ownership of their learning.

We've found that students tend to relate more to the ideas and concepts presented from subject to subject. Students often have very little knowledge in the arts at the elementary level. TTAAP seems to help students acquire a working knowledge base in the arts, because of all the explicit attention we give to connection-making in our lessons between music, art, and poetry.

Kids get triple the exposure to the ideas and themes, because we all address those ideas and themes across the board in art, and music, and in poetry. Kids acquire a basic vocabulary and begin to learn how to talk about the their learning in the arts. Once kids have a knowledge base to work from, then we find we can push students to deepen and broaden that knowledge which brings with it the types of understanding we want.

First of all, we find ourselves doing a lot more reflecting after we teach a lesson, TTAAP or otherwise. There is this thinking-centered goal that runs through all of our classes now. Did we attend to transfer? How do we know? What worked? What will I do next? What did this lesson mean for kids? TTAAP helped us activate our own knowledge about what we teach and how we teach it. It has helped us consider and teach toward the big picture in all areas.

I guess we still wonder if there is some proven formula for fostering transfer most effectively that we haven't discovered yet - the Holy Grail of teaching for transfer. But we're learning that even if there was a "proven" prescriptive technique out there, we'd still need to figure out how to test it and make it all work for us given our curriculum, our passions, our goals, and our kids. So as teacher-researchers, I think we're learning how to look at the theories and think through the problems and issues involved in implementing them. We suspect that there may be answers in the literature related to situated learning. We'd also like to learn more about how developmental factors may influence and/or hinder transfer.

They have responded very well thus far. For example, kids are bringing in samples of poetry to share on their own. They are even asking for more opportunities to write poetry, more than was even assigned! Students seem to have taken a pride in their work that wasn't there before. As we've mentioned before, the kids' work in the subject areas has improved, which is very encouraging to us. Interestingly, we've also noticed a positive shift in kids' attitudes toward poetry as an art form. Students who may not have been the most skilled poets are now investing heavily in their poems. For instance, now some of the less skilled poets in our classes will struggle for just the right word or just the right phrase. It appears the kids are having fun doing what we think is really hard and creative work.

Well, simply put, because we love the arts ourselves! The arts just offer so many rich and creative paths of inquiry and learning. Not that math and science don't, it's just that we stuck with what we know and love.

Another reason we chose the arts was because the potential connections seemed natural and accessible for upper-elementary students. Through TTAAP, students begin to discover for themselves the importance of art and music, not only as form of enjoyment, but also as a part of history and daily living.

Working on the TTAAP initiative has fundamentally changed how we approach our teaching. So we think cultivating transfer has become a permanent educational objective for all of us. It has definitely changed how we teach poetry. Looking ahead, I think we will continue to use what we learned from the research and work together to refine our conceptions of making connections. We're scheduled to do an in-service for our school district next year. And we plan to publish our work too. We think it'd be great to get a chance to work with other teachers or schools that are interested in doing similar types of projects.

Find out how they got the project started.

© Rochester Memorial Elementary School. Old Rochester Regional School Department. Rochester, MA 1999.
 

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