Chris Ashely, Music teacher

“I remember that we all had a common interest in bringing the disciplines closer together, and we wanted to work together, so we just went ahead and started. We were into team teaching and were pretty familiar with a project-based approach to teaching. So we looked hard at our curriculum, thought about what we really wanted to accomplish as teachers, and started planning. We’d find time meet after school and during the summer. We talked a lot at first, just getting the idea of teaching for transfer clear in our heads, and figuring out how it might play out in the classroom. It was slow going, but we did it that way on purpose. We wanted to start something together, but didn’t want to bite off more than we could chew. We didn’t want to overload ourselves and turn what we saw as a fun, professional thing into a burden.”

Jim DellaCioppa, 5th Grade Language Arts

“The key to getting started was having a big idea and then taking small steps toward putting the idea into practice. I mean, we’ve been working and shaping TTAAP for a few years now. We had no money from administration. No one asked us to do this project. We were all friends and had been talking about how we might work together. TTAAP initially just gave us an opportunity to share ideas and work collaboratively. We had help though. Al Andrade, who works for Project Zero and had been working at our school on another project, helped us shape the project from the beginning. We were friends already and talked shop a lot when he was at RMS. It was helpful having someone with a research background and perspective at the table. We’d read the literature, meet, and talk about what resonated most for us and then, experiment with an idea in the classroom right away. It was a very action-oriented enterprise. "

Linda Tilden, Art teacher

“As I recall, Chris, Jim, Al from Project Zero, and I just sort of jumped in. The planning process was very informal, but we made sure we kept momentum up by having something concrete to do after each meeting. We’d decide to team teach a lesson idea we had, or we’d plan part of the project we wanted to implement. We based much of the pedagogy of our work on Dave Perkins’ book Teaching for Transfer. But we also drew from other sources, as well as from our own teaching experience. We had a pretty good sense of what we really wanted to accomplish, but we tried to be as informed as possible too. Sometimes we wouldn’t meet for six or eight weeks. But other times, we’d drop into “transfer blitz” mode when faced with certain conceptual or implementation bottlenecks. When in blitz mode, we might meet two or three times during one week to team teach a lesson or pull materials together."

Read about the project's challenges.

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

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