Opal School Blog

We've moved!

We are thrilled to announce our new website!

Please join us at opalschool.org.

We look forward to connecting with you there!~

Join us in Playful Inquiry

While we've moved to opalschool.org for our online land of Playful Inquiry, it seems important to stop by this site from time to time to encourage you to join us.

What will you find?

• A new four-week course exploring Playful Literacy beginning March 1.
• A big batch of recent blog posts - in addition to many years of blogging archives.
• Presentations from our 2016 Summer Symposium (with last month's Visitation Days coming soon.)

Becoming a member of our online community opens all of these doors to you (and supports Opal School's ongoing work.)  

Join us!

A center of inspiration and connection

This site has been mostly dormant this year as we've been designing and building a new, more dimensional site that invites richer inspiration and connection.  After a year of efforts, we (finally!) are ready to unveil the result.

Over the last several years, this blog has published stories from Opal School that relate to the core questions teachers around the world confront as they strive to create the learning environments children have a right to - and upon which healthy democracies depend.  Readers of this blog have commented on the important role that it plays in their professional growth.  Visitors to Opal School - whether arriving through our workshops in Portland or our presentations around the world - have voiced similar responses, and have asked how we might foster conversations around these questions between them and others pursuing similar investigations and facing related challenges.  This new site is a platform to facilitate those conversations as we continue to document and share those learning stories.

Please check out opalschool.org and let us know what you think.  We hope it will excite you and that you'll become a member, opening doors to stories from all of Opal School's classrooms, social media opportunities to connect with other members, and exclusive courses - and supporting Opal School while you do.

Join us!

Public Gardens

We're so close to sharing our new website with you.  In the meantime, we'll continue to crosspost here.

As a big fan of the work of both Alison Gopnik and Peter Gray, a post written recently by the latter about a new book, The Gardener and the Carpenter, by the former, got me thinking.

In summarizing some of Gopnik's main points Gray writes:

We adults can help them best not by teaching, but by making sure that they have adequate social and physical environments and time and space in which to explore. The more that young children are integrated into the real world of other children and adults, the more they will learn about that world and discover their places in it.

Okay. Even though my idea of ‘teaching’ transcends the narrow definition of direct instruction that Gray seems to be using here, I'm with him in spirit to this point. But he continues:

Of course, if we take this approach and let children learn in their own natural ways, we are giving up the illusion that we can control what they learn and can shape them into being the particular kinds of persons that we might want them to be.  We are, instead, trusting children to shape themselves.

And I object. I see a false choice here. It's the same false choice that has sustained this argument over what young children should be doing with their time since anyone decided they cared. It's an argument that is so stuck it is status quo. Not being able to think our way around it may very well be what sustains the status quo. As we explore the complicated relationships between play and learning and environment for learning, staying stuck in this either/or thinking has dangerous implications for the health of our communities. I don't think that we have two choices: control or trust. More importantly, perhaps, I think that by perpetuating the idea that we have to choose, we also contribute to the system that perpetuates white privilege and white supremacy. Let me try and explain.

No person shapes herself in an isolated vacuum. At Opal School, we view learning as a reciprocal process that happens in relationship to others, to materials, to ideas, to environments. “Trusting” a child to shape herself is runs counter to this principle. If our goal is to improve and invigorate our democracy and to sustain our planet, social and physical environments for learning must include adults who are aware of the kinds of habits, dispositions and values that support sustainability and democracy and who are able to create experiences that strengthen the skills and strategies of agency and empathy. I have long advocated that there is no path to strong agency and empathy without opportunities to learn in environments full of choice -- including ample time to play. But lots of choices and time to play will never be enough on their own. It's more complicated than that. And environments for learning can offer more opportunity than that.

Most of all, children need adults to support them with skilled observations and the ability to facilitate reflection on the consequences of their choices. Children who are growing up in a democracy as our planet is warming need to be supported by skillful adults who recognize what resources, academic skills, arts, literature and technologies will support the particular children with whom they work every day to develop strong and healthy abilities as change-makers, innovators, and productive citizens.

White children won't develop courage and willingness to dismantle their privilege if they never learn to identify it in the first place, or they aren't expected, regularly, to practice the tools and skills associated with empathy. No child will learn how to exercise their right and ability to contribute to their community unless they exercise those rights and grow those abilities in the learning environments they inhabit. Children need adults to guide and to facilitate these experiences and to design these environments.

Gopnik's metaphors of the carpenter and the gardner refer to the attitudes of parents who want to build specific kinds of children as opposed to nurturing the children to grow into who they are and want to be. Gray argues: Every public school, by law, is in the carpenter mode; none of them are gardens. But there are such places as public gardens. Opal School is one, and we know many others. In telling parents to stop parenting, Gray accuses Gopnik of dealing in paradox. But paradox is precisely what we need to learn how to deal with. Recently, our colleague Mara Krechevsky shared this with us:

How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.  -Niels Bohr

We need to seek third doors - though which we support the development of a citizenry that can navigate paradox, conflict and uncertainty, and that prizes the agency and empathy necessary for democracy over individualism and autonomy. All "models" of schooling are carpentry instructions whether the manuals are titled Free or Direct Instruction or Waldorf. What if we prioritized how we want to live together -- all of us -- and built schools that helped us do that? How can school communities be gardens that are tended carefully? Designed so all children learn how to live in such a way that they can care for their own private and wild life without trampling on anyone else's -- where they learn to be who they want to be but also to contribute what is needed of them? Where they learn that the health of their own soil is dependent on the health of everyone else's?

What will we pay attention to?

Some of you may have noticed that this blog has been quiet for a while.  Behind the scenes, we've been working hard to deliver a new website - one that will house this blog, of course, but also offer our community a whole new way to access resources and interact with each other.  It's an ambitious effort and getting it rolling has had all the twists and bumps you can imagine.  It's nearly ready for you - but not quite yet, so for the time being we'll crosspost here.  Enjoy this peak into how we at Opal School are thinking about this coming year - and we'll look forward to introducing you to our new website soon!

Don’t for heaven’s sake, be afraid of talking nonsense! But you must pay attention to your nonsense.

-Ludwig Wittgenstein

As Opal School staff reconvened last week to launch the new school year, we were inspired by and found connections in two essays.  In Zadie Smith’s Speaking in Tongues, we saw our drive to support children to enter a landscape where “between… two voices there exists no contradiction and no equivocation but rather a proper and decent human harmony” – and the fundamental role of the “republic of the imagination” in accessing that territory.  In The Mistrust of Science, Atul Gawande writes that “even more than what you think, how you think matters. His encouragement of California Institute of Technology graduates to engage in inquiry with “an experimental mind, not a litigious one” with a group of people “pursing ideas with curiosity, inquisitiveness, openness, and discipline… battling for what it means to be citizens” resonates with our efforts working with young children at Opal School.

As a school, voyaging toward Smith’s “Dream City” is more complicated than the certainties provided by scripted curricula aiming for narrowly conceived outcomes. Rather, we’re interested in how co-creating curriculum with children can lead to unimagined possibilities.  How do we, as a community with a range of backgrounds – including many staff, children, and families new to the school – embark on the journey?  What will we pay attention to?  How will we work together to make sense of what happens along the way?

Knowing our intentions is key.

At Opal School, we’ve articulated our mission, guiding principles, and goals.  They are our North Star.  Each year, we consider those, along with our curricular sequence of big questions, current resources and concerns, and what we know about this group of children, to chart initial intentions for the year.  This year, the Beginning School, Primary, and Intermediate Teams composed letters of intent to make their questions visible to each other, families, and the Opal School Online member community.

The Beginning School’s letter focused on the concept of “transformation.”  They reflected on their eagerness to nurture relationships with children by making their thinking visible; expanding their understanding of children’s capacities for connection, understanding, empathy, and social justice; and possibilities related to self and others, the arts and sciences, and the natural world.

The Primary Team’s letter centered on the Opal School goal that students will “develop strategies that contribute to the quality of the community by having a keen sense of place, identity, and belonging while respecting the rights and identities of others.”  They wondered, What is the relationship between self-knowledge and taking action as mindful citizens of the world?

The Intermediate Team’s letter invoked contemporary issues as a resource to draw on.  It includes this passage:

As children witness the erosion of respectful public discourse, it is confusing to be a student at Opal School, where we value rich dialogue, healthy debate, listening, collaboration, empathy and perspective taking. We work hard to check our assumptions and to break down stereotypes. As the world of Opal and the world outside diverge, we hear a cynicism in the children’s observations and comments that concerns us. It is a priority this year to help the children recognize that only by practicing healthy and productive public discourse like we do at school can we create memories of possibilities that they can be responsible for bringing with them into the world. We want to nurture in the children a growing sense of responsibility for their own actions; to see themselves and their actions as directly connected and thus influencing the school community, and the wider world.

I wonder:

How might composing and publishing these letters of intent influence these teams of teachers?

How might these letters influence the children's experiences?

How might they support families?  

How might they inspire educators in other settings?  What connections or implications are you seeing to your work?

 

Finding the courage to think about utopia

I'm just beginning to put my thoughts together after the whirlwind of Opal School Summer Symposium.  It was a provocative, transformative three days together: 250 people coming together to pursue third doors that offer greater possibilities for all of our schools.  Tweets from participants, posted below, give you just a taste of what it felt like.

If you'd like to join us next year, register for our 2017 workshops, contact us to arrange a program for your team, and keep an eye out for news about our online network (coming soon!).

 

The antidote to complacency

With the 2015-2016 school year completed, our attention has turned to Summer Symposium.  Next week, 250 educators from around the world will gather at Opal School to consider together what it might mean to construct a pedagogy of play.  We'll analyze documentation of children engaged in learning, reflect, and form relationships connecting ideas, experiences, and materials with an eye toward transformation guided by a set of questions:

How might we construct a pedagogy of play?  What habits of mind, tools, and dispositions are required to do so?

How might a pedagogy of play support children?  What are the costs of not embracing a pedagogy of play?  

How might a pedagogy of play be expressed in different contexts?

What systemic elements sustain a pedagogy of play?

Last month, I listened in on a small group of fourth and fifth graders considering a related question.  Here are a few of their words from their conversation, which I offer because I think they shed light on those questions:

NW: It’s like being a glow stick but you need to absorb the light so that even when it’s dark you can shine anyways… Play is like that light – the good light that you’re absorbing and taking in so you can shine even when it’s dark.  So on a good day and you’re really happy and you play you absorb that light, so on a bad day you can use that light and let you shine even when everyone else is down.

NW: Everybody thinks of play as an action, but if you think about it it’s really not an action – it’s more like a feeling.

ABM: Everything can be play – you just have to have the right mindset.  If you have a fixed mindset, it will change how you act and it will change your culture and then you won’t see things as play and you won’t be able to observe that light – like the glow stick – but when you’re having an open mindset and you’re thinking of everything as play and you’re having the feeling inside that comes with an open mindset, then you can be able to absorb the light and be like a glow stick and then you can influence your culture and act in a good way.

CW: Play is... everything that complacency is not. Complacency is you’re just stuck in one place you just don’t want to move at all and then when you play it’s the antidote.

CM: We can’t just say that the antidote for complacency is love or something because that’s not it - we have to dig deeper than love.  What generates love?  What puts love into action?  Play.

BV: Play helps our light shine by writing the story of our life.

ABM: Play... makes us curious and it makes us want to understand other people.

SM: Play helps our light shine by seeking an action.

In these children's voices, I hear the call for a pedagogy of play. These children identify the value of playful inquiry to their lives and its role in transforming a society toward greater democracy and justice.  I'm so excited to continue their conversation with all of the Symposium participants next week.

Whether or not you're joining us next week, I hope you'll consider connecting with us next year.  Registration is now open for our 2017 professional development retreats, Opal School Visitation Days (with honored guest Erika Christakis), Reading the World (during which we're excited to host Ellin Oliver Keene), and the 2017 Summer Symposium (with the theme of Play, the Arts, and Education for Democracy.)  We also still have a openings for customized partnerships with individual organizations; contact us soon if you'd like to explore those options.  Lastly, I want to make sure you know that Opal School and Portland Children's Museum are hiring: If you see something listed here that leaves you curious, I hope you will reach out to start a conversation today.

Let's play!

 

All under one roof

To readers of the Opal School Blog, it might be easy to forget that Opal School is a project of the Portland Children's Museum.

To Portland Children's Museum visitors, it's not always visible that Opal School lives within it.

It's an unusual organization, doing so much under one roof - exhibits, programs, an elementary charter school, an early childhood program, a professional development center, summer camps (I'm just scratching the surface here) - and working to have all of those efforts guided by a consistent learning approach.  Sometimes, it's tempting to pretend like they all live isolated from each other.

But that's selling the promise of this adventure short.

Last week, Portland Children's Museum had it's annual fundraiser gala. The event featured this video - a strong effort on the part of the museum to tell this story.  It features Opal School Workshop participants as well as an Opal School alum.  Enjoy!

 

If the video - and our work - inspires you to contribute to keep our work afloat, we'd be honored by your donation.

The video was produced by Portland Center for the Media Arts.

 

Transformational Leadership

Last week, a post from Erin Dunn Baker showed how one teacher's experience at Opal School influenced inquiry with the third graders she works with.  Here, Susie Morice describes how her study of Opal School is shaping her thinking.  Susie's post first appeared on the blog of the Santa Fe Center for Transformational School Leadership.

Transformational Schools by Susie Morice

 

CITY GARDEN MONTESSORI, THE HIGHEST PERFORMING CHARTER SCHOOL IN ST. LOUIS, COMMITS TO MONTESSORI PRINCIPLES THROUGHOUT ITS ELEMENTARY AND MIDDLE SCHOOL PROGRAM.

Transformational leaders eschew the “fix it” focus of reform. Transformational leaders are NOT “turn-around teams.” Instead, transformational leaders seek to dig deep into the culture of a school or district and bring about positive change through systemic shifts that allow students to engage more fully in learning. Historically, American educators have relied on an industrial model: cranking out a skilled work force. Sadly, too many schools simply want rewards for students with top grades and high test scores. And we’ve crafted curricula around attaining that. Students get labeled college-bound, gifted, advanced, and remedial, often based on numbers alone. Numbers tell a narrow tale of who a student is or what that student might become. State education teams continue to look for a silver bullet but use ancient testing drills to raise student scores on standardized tests. These same bureaucrats seem utterly uninterested in a broader and deeper view, perhaps a portfolio view, of a student’s learning life. Nor do they note what a student gives to the surrounding world, as opposed to what he or she takes or scores. This is nowhere in the narrative of school reform.

 

Schools today should keep pace with the post-industrial world we live in. This world requires creativity, open inquiry, and engagement in meaningful discourse, with people capable of seeing multiple solutions to real problems, and of anticipating the future. Meaningful change in schools happens when leaders, teachers (sometimes one in the same), and communities come together with a vision of how things could be.

Transformational schools…

• abide by shared beliefs about learning,
• nurture collective aspirations to learn and think out loud,
• embed structures for collaboration, and
• carefully sustain a deep learning culture for all the stakeholders.

Three Emerging Patterns + Highly Skilled Teachers = Transformed Culture

In my work with transformational schools, I’ve witnessed three patterns unfold. One pattern is the attention to real world problem-solving, especially in the arena of social justice. A second pattern is the intentionally creative and inquiry-driven learning environment, as opposed to rote drills and worksheets and curricula that merely address standardized testing or tip their hats at the classical canon. The third pattern is a school-wide commitment to learning. School isn’t just about students learning: it is also about adults seeing themselves as learners who change the way they look at students and learning. In a transformational school everyone is a learner through active inquiry in every corner of the culture.

Each of these patterns emerges with the nurturing guidance of highly skilled, innovative educators who are aware they are shaping a learning culture. Their passion is palpable. Transforming is a messy process. No one school embraces three patterns and attains Nirvana. Transformation is an active process with a mission to address real problems with multiple possible solutions. Transforming schools run on the fuel of a collective aspiration to examine, study, and rethink, making shifts in practice based on new learning.

In one school in the City of St. Louis, City Garden Montessori, students and teachers alike embrace the mission of the school that aims to address the racism and bias in the culture of their community. In a city rife with racial discord, the students and leaders of this school are eroding racial barriers by nurturing the interdependence among school and community. The leadership team works with both the school and the community to ensure racial equity and anti-bias commitments: the active core of their charter and mission. For example, students sit on committees–counterparts to adult committees–and add their perspectives to the discourse on gender and racial equity. Promoting active social learning means students and teachers address real issues in the neighborhood, from cultivating a community garden to understanding the properties of water and how easily a community can foul its clean water resources. It is not unusual in this Pre-K through 8th grade school to find ten-year-olds working with seven-year-olds to sort out a problem. The school has removed some of the traditional boundaries that insist students at a particular grade level be chained to a constricting set of skills. Instead, students are urged to explore beyond the state testing topics in pursuit of plausible solutions to real problems in the community around them. The adults trust that a student who engages in meaningful discourse about real problems will, in turn, be able to apply those insights in broader arenas. And their scores on high-stakes tests bear this out: CGM children performed better in 2015 than 70.6% of the elementary children in the state, and the school itself has an excellent rating on the state accreditation system, despite a 43% rate of poverty.

Another transforming school, Opal School in Portland, Oregon, now fifteen years in existence, uses real-world problems and opens a world of inquiry and creativity. In this school of Pre-K through 5th graders, young learners engage in sophisticated discourse, for example, about various ways to explore mathematics that can yield a variety of pathways to a solution. “Playful inquiry” is a phrase used everywhere in the school as students develop stories and write narratives in a workshop atmosphere that nurtures creativity and clarity. “Can you add an example of what you mean when you say…?” a teacher asks a kindergartner crafting a story while the little one uses construction paper shapes that represent characters in her tale.

Teachers in these two schools are highly skilled in posing questions that push students to explain and describe their thinking and reasoning. Rather than questions at the basic low level on Bloom’s Taxonomy, both students and teachers are exploring why and how, as they synthesize, analyze, and create new ideas.   Similar in these two schools, is the buzz of student discourse focused on engrossing explorations of topics that are typically generated by the students themselves. “How is this like…?” “I wonder what would happen if…?” “If this were the case, then the next might be…” Students are urged to seek patterns and explain them, creating a bona fide love of figuring things out.

In both schools, the focus on tapping into the real world around the school is central. At Opal School, which is integrated into the Portland Children’s Museum, the museum staff and the Center for Learning staff are blended. These adults nurture a culture of inquiry that allows students to pursue their questions about the world. “Why does this gizmo work this way?” “What might cause three people looking at the same artifact to come up with three totally different descriptions?” Discourse is rich. Students create projects that fit in the museum structure and can be tested in the Portland area. Real world is central to everything the students do. They use what they create.

As a particular example, Hannah Chandler, a teacher working with 3rd grade students, taps into students’ interest in designing a new playground for the school. Rooting their inquiry in understanding the work of design and how designers do their work, the students visit several bike designers around Portland, a major biking city, interviewing them about their work and process. Chandler shares that it “helped students better understand the process of finding inspiration in the world around them, growing and revising a small idea into something wonderful, and thinking and researching to figure out how to make something just right.” She then asks students where they could get inspiration for designing the playground and pushes students to look beyond merely other playgrounds. Subsequently, “we visited open areas, swampy areas, and enclosed wooded areas,” each time analyzing the space for inspirational qualities. Through writing about these observations, the students begin to understand that researching something as seemingly simple as play can yield deeper understandings of design and what inspires different types of experiences. This use of community in real-world research to create something purposeful speaks clearly to what Opal seeks to nurture in children.

At City Garden Montessori, the workshop approaches that teachers use encourage writing that addresses real audiences, discourse and problem solving about real world dilemmas, and even the management of a school store. Acknowledging the importance of talking through the racial implications of the recent Ferguson police action in the suburb of Ferguson, for example, is part of the school’s mission to break down barriers. Social justice is central to much of the content students explore.

The third significant pattern in transformational schools is that teachers exercise a shared aspiration to learn, moving away from “sage on the stage” to being students themselves. Teachers and all the adults at Opal School are learners doing action research about how their students are learning what they are learning. It’s a metacognitive bonanza. The teachers examine student responses, take copious notes on student learning behaviors, and consistently adjust their questioning and teaching strategies to better address each student’s learning capacity. Every adult in the building is trying to determine how students are absorbing and displaying their understandings. For example, a kindergarten teacher working with narrative development in a small group scooted over to me and whispered enthusiastically, “Did you see that? Did you see that? That was Jessie’s first time to ask a peer for an added character perspective! She is recognizing that her story can expand in new directions. This is new for her!” Quickly, the teacher jotted notes in her journal, as the two students continued discussing characters. Everyone is observing and documenting kids. Everyone is open to discovery and rethinking.

The leadership in that school provides structures that bring these adults together routinely with educators from the region and often from well outside the region to explore what they are learning about learning. The school is set up for fluid movement of staff in and out of classrooms, no small feat for the leadership of the school. And the students operate in this flow like an easy pour of cream that sweetens the learning landscape.

As I’ve shifted from focusing on schools that give lip service to change, but which hang on dearly to that industrial model, to schools that are transforming the culture, I’ve changed, too. Instead of looking at the mess of what is failing or struggling, I’m exploring what is working. More than just looking for high scoring schools–although sometimes that is a key signal–my inquiry takes me into schools that are transforming the educational landscape. After so many years of professional development work in struggling schools, I am excited to observe, question, interview, observe some more, question some more, and finally analyze and synthesize all the data so that I can make sense of why some schools really are transforming the scene. Had I merely waltzed into these schools, measuring them against the status quo, I might have seen a lot of interesting behaviors going on, but I would not have seen patterns emerge. In the same way that it takes time to create a sustainable culture, it also takes time and a careful analysis to recognize that something complex and systemic has happened in these schools. The very culture of these schools sets them apart. A transformational school nurtures a culture that runs deep and takes time to percolate into a brew that consistently yields students and adults who learn passionately and purposefully in a world that needs just that.

Susie's piece leads me to wonder: How has your time at Opal School influenced your thinking about school leadership and change?

Making pickles

Opal School exists not only to influence its immediate community: It lives to provoke change far and wide. We know that our workshops catalyze change - but only rarely do we get a window into the ripples.  Below, you'll read how Erin Baker brought some of the juice from the Reading the World workshop back to her school to open new possibilities for her class.  This post first appeared on her blog.

How do you make pickles?

by Erin Baker

Earlier this week, I mentioned that I would share with all of you more about the conference I attended entitled, Reading the World. Peter Johnston, the keynote speaker who wrote the book, Opening Minds: Using Language to Change Lives, had said the following quote... 

Sometimes a single word changes everything… Because of our embodied histories, much of the time our own responses to children are automatic. We open our mouths and our parents or previous teachers come out. Changing our talk requires gaining a sense of what we are doing, our options, their consequences, and why we make the choices we make… the language we choose in our teaching changes the worlds children inhabit now and those they will build in the future.  

This quote led me to reflect more on my own teaching, (as well as parenting) and I returned to school with a greater intention of how to choose my words carefully with the children. I want to support them to work with one another, and particularly with how to help them understand and digest these larger complicated concepts about thinking like a historian and considering multiple perspectives.

While visiting a 4th and 5th grade classroom at the Opal School, where the conference was being held, and where I taught for 11 years before coming to OES, I stumbled on a quote on the wall from one of my former 1st grade students, now a 5th grader. 

He said, "Making pickles is like making a culture. It's like the brine that you soak the pickles in determines the flavor of the pickles, it's just like that with people. Whatever you grow up in shapes how you believe."   -Devin age 10

I asked Devin if I could borrow his metaphor of the pickle making to share with my 3rd Graders. He said yes.
-I wondered if this metaphor might help them understand more about the different cultures of Pioneer, Fur Trapper, Native American, and African American Pioneers.
- I wondered if using this powerful image of pickling would help me, to help the children to open up to new possibilities, encourage creativity, and then build connections between one another and the learning we are engaged in. 

I want to remind you as you read the children's conversation to remember that not everyone is a verbal processor and that some of the children share their thinking around this issue through their writings, drawings, and in the acting and script writing we have been doing in class. I share this conversation to share with you how the children build off of one another's ideas, to illustrate how this metaphor allowed them to make amazing connections that not all of them had made before. I want you to notice how the power of a joyful, compelling metaphor was able to open up thinking, and how it represents the "brine" we are creating in our community. This way of talking and listening is a part of our classroom culture. We have conversations like this on a regular basis and everyone is honored in our "brine" to think and process these ideas in their own way. I'll be curious to see what you all notice too!

We started the conversation by talking about our own jar, our own brine. Here is what the children said it was filled with...

Wonder, friendship, loving, working together, difference, history, questions, emotion, character, stories, fun, friends, imagination, helpfulness, hope, playful, ideas....

Jia said: "What's in the jar represents what we've learned, our friendship, how we came into a community.

Then I asked them: How do  you make pickles?   What is a brine?  How might making pickles be like creating a community?   

How is making pickles and the brine, like making a community?

Leoni: Instead of pickles I am thinking more of people. At the beginning of the year people were shy and not really willing to make friends. As you stay in this classroom and eventually you get happiness, kindness, friendship, kindheartedness, wonderful and you turn into this person who is kind of different than the beginning.

Will: I think it is like a life cycle, you start the beginning of the year as a cucumber. It takes a while to get into the groove and know where everything is and make new friends and that’s when you go into the jar, no spices no sweetness. By the the middle of the year you’ve gotten into the groove, you’re good and that’s when you get cooked. Then it’s toward the end of the year and you’ve had spicy and sweetness and you turn into a new person. By the end of the year you turn into a pickle, you are a completely different person and you know new things and have new friends and know new experiences.

Ben: Just like in my drawing, just like Will said, at the beginning of the year you start out as a cucumber, you don’t know that much, you have friends and people you know and you want to stay with them and so I called them Cucumbers from the Island of Garden and then there are other people who have already been at this school and already know where everything is and know everyone here and so they are already pickles from the Island of Learning and I drew a machine and so when the cucumbers go through it it is kind of like the year and at the end of the year of being in the brine you come out at pickles, and those kids that were new are a new kind of pickle.

Cat: What happened to the other people that were already there?

Ben: The cucumbers are like the new people.

Uma: So what do you guys think would happen if every year they became a pickle because every year you go to school, so when would you become a different kind of pickle?

Ms. B: Wait, there are different kinds of pickles? Would every pickle in the jar taste the same?

All: (A resounding- NO!)

Will: Every other single person is different and has different knowings and different experiences.

Ms. B: What are the things that are going in the jar that make different kinds of pickles? I heard experiences, feelings… differences, wonder..

Peter: More than one kind of cucumber can come from the same plant, like your brothers and sisters.

Lily: It’s like your family puts stuff in the jar too!

Ben: Soren and Uma just gave me an idea, the Jar of Learning, it’s the brine and you need that to work the machine because you can’t make a pickle with no brine, each different jar has a different personality and you learn something new every year and so every year there is a new jar of learning for you so  you keep getting new personalities as you learn things.

Uma: Wouldn’t it be your entire time you are in school you are in the brine and then when you graduate is when you actually become a pickle, you have to be there for a long time to actually become one.  

Ms. B: When  you make pickles how long does it take for them to be ready to eat?

Uma/ Ada:  A long time! Like 2 months.

Ada: I thought about the spices and sugar and salt all those things are the personalities of all these different people and they get mixed into you and when you come out you are completely changed.

Victoria: I thought of it as like a family, like every single person in it has a different job. Every different cucumber has different ingredients added to it in the community. Without every single one of those people or jobs in the community, it wouldn’t be what it is.

Catherine: Our class is full of wonderful things, and it is also full of things we need to work on. I don’t think any class if full of pure perfect. Every class has it’s things it needs to work, every class has its problems.

Will: Every class has its’ own jar.

Catherine: Yeah, and we can fix those problems but you know all these things in the jar are good things that we need to learn.  I think we need to add some of those things to our jar.

Flynn: It reminds me of that video we watched about empathy with the fox and the bear. I felt like the brine was the empathy you are giving to someone else, the friends you are giving to them and the feelings you are giving to them and then they become a part of your community and they are getting help from the brine.  What’s the stuff in between the pickles? I thought of that there might be a few problems in there, might not always be happy stuff, you might meet someone really spicy and you are really suite and then you might have a fight.

Lily: Every class has it flaws and there is no where to hide things, they will all come out.

Catherine: That’s ok.

Lily: It’s definitely okay.

Catherine: As long as you try..

Ms. B: So as you are listening to this conversation, what is this pickling thing all about, what are we talking about?

Soren: If I have someone else in my class or my grade that was my sister or brother, well the teachers are a part of the brine too and they can change how you look at things and so depending on your teacher, it’s not just your classmates who put stuff in the jar, your teacher does too.

Ms. B: Do I put a lot of stuff in that jar?

All: Yes!!!

Ben: I think there are always 2-3 pickles that don’t exactly… they were originally meant to be bossy or something like that, so there are 2-3 pickles that always think there own thing no matter what.

Will: Maybe they had different amounts of sweetness or salty.

Ms. B: So what I am wondering now is if we think about what goes into our community jar, what goes into some of these other jars….

Lots of voices: Wow! Oh cool!

Ms. B: What goes into the brine for these different groups of people?

Victoria: For every single one, difference! They think different ways they have different things that are important to them.  They all have the desire to survive and get more beaver.

Theo: I know something else, they all have different cultures.

Flynn: They all have different DNA or RNA.

James: What is RNA?

Will: They all come from different backgrounds, they have different schemas.

Many voices: They all have different brines!

James: The Hudson’s Bay Company told them what to do if they were fur trappers.

Soren: The brine that goes into the Chinook and the Kalapuyaa, they never thought that you could buy the land and keep it. They thought that if you got there that other people would come too but you just had to share it.  The brine of the Pioneers was that if I buy the land then I get to keep it and it is my land.

Victoria: They didn’t buy it they claimed it.

Lily: They just took it.

Aaren: All of them needed courage in their jar.

Ms. B: What went into their jar that gave them courage?

Will: There are different spices that give courage?

Catherine: If they have a problem they use courage to fix it.

Leoni: People who face their fears.

Soren: They have nothing to lose.

Peter: It depends on what plant they came from.

Charlotte: They could be people who try something new.

Victoria: Are you sure that all of these groups are different and come from different jars?

Ms. B: Hmm… interesting idea.

Victoria: Because we all know that Pomp came from two different plants, not just one kind of plant.  

Ms. B: That’s right, that’s what we have been writing about in our play about what happens when all of these cultures spill into each other.

Lily: Pomp, even if he chose to be a fur trapper, he would still have a part of him that is Native American.

Jonathan: Your genes go into the jar.

Flynn: Yes, your genetics definitely go into the jar. DNA, RNA!

Ms. B: Yes and, what does that tell people in the jar to do then, what to believe, how to behave…

Leoni: Creation stories, you would have grown up hearing them.

Flynn: Culture

Will: That we have a different creation story than you.

Victoria: They all believed differently.

Ada: The Chinook believed they came from Thunderbird.

Leoni: The Kalapuuya had different creation story that they came from coyote or from the wolf.

Peter: They would have had knowledge.

Quinny: They all have different sayings. Languages.

Ada: Everyone spoke Chinook wa wa, but they didn’t all have the same first language.

Ms. B: So would your language have helped determine what kind of pickle you would be?

What do you see here? What do you wonder about?  How are you finding that your time at Opal School is influencing your work with children?