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Cognition, Thinking & Understanding

What do thinking and learning look like, and under what conditions do they thrive? What is understanding and how does it develop? These and similar questions about the nature of human cognition have animated Project Zero inquires for several decades, beginning with early work in the nature of creativity and intelligence, to more recent work that emphasizes a performative view of understanding, a dispositional perspective on thinking, a focus on ‘visible thinking,’ and an exploration of the cultural forces that support good thinking. Over the years, Project Zero research initiatives in these areas have yielded a variety of frameworks and practices that help educators understand, design, and document powerful learning experiences in a range of disciplines and settings.

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Choosing a Honing Question

A resource from Making Learning Visible

Choosing a Honing Question

A resource from Making Learning Visible

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Article

Playful Learning Meets Curriculum Goals

A resource from Pedagogy of Play

Playful Learning Meets Curriculum Goals

A resource from Pedagogy of Play

Aarav1 is a student in Idah and Marc’s class. He and his family live in Billund,

though they originally come from India. It is January, and they are shopping

at a local store. When they get to the cash register, Aarav watches intently

as his dad opens his wallet and begins to use his credit card to pay for their

purchase. Aarav’s dad explains how a concerned Aarav stepped in to

interrupt the process, “Dad, why are you using your credit card instead of

your debit card? You know that you may be paying a lot of interest on it!” A

discussion ensues in which Aarav and his dad talk about the pros and cons of

using a debit card versus a credit card for purchases.

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Article

Working the Paradox between Safety and Freedom

A resource from Pedagogy of Play

Working the Paradox between Safety and Freedom

A resource from Pedagogy of Play

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Article

Building a Space for 3- to 7-Year-Old Makers

A resource from Pedagogy of Play

Building a Space for 3- to 7-Year-Old Makers

A resource from Pedagogy of Play

“The Creator Space feels like a big-kids room”

It is afterschool time in the Creator Space. Four 10-year-old students are using the iPads to explore a tangram challenge on the Osmo app. An 8-year-old boy is navigating a Wonder Workshop robot around the space, sending it dodging under tables and chairs. Three girls from P4 are using beads and hot glue guns to make bracelets, and there is a steady stream of 6- and 7-year-olds building houses and rockets inside of the enclosed LEGO bench. With so many tools and materials to choose from, it is surprising that there are no children from the Kindergarten classrooms. Two 5-year-old girls from K3A walk through the space with Marina Benavente Barbon, their K3A teacher, on the way to the nurse. They look around and pause to ask older children what they are working on, but quickly lose interest and leave. Later, when asked why the Kindergarten classes don’t use the space throughout the day, Marina replies “it feels like a big-kids room.”

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Article

Examples of Playful Learning at ISB

A resource from Pedagogy of Play

Examples of Playful Learning at ISB

A resource from Pedagogy of Play

Article from Examples of Playful Learning at ISB...

An ISB Staff Meeting: The Influences on Playful Learning for Adults

A resource from Pedagogy of Play

An ISB Staff Meeting: The Influences on Playful Learning for Adults

A resource from Pedagogy of Play

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Article from Examples of Playful Learning at ISB...

"Frankly It's a Gamble": What Happens When Students Compose their Own Schedules?

A resource from Pedagogy of Play

"Frankly It's a Gamble": What Happens When Students Compose their Own Schedules?

A resource from Pedagogy of Play

This article describes what happened when a group of middle school teacherresearchers at the International School of Billund (ISB), Denmark, joined university-based researchers from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, to engage in a new qualitative methodology called “Playful Participatory Research” or PPR (Baker & Davila 2018; Baker et al. 2016). The goal of the inquiry was to explore some of the tensions that exist between play and school—in particular the paradox between the timeless nature of play and the timetabled nature of school. The experiment was an example of one of the principles of a pedagogy of play proposed by the research team, which suggests that teachers’ collective and systematic study of artifacts of student learning (or “pedagogical documentation”) helps them to navigate such paradoxes. The teachers decided to replace two weeks of the standard school schedule with a ‘student-composed schedule’, in which students were free to design their own programme. Although the experiment got off to a shaky start, as it progressed, many students capitalized on the opportunity to choose where and with whom to work; they began to see each other as intellectual resources; and they started to take more responsibility for their own learning.

Frankly It's a Gamble: What Happens When Middle School Students Compose their Own Schedule?