The Rookery

The "culminating event" — we use these two words all of the time at Prairie Creek but rarely explain much about its role in our progressive setting.  According to the Herons' favorite dictionary, "to culminate" means to reach the highest point.  When we have a large, multi-faceted theme like our Colonial America theme, it is important to bring all of the pieces together.  Teaching others requires students to clarify what they've learned, deepen it, and rehearse it so that their learning becomes more lasting.

In preparation for our culminating event, students were asked to deepen their research of a particular aspect of colonial life.  Some chose to learn more about their character's work but others chose new areas to explore.  Students prioritized what they wanted people who visited them to learn and practiced bringing up these "talking points" in conversations with visitors.  Every student practiced greeting and engaging with visitors so that they could communicate information even if a visitor didn't ask questions.  Students also practiced sharing their characters' political views and had one opinion ready to share with visitors.

Students also had to create a physical space for their character to teach in and many created "extras" with which to teach.  Simultaneously, students worked on whole class projects like the play, scenery and the voting "booth."  When all of this was done, students could work on "sparkle" – extra things that went above and beyond the expectations for the event.

Culminating events re-enforce student learning but they have other benefits as well.  Students learn independence and time management.  They learn a lot about problem solving.  They learn that together, we can create far more than we could as individuals.  They learn structures such as committees and "priority lists" that they can use to lead projects in their future.  On many days leading up to a culminating event, my role as a teacher fades and I become more of a "go-fer" whose main job is to fetch things needed by the very busy students.  The students take the responsibility of hosting and teaching very seriously. 

But perhaps the greatest benefit of the culminating event is that we get to share our learning with the community.  This is crucial in a school that uses emergent curriculum.  Culminating events open new worlds for other classes.  Many personal projects are hatched at other classes' culminating events and it is not unusual to see one class's theme echoing in the work of other classes as the year progresses.  Culminating events, in all of their forms, create a rich stew of common experiences and learning.

Then, after everyone has gone and we've had a chance to catch our breath, we reflect on the experience in our Blue Book.  We collect artifacts from the theme and the event and we write about some of what we learned.  For this particular theme, we also learned about what happened next – the basic outline of the Revolution, the Articles of the Confederation and finally the Constitution.  Interestingly, when I asked the Herons what their colonial character would think was important in a Bill of Rights – they named quite a few of the rights that are enunciated there.

The Herons loved sharing their work with you.  Thank you for being a crucial part of our process.