Educators That Rock!: Patrick Sweeney
Patrick Sweeney with a model home and blueprints created by his fifth-grade students.
This week findingEducation sat down with Patrick Sweeney, a fifth-grade teacher at Boones Ferry Primary School in the West Linn-Wilsonville School District of Oregon. Sweeney teaches all subjects in his mixed-level, self-contained classroom. How does he keep 27 students with different ability levels engaged and excited about learning while covering the necessary curriculum?
Sweeney is a big proponent of project-based learning and teaming, both within and across grade levels. By bringing interests he’s passionate about into the classroom, and combining them with project-based learning principles, he’s come up with some pretty creative ways to get kids excited about coming to school every day.
fE: What exactly is project-based learning?
PS: Project-based learning is using open-ended projects, usually based off of research, as a model for teaching. You can also define it by what it isn’t. It isn’t where subjects are broken up into sections: Math is taught is in a math class or math block, and literacy is taught separately and technology is taught separately. Project-based learning takes all subjects and integrates them. You’re interconnecting them so that everything seems to have a sense of purpose.
fE: What are the benefits of this style of learning for kids?
PS: Children find it hard to do math when they can’t make a personal connection to it or see a real-life connection. If they see that finding perimeter and area are connected to something in the real world—for example, doing blueprints and building a model house—then there’s purpose for doing it. Literacy is the same way.
fE: How do you get started with a project-based approach?
PS: It starts by making sure that certain fundamentals are in place before you get going. What people fear about project-based learning is: Are you covering all the curriculum you’re suppose to cover? In fact, I would challenge and say not only do I cover the mandated curriculum, but I think that it can slow you down and that you can actually do more.
fE: Tell me how you’ve used this approach in the classroom.
PS: Well, I was always passionate about photography. The idea came from a documentary I saw called “Born into Brothels.” I saw this English woman in Calcutta who gave cameras to these incredibly poor children and had them capture scenes from their lives. And then she would take those photos and develop them and critique them with the children.
I saw that and it was amazing, and I said “Well if this woman can do it with film in Calcutta why couldn’t I do it in a predominantly upper-affluent school with digital cameras?”
I started by looking at the principles and elements of art and design with the kids. What is texture? What is contrast? What is symmetry and rhythm? We also studied geometric patterns through the eyes of a camera and talked about mathematic concepts. So the kids learn these key elements and then I stick the cameras in their hands and set them off with homework assignments to get an animal portrait or shoot something they think is an example of contrast or an example of symmetry. The kids created digital portfolios of their work and used Picasa for photo editing. We critiqued the photos with peers and they picked their best shots to print.
The kids were so excited by this—and I was so excited—that we wanted to take it further. What started as an experiment in class wound up being connected with a poetry lesson and a narrative writing lesson; it gave meaning to their writing. It was a mingling of art, technology, literacy and mathematics in one project. Other fifth-grade teachers saw what we were doing and wanted to get involved. Even a third-grade class joined in.
fE: This project served as a stepping stone to another project, right?
PS: This was just the start. I also grew up a carpenter, helped my father build a house, had a carpentry business before I got into teaching, so I loved working with tools and building things. That was another passion.
Then a new team of teachers found a book called “Green Dollhouse” that we passed around our team. This book was using recycled materials to put together three-dimensional dwellings. We started thinking about how we could get kids to take this idea of sustainability and environmental issues, study those issues, and how could we point them to looking for possible solutions. We started to think we could steer toward the green dollhouses: The kids could build these houses and feel as though they can come up with an answer to some of these problems that they encounter in their reading.
During the process, we were looking for a field trip to support our research. We went to Pringle Creek Community, a small housing community where some progressive people have tried to make homes as energy efficient as possible. After we saw how they are dealing with the energy issues, we told the kids they have to design a home and make it as energy efficient as possible. One of the teachers on the team put together a Web site, Green Tech Architecture, that included how-to videos that demonstrated each step of the project, along with a list of helpful sites on different energy topics.
fE: What subjects were you able to integrate in this project?
PS: All subjects: science, math, reading, technology. One of the first assignments was to measure the perimeter and area of the classroom. From there, we had them draw blueprints of their homes. We had professional architects come in and critique the blueprints and give them feedback. From the blueprints, we go three-dimensional. They make 3-D renderings of their homes in Google SketchUp, then they build the 3-D model of their homes using cardboard. They also had to write a persuasive paper on a specific energy form. They learn how to use a protractor, read a tape measure, and how to estimate area and perimeter. They become little carpenters, little architects.
fE: Why do you think these projects were successful?
PS: When you bring your personal passions and loves into the classroom it has an effect on children. They see you enjoying it and they in turn fall in love with it. It’s a beautiful thing because you wind up coming to work enjoying what you do and creating something new, and the children also thrive on that, versus just pulling out a textbook.
