Making Space for Active Learning

This powerful collection will inspire new and veteran teachers to “make space” for children’s interests, for teaching as relational and intellectual work, and for new insights and ideas. The authors introduce the Prospect Center’s Descriptive Review of Practice, a collaborative inquiry process that provides an opportunity for teachers to examine their practice and gain new perspectives from other participants. The contributors to this volume respond to each child’s modes of thinking as they develop curriculum or find “wiggle room” in curricula they are given. By demonstrating how it is possible to pursue careful knowledge of craft, this book offers ways of teaching that allow for continuing growth and change.

Book Features:

• An inquiry methodology that assists teachers to reflect on the classroom and develop curriculum that responds to children’s interests and needs.
• Specific examples of a variety of sources teachers can draw on and think about to improve practice.

A method of data collection that can inform practice while allowing for the unevenness, messiness, and essential humanness of teaching and learning

Anne C. Martin taught in public elementary schools for over 30 years in New York City, London, and Brookline, Massachusetts. Ellen Schwartz taught in the public schools of Vermont and Massachusetts for 29 years. She is a mentor to practitioner fellows working with the Prospect Archives at the University of Vermont.

“Keep this book handy. A chapter at a time will restore some needed sanity about what's important.”
—Deborah Meier, author and education activist

“As you listen to these stories I hope you will be moved to join the conversation, reflecting on your own practice and the children who intrigue you.”
—From the Foreword by Helen Featherstone

“This book will add significantly to the expanding and important literature about The Prospect Processes which were developed over many years at the Prospect School and Center in Vermont. The chapters, all by experienced educators, profit from the back-and-forth between inquiry and stories of classroom life, each informing the other.”
—Brenda S. Engel, associate professor, retired, Lesley University

"This book is a moving and powerful collection of teachers' work that holds the possibility of inspiring and changing new teachers' practice."
—Kathy Schultz, dean and professor, School of Education, Mills College

“For teachers oppressed by state-imposed regulation, for those preparing to teach and just entering the schools, the stories in this book are lifelines to the future. These are stories that safeguard and illuminate a vision of classrooms, of children, of teaching as an art—of what can be, of what is possible. Educating children to be makers of works, to be pursuers of learning for its own sake, is what this vision is about. ”
—From the Introduction by Patricia F. Carini, co-founder, Prospect School