Prelude - A game of discovery and learning.

Place Cartier Adult Education Centre

March 12, 2010

Place Cartier offers classes year-round for adult students to complete high school, prepare for CEGEP, a public post-secondary collegiate institution unique to Quebec, or vocational education. It is part of the Lester B Pearson School Board.

Website: http://placecartier.lbpsb.qc.ca/

Location: Beaconsfield, Quebec

Description: A quartet of intrepid Place Cartier teachers – Gail Gagnon, Peggy Grant, Elizabeth Iten, and Janice Newton - has developed a new approach for cross-curricular team teaching. Each shares a common subject, but each teaches it from a different perspective. The program began last fall with Planet Earth as the theme. Sub-themes included ethics, art, conservation and sustainability. Each quartet teacher worked with four groups of students, with each teacher taking one group at a time, and teaching them for one month.  Then the groups rotated to a new teacher.  Over a semester, they rotated four times. The new 2010 program theme is Leadership. This time, all four teachers will be teaching the same topic for the first module. And, they began the process with Prelude. They see it as a natural start-point given its focus on fostering individual and group social and emotional skills, Gail Klinck provided online training for all four teachers, thanks to ongoing support from Massey-Vanier High School and the Eastern Townships School Board.

Photos:

REVIEW

General Comments

• Dynamic program
• Results speak for themselves!
• Amazing process!
• Students took great pride in their work
• Students really enjoyed answering the questions and took ownership of the process
• Challenging exercise but students were gratified by the end results
• Students became joyful and engaged and took great pride in the end results; they accommodated each other; respected each other and the task was magical – their roles emerged naturally. They took ownership of their respective projects.
• Many students wrote in their journals that they were surprised by the discovery that they preferred to work with others rather than alone
• We look forward to continued collaboration

Prelude Training & Support Materials

• Look forward to having all the material in one place, since we found it difficult to navigate the three [web] sites and also found there was some overlap or missing information
• Gail Klinck’s Prelude Lesson Plan was very helpful
• The Glossary was an important addition as it provided support for our students
• Star Graph Journal did not go into enough depth. We provided supplemental journal questions to encourage further student reflection
• Coming up with symbols [was] difficult. We supplemented with a slideshow of symbols to help [students] with their designs. We did not have enough time to explore what symbols are and how to create symbols that reflect who they truly are
• Goal building aspect of Star Graph Journal required supplementation with theory – we used SMART goals
• We tailored the goals to fit with the Leadership paradigm – so that they would be observable and measurable within a given time period

Logistics

• Module 4: allTag preparation was considerable and organization intensive for a group as large as ours (120 students)

Practitioner Innovations

• Cross Curricular Teaching Using Prelude
• Census of Keynote Reports: A visual snapshot of the class results, which we displayed on interactive whiteboards for students to tally their results
• Star Graph Journal: Supplemental questions to encourage further student reflection
• Slideshow of Symbols
• Tricycle Model on Group Dynamics

Next Steps:

Further collaboration using Prelude is planned. As well the innovative adaptations developed by Gail Gagnon, Peggy Grant, Elizabeth Iten, and Janice Newton will be incorporated in their next game cycle as well as more generally in Prelude training materials. This is in keeping with Prelude’s versatility and flexibility. It’s also underscores that Practitioners have the latitude to adapt this learning tool to local needs, thus creating new knowledge and practice. This is a virtuous circle indeed in that other practitioners in other areas will now ‘riff’ on these developments as well.