The Education Laboratory promotes the improvement of educational practices through methodologies, projects, and products developed based on research, implementation, and systemic evaluation. Its premise is to return to academic research the questions generated in the practical application of pedagogical knowledge, restarting the cycle in the pursuit of constant improvement of its action methodologies. We know we are on the right path when these ends meet.
The volume 12 of the Veras Academic Education Journal recently published a report on the implementation experience of the Learning to Study Texts Project (AET) in 2021. Developed by the Education Laboratory, the Project’s continuous training methodology supports 4th and 5th grade elementary school teachers in studying and planning activities that incorporate academic language as a teaching and learning tool, helping students become avid and critical readers who not only understand what they read across different curricular areas, but also learn to think, reflect, form opinions, dialogue, and establish connections between their contents. Through a structured set of training actions, AET supports teacher reflection on how to promote communicative interactions that give students keys to enter the world of knowledge through texts.
The article describes the Project’s cyclical structure, which offers teachers the opportunity to experiment with planning practical situations not only at the end, but throughout the training process. This “spiral” path, based on action-reflection-action, was tested at Prudente de Moraes State School in 2019, in a pilot study, and refined in the 2021 edition, presented in the publication text.
In the current context of AET implementation, teachers have already completed the training sessions corresponding to five model texts available on the Project platform. After studying the text and the linguistic phenomena that articulate its statements, teachers have been analyzing, discussing, and appropriating a repertoire of activities that are being developed monthly in the classroom. To streamline the sharing of promoted learnings, favoring direct exchanges among participants before and after this moment, a virtual space was created to share records (photos, videos, audios, student productions) proposed from reflective prompts developed by LABEDU’s training team.
In this year’s process, the intentional inclusion of Pedagogical Coordinators (PCs) in the Project design aims to focus on developing these professionals as trainers. The team has presented a set of references and action proposals for PCs to exercise this role of simultaneously looking at students’ learning expectations and teachers’ training needs. For the first experience, for example, a collaborative path was developed that allowed documenting, analyzing, and valuing the work carried out by teachers and the learning achieved by students.
As we could perceive in each of your reports, classroom observation is an important training strategy to monitor children’s learning and support the teacher’s work. Today we will also reflect on how it can be an ally in the coordinator’s training work. To this end, we will analyze some excerpts from two records that are representative of situations that occurred in most schools. (Caroline Rezende, AET project trainer)
From the sharing and reflection on the Coordinators’ own records, it was possible to establish connections between the challenges faced in classroom work and the trainers’ intentionality when planning the strategies used in meetings (for example, the thematization of practices that exemplify “what,” “how,” and “why” to conduct interactions around the text in one way or another).
Read below an excerpt from the article that explains a bit about AET’s action methodology:
Grounded in theoretical principles derived from psychology and cognitive linguistics, the Learning Project aims to bring teachers closer to a theoretical and procedural repertoire that serves as support for planning. Model proposals are presented – each organized around a text – where teachers are invited to analyze and study a set of reading and text study activities that are being implemented in the classroom with students. Thus, the proposed training situations, which occur in cycles, privilege pedagogical reflection around teachers’ actions and the relevance of linguistic and didactic knowledge, always in an articulated manner with practice.
To support pedagogical implementation in the classroom, the concept of chained tasks, developed by Ana Teberosky, was adopted, which organizes a sequence of activities to be proposed to children in order to favor the necessary balance between actions such as observing, noting, commenting, analyzing the language of texts, and actions aimed at production, based on the understandings achieved (2020).
The Project intends, with this set of strategies and actions, to constitute itself as a privileged space where teachers reflect on the importance of promoting an educational discourse that includes student participation, with a view to understanding the object of knowledge and the symbolic resources to represent and communicate it – starting with academic History texts, their structure, and the language characteristic of the area. Thus, throughout the training, teachers came into contact with a repertoire that allowed them to incorporate into their reading practices: (i) a perspective on structures and linguistic resources of academic texts in this specific field of knowledge; (ii) a didactic planning “architecture,” based on the conception of “chained tasks” that articulate reading, writing, and orality.
The article, authored by Caroline Rezende, José Carlos Souza, and Nicole Paulet Piedra, is available on the Veras Academic Education Journal website.
Caroline Rezende is a pedagogue from the Osvaldo Cruz Faculty of Education and a master’s student in Education at the National University of La Plata (Master’s in Writing and Literacy). Teacher trainer at the Education Laboratory since 2021. Contact: [email protected]
José Carlos Souza holds a degree in Letters from São Judas Tadeu University and a master’s degree in Genetic Criticism from the Letters program (French Language and Literature) at the University of São Paulo (USP). Professor in undergraduate and graduate courses at the Vera Cruz Institute. Teacher trainer at the Education Laboratory since 2020. Contact: [email protected].br
Nicole Paulet Piedra is a social scientist and holds a master’s degree in International Education Policy from Harvard University. Content Director at the Education Laboratory. Contact: [email protected]