Myth of Laziness -- project checklist

Levine says in The Myth of Laziness that long term projects allow a child to get used to organization and accountability. He suggests that parents set up time and materials at home to facilitate organization and accountability. For example:

1. Set up a work space -- eg, have paper, pencils, computer, index cards, good light -- in a location free of distraction. He mentions that children work well in different environments. For example, I always worked bettter with some type of noise level or activity around me. I used to go to a coffee shop (one where I wouldn't meet anyone I knew) in order to do my best studying and writing. Other people need quiet and a lack of activity in order to do good work -- one of my sons shuts himself up in his bedroom. It is worthwhile to experiment with different environments.

2. Set up a work time. Levine mentions that the families with the most effective results have often made studying and academic work an integral part of their life. Often they have agreed on set hours to study and read and write. They often have the whole family doing their quiet work at the same time in the day so that the whole environment recognizes the importance of productive study.

I think that homeschool families tend to do this somewhat naturally, and that this is probably one of the reasons that homeschooling is often so successful. But I see that now that it's written out, I could probably do this more consciously so that our time and material "systems" made it easier for my kids to find a system that worked for them.

Here is his list of the writing steps, which also seem to be a good list for any project -- I am using the checklist to plan out my kids' courses for next year, for example:

1. Strategic planning -- overview -- what are the goals of this project -- what do I have to accomplish in order to be done? Gather the materials and provide yourself with a work space.
2. Plan and timeline -- this is where you break the overview into steps with intermediary deadlines -- index card notes completed by X time, outline made by Y time. If you are an intuitive non-sequential thinker like myself and some of my children, you may want to do it somewhat differently -- for example, visualize the different stages of the project in completion. But the timeline helps avoid the last minute crunch.
3. Brainstorming. You generate ideas here -- mind maps may be useful. The idea is to get your thoughts flowing and put your intuitive processes to work. It doesn't matter whether the ideas are actually useful or connected, at this point.
4. Research -- gather information and compile it.
5. Initial Arrangement -- here you figure out some sort of provisional order. It is not fixed yet.
6. Rough draft.-- you put something together, but you let yourself have freedom to go, since it is not yet a final draft.
7. Revision -- make corrections, rearrange, elaborate or cut.
8. Final product.-- "publishing" in some form
9. (I added this part myself because Ignatian pedagogy recommends it -- it is beneficial to have some sort of demonstration of the product. For example, making an oral presentation of the written material, or devising some sort of visual that you are prepared to explain. )
10. Assessment -- reflection on the final product. How would you score yourself? How could it be improved? This helps you to refine your level of work over a period of time. Levine recommends that the students give themselves a grade and evaluation. Kids like mine will usually grade themselves down, whereas other kids might inflate their grade, but over time hopefully they will learn how to more accurately self-assess.

A sort of organizing process should be going on throughout all this.

1. Finding and managing the best materials for the job. This might change somewhat during different stage of the process.
   
2. Managing time -- making daily room for work on the project and having a rough longterm plan which can be modified along the way.
3. Organizing thoughts -- (using the seven types of paragraphs might be helpful)
4. Quality control -- Levine says that successful students usually have a continual self-monitoring going on ("how am I doing? how could I modify things in order to improve?"). There have been lots of studies showing that successful readers, for example, are always checking their understanding and engaging in an active dialogue with the books they read. Examples here. Similarly, successful math thinkers have been shown to have a mental interaction between reality and the symbolic concepts on the paper. I was just recently watching my friend's MUS DVD where Steve Demme says that a group of kids asked to solve a simple math problem were stumped because they weren't told what operation was to be used -- in other words, they had learned the rote operations but not how to apply them. There is also a lot of discussion about this in John Holt's excellent book How Children Fail.
   

An elementary Writing Center set-up here.