“[Bridges] took me from being a teacher that was just strictly about teaching what had to be taught and not having any time to fit creativity into my curriculum… Through the Bridges program I learned how to fit that stuff into my teaching and how to become a more passionate, artistic teacher, which is something that I never had the confidence for before.”
Jean Antoldi on raising expectations of what her 1st graders were capable of.
“At first I was a little afraid of all the freedom the program allows, but… the students have the total ability to make choices…Not being afraid to introduce new words to the kids, words that I would think would be too hard, through descriptive language.”
Bridges allows “students to do more of the work, and the teacher stands back and acts as the facilitator but not necessarily the controller.”
A reminder of the original impetus to teach: “Over the years you can get stuck…but take it back to why you started, and it’s about THEM…”
137 teacher researchers engaged in a cycle of hands-on exploration, feedback, revision, and implementation of resources, tools and activities. These teachers were passionate teachers to make sure content for their peers and students that really worked.
“It is something the kids created. We’re not telling them what to do; we might be leading them, giving them some ideas, giving them vocabulary, giving them language, but they are planning it, and creating it, and making it something personal. So we’re not correcting them in any way, and they get to do it how they feel like they need to do it.”
“It really was a good way to bring them in…they’re visualizing, they’re thinking about what they’re hearing, what they’re seeing, if they’re going to smell anything, and then afterwards we would go and do activities and they’d be able to use what we ‘saw’ on our journey to [make] setting, or make up a story…”
“When we look at their work we’re not saying ‘this is a good job’…. We’re being very specific about what we see… not praising, not correcting anything, just letting them talk about their work, and thinking about how to describe it.”
“Don’t tell them, let them tell you. …They might have something else in their minds. You don’t wa
Many teachers chose to focus their Action research on literacy topics, and how to integrate Bridges activities and approaches in their literacy curricula. Check out their research and see how their students developed active vocabulary, explored stories to build understanding of story concepts, wrote stories, developed details and more on the
