Productive Chaos in Fourth Grade
Author: Matt O'Donnell
Published: 02.05.16
This week I visited Vicky Hill’s fourth grade class at Oak Grove Elementary to help them finish their films for the 2nd Annual Sonoma County Five Minute Film Festival. Vicky had no experience with filmmaking on iPads in her classroom before she embarked on this venture two weeks ago, but she was willing to take a risk and see what her students could do. She felt the two weeks were a period of “productive chaos.” Students were going off in all directions to shoot scenes or to find a quiet place to do a voiceover. Some students quickly became experts in using a green screen, others in navigating the menus in iMovie. Parents stepped in to help out in different ways; one parent even built a wooden platform to hold iPads for filming stop motion animation. At the end of each day, there on the whiteboard, was a list of films in progress with a visual check-in of what the filmmakers’ next steps were.
What struck me was how organically the classroom started to resemble a modern workplace where teams of people work collaboratively on a project. The student groups took different approaches to attacking their projects to maximize the individual strengths of the group members. Their teacher did not have to say things like, “you are the cameraperson, and you are the actor,” it happened naturally and effectively.
At the end of the two week period, all of the student groups met their deadline for creating a film. They gained skills in project management, collaboration and teamwork, in addition to the multimedia skills the project required. Quite an impressive outcome from two weeks of “productive chaos” in fourth grade. This could never have happened in the old classroom management style of sit down, keep quiet, and listen to the teacher talk.
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