A "Meeting of the Minds"

Teachers collaborate on project that supports learning and retention

Third-grade teacher Foun Tang and High School English teacher Nadia Mahdi bonded over their shared appreciation of “thinking routines” during a faculty meeting designed to foster collaboration across the School’s divisions. A few months later, they brought their students together to work on cultivating those routines and deepening each age group’s reading, writing, and analytical skills.

“What we saw when those students interacted gave me goosebumps,” Foun said.

Thinking routines are practices and sequenced steps that reveal a student’s thought process, primarily by using prompts and visual aids. The routines are a core element of Harvard University’s Project Zero, a decades-long research initiative that initially studied artists’ cognitive development but expanded to include dozens of projects worldwide that more broadly explore intelligence, thinking, and learning.

Project Zero’s premise is that information alone does not guarantee comprehension or long-term understanding. Rather, true learning happens through active engagement and meaningful connections that help students make sense of ideas and retain information. That’s in keeping with other educational research, including Hermann Ebbinghaus’s “forgetting curve” experiments, which found that up to 90 percent of new information is forgotten within a month if it is not reinforced.

Concept mapping resonates 

When Foun and Nadia joined forces, they drew on many of these research-based findings to design a joint lesson plan. The rollout was in October, when Nadia’s Creative Writing students visited Foun’s class. They listened to Foun read A Different Pond, a children’s book about a Vietnamese father and his young American-born son reflecting on their family’s heritage during an early morning fishing trip. 

Afterward, Foun introduced the students to “concept mapping,” a visual tool they used to organize the story’s main themes and related words or phrases. The students broke out into small mixed-age groups and started brainstorming, using markers, post-its, and conversation to structure their thoughts.

“[The High School students] were very supportive of us even though they were much older,” said Zachary Netter ʼ34. “They let us have our ideas, and they had their ideas, and we wrote everything down on a big piece of paper. … It is very good deep thinking because it makes you focus on what words mean.”

No two concept maps looked the same, though similar themes emerged. Stella Fahrenthold ʼ34 said the exercise helped her understand how some themes–such as family, hope, and memories–are linked. “Sometimes, these things are connected in more than one way,” she said. “When you write it down and connect all the lines, you remember it better than if you were just trying to think about everything in your head.” 

Foun, who has participated in Project Zero’s professional development courses for years, said making the students’ thinking process visible to themselves and others helps them retain information. “Together, they found a common learning language,” she added.

Hazel Tarloff ʼ34 said she was amazed that the groups had different takeaways from the same story. “When I listened to all the different ideas that other people had, I was thinking: ‘Oh my gosh. I like the way that they thought about this,’” Hazel said. “It taught me to think in many different ways about something. There are so many ways to explain yourself and how you think of the story and what it meant.”

Life lessons for all

For Nadia’s Creative Writing class, the work was just beginning. Nadia wanted her students to write their own short stories for a young audience using A Different Pond as a template. “I wanted them to use the thinking routines and concept mapping as a starting point to understand the responses and reactions of third graders,” Nadia said. “I was also looking for ways to create community through writing. In my experience, some of the best writing is done in collaboration with others.”

Nadia came to GDS with an acting and directing background. Earlier in her career, as an artist-in-residence and mentor at Brown University’s Arts Literacy Project, she collaborated with public school teachers to design lessons that used performance, poetry, and playwriting to explore the meaning of a text. This approach, which reinforces thinking from different angles, aligns with Project Zero’s principles and sparked her interest in working with Foun’s class.

Nadia asked her students to lean into generational connection by interviewing an older relative and creating a story based on what they learned. Sadie Boyle ʼ25 wrote about a Passover Seder celebration her mother remembered from childhood to convey her mother's relationship with her parents.

Sadie said she decided to write the story from her mother’s point of view as a child based on what she learned during her time with the third graders. “Hearing the way they responded and reacted to [A Different Pond] gave me insights into how they process a story,” she said. “They noticed things in a picture that I didn’t notice or pointed out words that didn’t stand out to me. I took that to heart when I was writing.”

By December, the students had written their stories, illustrated them, and bound them into handcrafted books. They then invited the third graders to a High School classroom (personally decorated by the writers) and read some of the stories aloud. 

Richard Evans ʼ25 wrote about his family’s homemade ice cream recipe after interviewing his maternal grandmother. He said he would have dumbed down his story if not for the quality time spent with the third graders. “From working on the concept maps, it was clear they understood a lot about family dynamics,” Richard said. “I realized how smart they are, so I included a lot more information than I would have otherwise.” 

Nadia said the project offered insights into how to better guide student learning. “It provided an analytical framework that they could share as equals, a meeting of the minds,” she said. “They came together as listeners and responders. They made connections between the text and themselves, between the text and each other, and between what they were reading and how it applied to larger issues in the world.”