Celebrating Failure in Rm 613

Last year, I launched my World History class with the project called We, the People of Mars...  where students investigated various forms of government so they could form their own ideal government to be used on Mars. As I mentioned in a post last year, it was one of my more cringe-worthy projects for a variety of reasons and I decided to completely revamp it for this new school year. But no matter the adjustments I made, I couldn't fall in love with the project and I felt stuck on what to do for a project that discusses democracy. As one of the beginning of the year activity, I had students do a gallery walk with sticky notes where they answered questions on posters. One of the questions was "What do you want to learn in History?" No students put "FOUNDATIONS OF DEMOCRACY!" and I realized that I only taught that concept because I always have, not because the students were excited about it. The most successful PBL is one where students are engaged in relevant...

During the first class I took to become a teacher, the professor took half of the class out and informed us that after four years of teaching half us of will have left teaching all together. Now I'm well into my fourth year and I'm still standing. In fact, I feel that this year is going to be... For starters, I have officially started my Master's in Educational Technology. I'm only a few weeks in and, while I'm overwhelmed and stressed, I'm glad that I'm finally taking the next steps in my education. It also helps that one of my amazing friends is doing it with me! I'm also blessed to be going into my second year at Minarets High School, which continues to be my dream school. As many people said, the first year was me trying to drink out of a fire hose, but now I feel confident and ready to be 100% PBL in a 21st century school. Over the summer, I participated in the EdtechTeam's Teacher Leader Certification and becoming inspired to set new g...

The Cold War: a complex event that lasted over forty years with a wide variety of players and foreign policies. An event that has lasting-effects that we still witness and experience. So as a teacher with the school year coming to an end, I was torn on how to cover such a complicated event with one project. The year before I would have just lectured about the Cold War, which was easy for me and painful for the kids. Besides, nowadays "if we have an Internet connection, we have fingertip, on-demand access to an amazing library that holds close to the sum of human knowledge," as said by Will Richardson in Why School?  So obviously that wasn't a viable option. But how could I expose students to the variety of events in the Cold War without just telling them all about. Of course, I started doing research on ways other #pbl teachers have used the Cold War, but either I wasn't inspired by the project or I had already done something similar with another project. I sea...

After using project-based learning for a full school year, I have found that getting students to critique and revise their projects is a struggle. We all know that it is an essential part of any process that involves a final product, but some of my students do not seem to see the benefit of revising their work before submitting it, which means that I end up with projects that seem more like a rough draft than a final draft. Of course this is not just a weird quirk about Minarets; I experience it at my old school site and my fellow teachers at a variety of levels and schools also experience this frustration. At the start of the year, I knew that I needed to make revision part of the PBL process in my classroom. I decided to do this in two ways: Scaffold Process : Rather than assigning a giant project that was due in two weeks and saying ' Well, good luck! ',  I have students complete their projects in steps. For example, they  turn in a topic proposal then a research...

Warfare is always a favorite topic for my students. Maybe its the excitement from the action or the emotional response that is brought on by the death involved, but student engagement always improves dramatically as soon as we start discussing a war, especially WWI. This year I had the opportunity to push student engagement even more by mixing the War to End All Wars and project-based learning. When I was in college,  I always wanted to take the History of Warfare, where we would have studied how warfare evolved. Unfortunately, I never had the opportunity to take the class I used it and the fact that WWI resulted in dramatic changes in how wars are fought as inspirations for my students' WWI projects. I introduced this unit by having students analyze primary resources to determine the causes of WWI, beyond the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. Once the causes were determined and the trenches were experienced by the students , they began work on their Evolution of Warfare pre...

For many people, diseases and history are not two topics that go together; diseases are a scientific topic while history is, you know, the study of dead people. But if you examine the human experience throughout the centuries, you see that diseases have affected societies in a variety of ways. Since many of these historical diseases have been eradicated or cured with vaccines, the social effects of have been forgotten. But now we are seeing a reemergence of these diseases for a variety of reasons. Because of this connection, my sophomore students investigated disees and their effects as part of their project based learning of the Industrial Revolution. Unlike prior projects, this knowledge was not kept within the confines of the classroom; the final projects were donated to Valley Children’s Hospital in hopes of spreading awareness about historical diseases. The project was launched in November with a PearDeck where students viewed of several news reports of recent outbreaks: ...

Last year I had my Woodlake students complete a DBQ regarding Progressivism, where they had to argue which 20th century issue they would invest their million dollars into. As always, I had students finish significantly earlier than others so I quickly threw together another project where they had to create a poster describing a current issue that they felt needed attention. This was meant to keep the early finishers occupied, but turned into a project that the students became excited about: Ebola by Mikayla Juvera New iPhone Concerns by Ramiro Padilla North Korea by Henry Pfaff Unfortunately, because of pacing and an upcoming benchmark, we couldn't invest much time into the project, but I wished that one day I could do this project on a big scale. Then a year later, my wish was granted when I was offered my dream job at Minarets High School, a school dedicated to project-based learning. I knew immediately that one of my projects would be focused on muckraking curren...

Created by Wordpandit.com As I was on my way home for Thanksgiving, I was flipping through Pinterest, I came across the image to the right and I thought to myself: Darn it. That's what I should of done for my government PBL... To back up, one of my first projects as a teacher at a fully project-based school was titled: We, the People of Mars ... This project was geared towards my sophomores in World History and the driving question was "How can we as inhabitants of a new planet create a functional government?" The goal was for students to investigate different types of governments around the world to create their own unique government for Mars.  My inspiration came from the PBL training provided BIE,  where my colleagues and I created a project according to their organizational format. After a very helpful brainstorm with another teacher, they pointed me in the direction of Mars One , an international project that hopes to one day settle humanity Mars that would ...

Words are powerful, especially the ones that you find as unimportant or insignificant. Someone saying hi, asking about their day, or remembering a small details about their lives is sometimes all it take make an impact on a person. As teachers, we all have that story of at least one student who you made a deep connection with even though you didn't realize it. It wasn't until the recent GAFE Summit in Bakersfield that I realize there is another statement that is influential to students: 'Good job'. Now, I don't mean this in a students-need-to-hear-positive-reinforcement kind of way. While positive comments are necessary, Brian Hamm, the keynote speaker, challenged me to reevaluate the kind of feedback that I give my students and myself. As Hamm was getting us attendees of his session ready to experience design thinking, he discussed the significance between 'good job' and 'good start.' Obviously, 'good job' implies that the task the person ...

A few weeks ago I taught my students about choices; how unlimited wants and limited resources force us to make decisions. This is the basis of economics and dictates every person's life, whether they know it or not. Just like every other person, I too have to make choices in my life, whether professional or personal. So I'm excited to announce that this fall I will be teaching social science at Minarets High School ! For the longest time, Minarets has been my dream school with their deep integration of edtech and project based learning. I fell even more in love with it when I presented there for the Google Summit in May so when I found out about a social science position opening up I eagerly put in my application. I'm so excited for what the future holds for me at Minarets High School with all the new things I have learn, new people I get to meet, and new students I get to teach. Despite my joy, I'm heartbroken to leave Woodlake High School, the place of my first ...

For whatever reason, I have always wanted my students to do a children's book, but never found the time. Then, with the SBAC testing and my department's agreement to try out project based learning, I threw my project idea into the ring and we decided to do a children's book regarding a US topic during the Cold War. I imagined using Storify to have students create their books, since my goal is to integrate technology whenever possible, but with no technology access during SBAC testing we decided to go "old school" and I'm so glad we did. I don't think my students would have been as creative and free to express their ideas if we had used technology. The first step of project was to have students select their Cold War topic, which they did using Google Forms. I was eager to try the Choice Eliminator, but found out quickly that the add-on does not work as quickly as I hoped so I ended up having to quickly problem solve and adapt the form so students made the...

“Picture a classroom...the first thing most of us think of is a square room with rows of desks….this traditional classroom space is the product of an industrial-era model education. Just like factories, schools were designed to categorize students by age and (supposedly) ability, then deliver curriculum in an assembly line format.” As a history teacher, this statement made by Kevin Brookhouser in his The 20time Project hit me in the gut. While my classroom does not look as Brookhouser described, elements of my instruction still did. I was increasing rigor within my content, but I still had to teach my students in way for them to do well on our CST style benchmarks despite the recent inclusion of short responses. This had been weighing heavily on my mind so when I heard this quote at the Google Summit in Minarets, I felt guilty and ashamed that I was not making my students "future ready." Thankfully, I was not alone in my concerns and convictions regarding the way to teach...