Celebrating Failure in Rm 613

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...

In 2014, I have experimented with student blogging and loved it, minus one thing: how long it took me to grade. For each student, I would have to find their blog (typically collected into a Google Form), find the specific post (hopefully I didn't far behind in grading), read it and then find them in the grading system to enter the grade. This became twice as time consuming when I had students commenting on each other's blog as assignments. I tried having students copying and pasting their comments into a spreadsheet so I could keep better track, but many students forgot, pretended that they wrote a comment, or messed with each other's responses since it was an all access spreadsheet. I even tried doing everything in a spreadsheet where each student had a custom tab, but this was difficult to manage with seven classes and I wanted students to actually be publishing on a blog. After about three years, I feel like I have finally perfect system for myself: I have students p...