Celebrating Failure in Rm 613

Its time to start gearing up for the upcoming school year; I mean Target already has their back-to-school section set-up so I guess its official. A new year means the opportunity to try and experiment with new things and maybe project-based learning is something you are considering. With my experience at a project-based school and various courses focused on PBL, here are five tips based on my own trials and errors. Before we get started, here is a review of project-based learning: Project-based learning is when students actively explore real-world problems/challenges to acquire a deeper understanding.  Teachers act as facilitators and guide students through the project process.  Its not a project thrown at the end of unit where students all make similar products from information provided by the teacher For more information: Buck Institute of Education Edutopia's PBL Page Teaching Channel's PBL Page   MAKE IT AUTHENTIC.  Projects should be as rea...

Created using Canva . One of my favorite projects is Down with the Sickness, where students research the effects that disease have on both past and present societies. I still consider it as my top project of the 2015/2016 school year, which I described in a previous post . With a year of experience, I was able to streamline the project and improve student engagement as shown by the end of the semester survey: "I really liked the medical aspect of our history class because it wasn't a typical kind of study for a history class. I had never done anything like it before and it was a lot of fun."  "I enjoyed researching different disease and learning more in depth about how the CDC and the WHO deal with these situations. Creating an infographic was fun because I prefer to show people what I've learned through graphics/art." Contagion Activity with link. I liked creating the infographics and I really enjoyed learning about different disease...

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...

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...

As I said in my earlier post , revision is a necessary part of project-based learning. In fact, its even embedded into the Minarets Cs, the skills and goals we that emphasize for our students at Minarets: This is why I continued improving the ways my students revised their work even after I found success with Student Completion in Schoology . Since I had students participating more readily in the scaffold project process, I found another weakness in my process: Peer Reviews. I love peer reviews because it allows students an opportunity to get feedback from their peers in order to help them improve the quality of their project. It also gives them the opportunity to dissect the rubric and gain a better understanding of what the final expectations are.  At the start of the year, students filled out a Google Form that was based around the rubric for the project. There would be spots for comments, but students wouldn't always get to see the feedback. I wouldn't ...