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Blair Peterson

PBL: What Does It Take for a Project to Be "Authentic"? | Edutopia - 0 views

  • A not-authentic "dessert project" would involve the kind of assignment students are typically given in school: compose an essay, create a poster or model, write and present a book report, or make a PowerPoint presentation on a topic they've researched.
  • Beyond their teacher and maybe their classmates, there's no public audience for students' work, no one actually uses what they create, and the work they do is not what people do in the real world.
  • PBL means students are doing work that simulates what happens in the world outside of school. In a project that is somewhat authentic, students could play a role (as in choice "c" above) -- scientists, engineers, advisors to the President, website designers, etc. -- who are placed in a scenario that reflects what might actually occur in the real world. Or students could create products that, although they are not actually going to be used by people in the real world, are the kinds of products people do use.
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  • PBL means students are doing work that is real to them -- it is authentic to their lives -- or the work has a direct impact on or use in the real world.
  • The project meets a real need in the world beyond the classroom, or the products that students create are used by real people.
  • he project focuses on a problem, issue or topic that is relevant to students' lives -- the more directly, the better -- or on a problem or issue that is actually being faced by adults in the world students will soon enter.
  • he project sets up a scenario or simulation that is realistic, even if it is fictitious.
  • The project involves tools, tasks or processes used by adults in real settings and by professionals in the workplace. (This criterion for authenticity could apply to any of the above examples of projects.)
Blair Peterson

Ensuring Critical Thinking in Project-Based Learning « The Whole Child Blog «... - 0 views

  • Through repeated practice, you can create a rigorous driving question that is open-ended, complex, and at the same time kid-friendly. A driving question is not “Google-able” but may contain many “on-the-surface” questions.
  • If the project is for an outside audience, the purpose may become more complex, because that audience’s lens and needs are unique and challenging. If you pick an audience outside of the classroom and a purpose that is rigorous and challenging, then the project will require some critical thinking.
  • Don’t forget that when you demand critical-thinking skills, then you must scaffold these thinking skills with lessons, modeling, and so forth
Blair Peterson

Assessment of Learning with a Competency-Based System: How to Start | Connected Principals - 0 views

  • The ability to be able to “dig deeper” into what a final grade represents and how it can be used to report learning not only intrigued the admissions officers, but it generated an entire discussion around what else a competency-based grading and reporting system could do for students.
  • A “competency” is the ability of a student to apply content knowledge and skills in and/or across the content area(s).
  • In contrast, O’Connor (2009) defines a formative assessment as “an assessment for learning and can broadly be described as a “snapshot” or a “dipstick” measure that captures a student’s progress through the learning process.
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  • At Sanborn Regional High School, summative assignments must account for at least 90% of a final course grade.
  • e do not make use of averaging by quarters or trimesters to compute a student’s final course grade. Instead, our students know that their grade will be calculated based on all of their work for the entire course.
  • At Sanborn, any student who does not obtain an 80% or higher on a summative assessment has the option to reassess, provided they complete a reassessment plan with their teacher which may include a deadline for completion of the reassessment as well as the completion of several formative assessments at a proficient level prior to taking a reassessment.
  • Rather, a zero skews a student’s final grade in such a way that it no longer accurately represents what a student knows and is able to do. Giving a student a zero is akin to giving them the option to fail. In the Sanborn model, failure is not an option for any student. Teachers will do whatever it takes to get student’s to complete an assignment.
  • One of our next hurtles to address as a school community is moving this to something higher, possibly as high as an 80%)
  • Completion of an online course or competency module at a proficient level Completion of a teacher-directed project or recovery plan at a proficient level. The plan may include reassessments of key summative assignments or the completion of an alternative project Completion of an appropriate extended learning opportunity that is connected with the skill or competency that must be recovered
Blair Peterson

Practical PBL: The Ongoing Challenges of Assessment | Edutopia - 1 views

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    Good ideas for assessing and grading group projects.
Blair Peterson

Should I Stop Assigning Homework? - Jessica Lahey - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • tudents who don’t complete homework receive zeroes, but they learn a valuable lesson about responsibility, many teachers argue, even though there’s no legitimate research connecting responsibility to homework. 
  • One, students, teachers, parents, and administrators expect me to, and when I don’t I am labeled an “easy” teacher, viewed as less serious or rigorous than my colleagues. Parents may rage about the veritable avalanche of homework that threatens to suffocate their children, but in my experience, parents also view that avalanche as a badge of honor, evidence of academic rigor.
  • I tried to picture a school year in which I shoehorn all of this work in to class time. I hardly complete a year’s worth of material as it is; a year without any homework at all seemed like a disaster in the making.
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  • Barnes spent that summer immersed in research on learning and homework, and returned in the 14th year of his teaching career determined to do away with homework and create what he calls a “results-only learning environment.”
  • Contrary to my first concern, Barnes found that most parents were in favor of his doing away with homework, particularly once he outlined the research for them.
  • Barnes points out that a no-homework policy does not mean that his students never work outside of class; indeed, they often do, because they enjoy the learning and want it to continue outside of class.
  • His class was a project-based classroom, so many students did choose to prepare for their projects outside of class. Barnes eliminated all work that required rote memory, and leaned more on context clues and word roots instead. “The result of eliminating traditional, mostly rote memory, homework was one of the most rewarding experiences of my teaching career,” Barnes wrote.
  • Above all else, my students enjoyed class and become intrinsically motivated independent learners.
  • I would add for the no-homework skeptics, and they are legion, you have to keep in mind that any research that supports homework is based almost universally on test results.
Blair Peterson

Resources for Assessment in Project-Based Learning | Edutopia - 2 views

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    Ideas for how to assess individual student performance on group assessments.
Blair Peterson

Tech's Favorite School Faces Its Biggest Test: the Real World | WIRED - 1 views

  • Last year, according to Summit administrators, 74 percent of Summit students met or exceeded Common Core standards for English Language Arts on California’s state tests, compared to 49 percent of students statewide, and 51 percent of Summit students met or exceeded the standards for math, compared to 37 percent statewide. The college acceptance rate for Summit graduates perennially pushes 100 percent.
    • Blair Peterson
       
      Amazing that the overall results are so low. How can this be? Another piece of data around lower performance in math.
  • Even some of personalized learning’s biggest backers admit that it’s easy to get it wrong.
  • “Personalized learning is easy to bastardize. It’s easy to do it superficially.”
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  • Last August, for instance, the Center on Reinventing Public Education published a brief field report from their ongoing study of personalized-learning initiatives warning that some schools focus on the “iconography” of personalized learning — the technology or the project-based learning — but sacrifice rigor.
    • Blair Peterson
       
      This is something that we always strive for. Rigor has to be the standard.
  • “When I walk into a classroom and see all the kids on a computer, mostly on the same screen, and the teacher is moving around the room like a test proctor, that is where we’ve gone way wrong and need to right the ship,”
  • The only prerequisites for would-be Basecamp schools are a commitment to Summit’s grading policy, a one-to-one ratio of computers to students and a team of at least four teachers covering the core academic subjects for about 100 students.
  • “Historically, there are virtually no game-changers in the history of school innovations,” said Justin Reich, executive director of MIT’s Teaching Systems Lab and the author of Education Week’s EdTechResearcher blog.
  • “I’m not spoon-feeding them anything,” she explained. “That’s a relief, because there’s a lot less of me trying to run around and help everybody with little details, and more of us having conversations about math.”
  • According to Riley, the personalized learning advocates wrongly assume that all students are able to effectively guide their own learning.
  • Christina Nguyen, a ninth-grader at Summit Denali. Nguyen was working on quadratic equations with her friend, Chloe Starbird
  • Summit requires Basecamp schools to follow its practice of basing 30 percent of grades on mastery of content and 70 percent on students’ use of various cognitive skills, such as making inferences and clearly communicating their ideas.
  • While Summit’s PLP does include tests of content knowledge for each subject, students take them only when they feel ready and, if they fail, can re-take them until they pass. Some Walsh parents, such as Paula Swift, whose sixth-grade son, Trevor, is in the Summit program, are fully supportive of this “mastery-based” grading.
  • Other parents are puzzled by the approach. “I’ve definitely heard from at least 10 parents who are like, ‘I don’t know what’s going on,’ ” O’Connor said. ” ‘Is this good for my child?’
  • “I used to fail a lot of math tests. But now, I love school math, because I’m learning better.”
  • Benjamin Riley, who visited many personalized-learning classrooms from 2010 to 2014 as the policy and advocacy director for the NewSchools Venture Fund. Shortly after leaving that post, Riley planted his skeptic’s flag with an oft-cited blog post titled, “Don’t Personalize Learning.”
  • At the start of the year, her students were often frustrated, and she had to resist the urge to step in and rescue them. For nearly two months of school, she said, “It was tough. There were tears.”
  • Logically, this concern about the need for guidance heightens with novice learners.
  • “When you have little ones, it’s harder to do the full, self-directed learning. There needs to be a lot more scaffolding and support,” said Loughlin, singling out her school’s structured and deliberate literacy instruction. “We need to set a strong foundation. We don’t want to create gaps in our learning for our little ones.”
Blair Peterson

To Reassess (or, how to make more work for me) | Continuous Everywhere but Differentiab... - 0 views

  • 1) students waited too long to do it. I put an approximate 2-week limit (after returning tests) to re-assess. Students waited until almost the last day just to notify me of their intent to re-assess. The longer they waited the worse they did.
  • The good news this year, though, was that re-assessment didn’t take over all of my time like I thought it would. It took extra time, sure, but it was manageable. One of my projects this summer is to make a bank of more questions for assessment.
  • As for re-assessing, my biggest surprise was that many students chose NOT to re-assess! (this is honors, too!). I think back, even last year when I had a lazy group and grades were low. There I was agonizing about why, why, why, and what could I do to improve the grades….what I discovered is that I agonized over it far more than they did. The ones who didn’t re-assess accepted their grades. The ball was in their court, and they didn’t play. And I didn’t have to agonize over anything this year. So I guess it balances out — more time for me to do re-assessment, less time I spend agonizing over grades. I’ll take it.
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