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Meghan Cureton

Q: What's the Right Dosage of PBL?        A: Not Once Per Year | Blog | Proje... - 2 views

  • Does adopting PBL mean we should use it all the time and teach everything via projects? If not, then how many projects should teachers do per semester or year?
  • Project Based Teaching Practices are actually just good teaching, period, and many of the practices can be used in the classroom when students are in between projects.
  • “Just make two high-quality projects per year for every student be the goal.” In a K-12 system, that means each student would experience 26 projects at a minimum—which sounds like a lot! But that’s only the start. Perhaps students in middle and high school, at first, would experience two projects per year in one subject area—if, say, only social studies teachers begin to use PBL. But assuming PBL spreads across the school, students would do projects in other subject areas, or do interdisciplinary projects, and eventually experience many more than 26 projects if they stayed in one K-12 PBL-infused system.
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  • But assuming projects are between 3-6 weeks long, I’d like to see a minimum of two projects per year in every K-12 classroom, in all subject areas—so that all students, no matter who they are, can gain the benefits of high quality PBL.
  • Even better, make it one project per quarter—four per year. And while you’re at it, sprinkle in a few mini-projects to help build a PBL culture or tackle a relatively confined topic or task.
  • Why is the PBL dosage important?
  • Students cannot build 21st century success skills if they only get occasional opportunities to practice and internalize them.
  • Students will become more confident, independent learners—even identifying and tackling problems authentic to themselves, their communities, and the wider world.
  • be part of a culture that celebrates risk-taking and innovation.
  • If only a few scattered teachers use PBL in a school or district, or only a few students experience it and thus limit demand, then the system’s basic structures, policies, and culture will remain the same. But if a critical mass is reached, schools and districts will need to rethink the use of time, teacher workloads, community relationships, assessment systems, decision-making processes, and much more. Here’s to reaching the PBL tipping point!
Meghan Cureton

How Do You Teach to the Standards When Doing Project-Based Learning? - 4 views

  • People often debate about whether we should be process-driven or product-driven in project-based learning. But I think there’s a third option. We can be learning-driven. In other words, we should start with the question, “What do we want students to learn?” and let that drive the process and the product.
  • PBL is not a license to ditch the standards or take a break from real learning.
  • #1: Inquiry-DrivenInquiry-driven PBL begins with a state of curiosity and wonder. It might be as simple as the sentence stem “I wonder why _________” or “I wonder how _________.” Students then have the opportunity to research, ideate, and create.
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  • #4: Problem-DrivenProblem-driven PBL begins with a specific problem or challenge that students must solve. An example is our maker challenges that present a specific scenario that leads students into research, problem-solving, ideation, and a final product that solves the initial challenge.
  • #3: Product-DrivenPBL experts often say, “Students should focus on the process and not the product.” But there’s also a time and a place for projects that challenge students to focus on developing a quality product. In these projects, the product has tighter parameters but the process is more flexible.
  • #2: Interest-DrivenAnother approach is the interest-driven PBL process.
  • #5: Empathy-Driven (Design Thinking)Empathy-driven PBL can have elements of the previous four PBL approaches.
Jim Tiffin Jr

Project-Based Learning Through a Maker's Lens | Edutopia - 5 views

  • A Maker is an individual who communicates, collaborates, tinkers, fixes, breaks, rebuilds, and constructs projects for the world around him or her.
    • Jim Tiffin Jr
       
      A nice list-style definition of a Maker.
  • A Maker, re-cast into a classroom, has a name that we all love: a learner.
    • Jim Tiffin Jr
       
      True, but (sadly) the converse is not always the case in some classrooms: A maker may always be a learner, but a learner is not always a maker.
  • A Maker, just like a true learner, values the process of making as much as the product.
    • Jim Tiffin Jr
       
      Equality of these two ideas, process and product, is a value held by a Maker.
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  • Making, especially to educators and administrators unfamiliar with it, can seem to lack the academic rigor needed for a full-fledged place in an educational ecosystem.
    • Jim Tiffin Jr
       
      Only in educational settings where content knowledge is deemed the most important indicator of learning.
  • With practice, the students can frame the questions themselves.
    • Jim Tiffin Jr
       
      Essential when you are trying to develop agency in students.
  • Once completed, the project becomes less of a daily race to fulfill lesson plans and more of a quest to document your students' growing capabilities.
    • Jim Tiffin Jr
       
      This reflective documentation process should be something that both teacher AND student are doing. The student point-of-view should be written for the benefit of the student, not the teacher. The teacher should coach this process for the student so that the monitoring of growth is seen as a value for the student. The teacher documentation should also inform the student as to their growth, but the information can be used for more "teacherly" purposes as well, such preparing for future activities or intentional pairings of students in the early phases of the PBL unit.
  • model it yourself first
    • Jim Tiffin Jr
       
      Always let your students see you, the teacher, as a learner - first and foremost!
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    The messy, hands-on Maker classroom is perfect for a PBL unit when the teacher is willing to collaborate, tinker, fix, break, and rebuild alongside students. Some fundamental elements to consider in the designing of a maker-centered project, but not as absolutes. It is important to realize that any project taken on in a maker-centered classroom is, by definition, a PBL experience.
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    Fabulous piece about the myriad connection among PBL and Maker. And your commentary is so helpful and provocative. Thank you!
T.J. Edwards

PBL, STEAM, & CTE: Validation through Triangulation | Blog | Project Based Learning | BIE - 0 views

  • identifying ways that STEAM, CTE, and PBL have a unique three-way symbiotic relationship
  • So, with CTE, one or more of the STE(A)M subjects naturally is embedded within it, especially when applied to key knowledge, understanding, & success skills. Sound familiar? That’s the focus at the center of Gold Standard PBL! So what about the Essential Project Design Elements of PBL as applying STE(A)M within CTE?
  • what if an Engineering and Architecture Pathway student was asked to use CAD to design a home using passive solar construction techniques, much like the Anasazi did before electricity and indoor plumbing?
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  • Integrating CTE and STE(A)M in this manner raises the bar to the rigorous level of PBL.
  • Then I realized that all of the CTE industry sectors have these same standards, so they apply to STE(A)M and PBL in the same manner as the example above from Architecture and Engineering.
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    Makes me happy that Career Tech is mentioned as a vehicle for more rigorous PBL and STEAM and not as a program for "underachievers"
Meghan Cureton

What the Heck Is Project-Based Learning? | Edutopia - 0 views

  • "PBL is the act of learning through identifying a real-world problem and developing its solution. Kids show what they learn as they journey through the unit, not just at the end."
  • Teaching with PBL is the difference between the atmosphere at Disneyland and the atmosphere at a Six Flags resort.
  • PBL doesn't ask you to replace your content. It asks that you create a vehicle in which to communicate your content.
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  • "PBL is the act of learning through identifying a real-world problem and developing its solution. Kids show what they learn as they journey through the unit, not just at the end."
  • PBL is the ongoing act of learning about different subjects simultaneously.
Bo Adams

Equipping Young Leaders to Take on the 32 Most Important Issues of Our Time - Vander Ar... - 0 views

  • If we take citizenship preparation seriously, we should be encouraging young people to engage with the world’s most important issues by helping them frame projects around these goals. Here are six reasons:
  • Extended and integrated challenges are the best way to promote deeper learning and develop readiness for the automation economy. The goals include interesting and timely causes that many young people will find motivating. Making a contribution toward a goal they care about may be the best way to develop student agency. Goal focused projects get kids into the community and connected with local resources (see #PlaceBasedEd) It’s also a chance to shift the paradigm from “prepare for a career 10 years from now” to “make a difference right here, right now.” Taking on real challenges will promote creative and effective uses of technology from collaboration to production.
  • Integrate projects into existing courses. The Global Goals site has useful project resources for 16 of these goals. Plan an integrated unit between two courses. Most of the goals combine science, sociology, research, problem-solving and writing. Capstone projects in the last two years of high school are a good place to start. Each academy at Reynoldsburg High School in Ohio and Chavez Schools in Washington, D.C., engage in a capstone project. Students at Singapore American School are required to conduct a capstone project.
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  • To engage millions of students in local projects connected to global goals, it would be helpful to have: More content associated with each goal (GlobalGoals.org is a start); Templates for local projects; A microcredential system that could help pack projects full of valuable learning (i.e, science, math, communication and collaboration); Access to data sources, data tools and project tools (mentors would be really helpful); and A project gallery for completed contributions.
Jim Tiffin Jr

My Favorite Projects in 2016 | Blog | Project Based Learning | BIE - 1 views

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    List of 15 projects, that caught the eye of BIE Editor in Chief John Larmer. One of which is the Kindergarten PBL: Happy Habitats organized and executed by MVPS Kindergarten Team.
Bo Adams

Authentic Design Challenges in Project-Based Learning: Fostering Innovators - Medium - 0 views

  • By connecting Design Thinking with Project-Based Learning, these amazing teams helped their students see how innovation and imagination can solve not just local challenges, but those faced by humans around the world. The design process required the kind of critique and revision PBL asks of students, and the resulting increases in risk taking and resilience will serve students well in any field. Most importantly, by grounding the design work in empathy interviews and authentic challenges, students were invited not only to witness the world as it is, but also to begin crafting the world as it might be.
Meghan Cureton

Project-based Learning: Are You Focused on the Project or the Learning? - 0 views

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    HT @akytle
Bo Adams

Design Thinking & PBL: Why Laura McBain is BIE's 2018 PBL Champion | Blog | Project Bas... - 0 views

  • defines design thinking as “a process for creative problem solving” with a “human-centered approach to innovation.”
Meghan Cureton

Do historians miss the ideals of assessment, as some have suggested? - 1 views

  • Grading Smarter, Not Harder
  • Their recent finding that many students don’t learn critical thinking in undergraduate history courses -- a challenge to history’s sales pitch that its graduates are finely tuned critical thinkers.
  • A panel of professors here urged a sizable crowd of colleagues to embrace not just grades but formative, ongoing assessment to gauge student learning or lack thereof in real(er) time.
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  • LASER, an acronym for Love history, Acquire and analyze information, Solve difficult problems, Envision new explanations, and Reveal what you know. Sourcing work, which Calder called a “threshold concept” in history, means asking students to evaluate the reliability of various historical texts. Who made it? When? Why? What value does it hold for historians, if any?
  • letter grades “do little to differentiate the level of student effort or the quality of student work or student growth over the course of a semester or program,”
  • to the idea of “transparency,” which they all agreed begins with articulating clear student learning goals -- for themselves and their classes.
  • Whatever the activity or assessment, Mintz said it needs to be aligned with a particular learning objective. Research suggests that the most effective activities and assessments when it comes to student learning are considered “authentic,” or those that mirror professional practice and address some meaningful question,
  • Project and performance-based assessments are much more likely to provide a “valid measure of student proficiencies and higher-order thinking skills than are multiple choice or short-answer questions,” Mintz continued. And evaluation needs to be based on a detailed rubric, he said, suggesting that students may help create these rubrics.
  • But “a paradigm shift is occurring in higher education,” Mintz said. “We all know this. We’re sifting from teaching to learning, shifting from a sink-or-swim mentality to a mentality where we have obligation to bring all students to minimum viable level of competency.” That is regardless of institution type, he said.
  • think of themselves as "learning architects" whose meaningful "forward-looking" assessment will be a "true learning opportunity" for students.
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    HT @cmtbasecamp
Bo Adams

Purpose Based Learning (a #FailUp moment) | Planting T's - 0 views

  • So what is the big #failup moment? Well…perhaps product is more important than teachers tend to let on?
  • Reflecting back, I am more and more convinced that product and process are equally important. p[-[ I don’t mean to devalue the process by any means. That is where the learning happens. But the product – the thing – the solution – is why the learning happens
  • Last semester I had quite a different “engagement curve” with my T.E.D. class major project. In meeting Alex and 3D printing a prosthetic hand, my class and I made noticeable shift from working on a project to working for a purpose
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