Tag: PBL

Teachers plan meaningfully and rigorously in ways that allow the synergy of soft and hard skills to interact

It was the week before the exhibition at High Tech Middle Chula Vista. My eighth-grade class had spent the last eight weeks exploring the question “What makes us resilient?”

Here is a paradox of teaching: if you want your classroom to be full of conversation and self-directed learning, you need to be able to quickly capture everybody’s focus.

Much like a movie’s opening scene, the launch of a lesson should grab everybody’s attention, spark curiosity, and get students asking questions.

Last spring I was standing in my fifth-grade classroom, mid-project, rearranging student groups when I realized we had a problem. My students were building scale models of dog houses and cat condos that they had designed—and would ultimately build—to donate to a pet-adoption event later that spring.

This collection is called “true project stories” because it’s all about teachers (and students) telling the stories of the projects they’ve done, from the heights of achievement to the depths of despair.

As a new teacher, I faced the same dilemma every fall: What to put on the walls of my classroom?

Q: It seems restrictive to tell every kid to make the same kind of product when we’re doing a project. How should I decide what parts of the project to be flexible on and which are non-negotiable?

The answer to this question is, literally and precisely, "I'd like to see them try." 

“We critique and discuss what makes the work powerful: what makes a piece of creative writing compelling and exciting; what makes a scientific or historical research project significant and stirring; what makes a novel mathematical solution so breathtaking.”