Notes from Boss and Krauss, Chapter 4-5

Chapter 4: Strategies for Discovery

Common Pitfalls of Projects:

1. Long on activity, short on learning outcomes (if students can learn as much through a brief lecture, beware!)

2. Technology layered over traditional practice-- having students research a topic on the Internet and present it in a PowerPoint is not quality

3. Trivial thematic units--themes aren't inherently trivial but they can be (probably more of a pitfall for elementary classes)

4. Overly scripted with too many steps-- make sure there is lots of room for student inquiry and decision making


The rest of the chapter has the reader create a project sketch-- basically going through the process that we went through in our workshop last week, so I'm going to move on to Chapter 5.


Chapter 5: Project Management Strategies for Teachers and Learners


Teachers who manage PBL classrooms also need 21st century skills-- it's not just for the kiddos!


Front-loading projects--

• Gather resources-- supplies, information, experts, technology-- and plan on how to divide responsibilities if you are teaching as a team. 
• Create deadlines (preferably with students).  Involve parents, put systems in place to help students manage their time.  
• Plan the teams-- how will students be divided?  
• Plan for assessment-- figure out students' prior knowledge and interests, plan to clear up misconceptions and help students learn from setbacks, plan to build on what they have learned and push for further learning.  Need formative and summative assessment. 
• Formative-- monitoring, observing, interacting, analyzing, reporting
• Online surveys, checklists, student reflection
• Traditional methods of assessment can be appropriate
•  Solid rubrics tied to standards

*The planning and assessing intimidate me.  I know these are the kind of things that you just have to do-- reading about them will only get you so far.  I also anticipate a lot of trial and error and learning on the fly and I'm okay with that ambiguity.