Class 3: Blog Post 1 - J.L. Mann Visit

It was such a treat to have time to visit J.L. Mann and see how they implement PBL. I really enjoyed being able to sit in on a planning meeting with the teachers. Their use of the critical friends protocol to discuss ideas for new units was great, and I wish this was something that would be easy to implement with my own coworkers. I think it is helpful that they have someone to facilitate this protocol and to be a resource for them as they plan and implement PBL units.

One thing that I found very interesting was how they pair up classes. The pairings that we were able to see seemed to work really well together, at least for the specific projects students were working on at the time. I would imagine that it is very difficult for high school teachers to integrate and/or collaborate with teachers of other subjects. As an elementary school teacher who teaches all subjects, I value the use of integration, especially in the PBL units I have implemented and hope to implement in the future.  It is important for students to continue to see that most real-world tasks are cross-disciplinary, so it is important for them to have skills in multiple subject areas. Seeing this integration first hand made me realize that I can definitely be more intentional about making my PBL projects cross-disciplinary. With new legislation that is going to impact our reading instruction next year, I know that I will need to heavily integrate to continue to implement PBL next year as I may not have as much time to teach science and social studies (which usually provide the driving question for my PBL units).

I also liked how the teachers displayed their driving questions, problem statements, and other elements of their projects on their class project boards. This is something I have already implemented in my classroom so my students can easily refer back to the driving question for our current project. It is a practical, fuss/frill free way to make that information easily accessible to my students.

I am glad we got the chance to see PBL in action. I was worried that I would not be able to take away much because I didn’t know how the high school experience would relate to the elementary experience, but I definitely learned a lot. I would really love to see PBL in action at the elementary level at some point!