Kimberly Trott Blog 4
Reflection on Dawn's visit and co teaching.
For class that day the focus was on developing a task to help students with self assessments. A Google document was created to help student evaluate group work. The students with the help of Dawn created a rubric to self assess their work and another's group. The students developed the rubric to determine what they thought was adequate representation of well conducted research. So once the students evaluated the other groups projects, they worked on the last remaining five topic for about a week before creating their project. I took up the research papers after they completed their projects and looked through them to see if they had improved on the quality of their research. I felt like the students work fell into two categories, those that actually improved and those that actually wrote less I believe, because they got lazy as time went on in the project and chose to do less.
I actually found that the students have a harder time researching the material this time because I just gave them topics and no parameters. Last time I gave them "ideas" within the topic. I believe that ninth graders need more structure. I'm actually going to switch up the research process a third time when I do this PBL next year. I'm going to give them only their specific projects to research and require a more detailed research component
Hi Kimberly,
ReplyDeleteThank you for your honest assessment of your students' performance within the recent pbl and the co-teaching lesson focused on the student created rubric. I thought the students did a good job as a whole overall, generating criteria for the rubric. You shared that their work fell into two extremes - improved or worse than the previous implementation. In your holistic reflection you shared that in wanting to give students more choices they struggled more without the structure. In modifying this for your third implementation next year you shared how you will assign one specific project with a more specific research component. I'd love to know the outcomes of that so we can compare.
Thanks Kim for your willingness to monitor and adjust.
Sincerely,
Dawn
I think what observing with the PBL projects two underlying themes. The student's don't like working on the PBL and me also teaching in between, they tell me they get confused on the two dual aspects of class. They can't distinguish that the two go together. Maybe at a true PBL school, I would not be worried about hitting specific content that I find one PBL can't cover. For the last PBL on a sustainable city I decided to do just the PBL and not integrate the next chapter into the unit so we will see if it flows more smoothly. I also think that by telling students we are doing a PBL it seems to produce an image in their mind of a harder project. I think if a regular teacher uses PBL in her classroom that this is just how we do projects... the students who are in the Stems program in my class really understand the process and are good at helping out. I think that it is a process that students must be exposed to over time or at least if a teacher uses PBL, it must be from day one of her class if that is how projects are conducted. It works out better once students get in practice with the way it is structured.
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