Video reflection: 

I am used to video recording but it has been a while since I tried to get myself video recorded.  The problem with having myself recorded--besides the things that others have already mentioned such as not liking what I sound like--is that EVRY TIME someone video records me they make some decision about how it OUGHT to be done that negatively affects the outcome.

I recall doing my National Board videos and having to ditch one lesson after another because the person doing the recording decided--despite my explicit instructions otherwise--not to stop recording!  The same thing happened with this project.  I asked the person recording the lesson to please don't stop recording... and they did so anyway!  What do you do?  I'm not paying them.  They are volunteering their time.  And it is always a different person doing the recording.  This time, rather than trying to find still another lesson to record, I just decided to edit together pieces.

OK, so enough complaining.

What was most important in my classroom and instruction:

Because this is NOT the PBL that I have been developing since the summer, I was creating a PBL “on the fly.”  I was brainstorming some part of a PBL that I could do to show in this class.  The more I brainstormed, the more I started to see the pieces of an entire PBL coming together.  In the end, I found that I had most of the parts, but there were a few missing and I will fill those in when I do this in the future.    

What I saw as being most important was that most students in this class were working diligently to tackle the task assigned them.  In doing so, they were not only teaching themselves how to name chemicals from formulas or to write formulas from names, but they were also building so-called soft skills such as:

1. learning to work in a team,
2. learning how to work around or through problems,
3. developing a belief in their own abilities to work through a problem, and
4. developing small group diplomacy skills.  

I am holding off reaching a final conclusion on this, but I believe that students are developing a deeper understanding of the mechanisms of nomenclature.  They are not just learning the rules, they are learning how the rules apply outside of this immediate context.  

I also found something important for me in developing PBL lesson plans: I can build these in steps.  I don’t have to have a complete PBL when I first implement a lesson.  Just to get things off the ground I can use SOME these elements of PBL in this semester, and fully flesh it out in a later semester.

Make connections between important parts of classroom instruction and principles of effective teaching:

The learning objectives of this PBL is for students be able to:

1. successfully work together to develop an attainable work product,
2. be able to understand the nomenclature systems used in the sciences
1. with a long-term goal of being able to transfer that knowledge and understanding to other sciences or disciplines outside of science,
3. be able to correctly name chemicals given a formula and write formulas given a name, and
4. be able to teach others how to name chemicals given a formula and write formulas given a name using the skills and knowledge acquired in their project development.

I am learning more and more about my students that my initial survey did not tell me.  Many --perhaps most--have done projects before but they have gotten used to being able to put forth minimal effort to earn a grade that is acceptable for them.  If the grade isn’t acceptable, they claim that the project was too hard or they didn’t understand.  

Incorporate contextual knowledge into my analysis:

I analyzing the preliminary results of the projects I have found that young men struggle the most with this methodology particularly those in one particular racial minority groups.  The cohort is too small to reach any broad conclusions.  It is also true that some of my young male students, including those in the racial minority group of concern, have been the most successful.  The results of my unit assessment did not demonstrate a greater grasp of concepts.

The less successful young men exhibit a greater amount of off-task behavior and greater resistance (both direct and passive aggressive) to efforts to keep them on task.

There is a smaller group of young women that exhibit what we commonly refer to as quiet and shy behavior that also are less successful.  Again, there are also quiet and shy young women that are among the most successful.  

I see no reason to conclude that these students are unable to be as successful as the rest of the cohort.  What is am seeing is a lack of what we might call grit.  Teasing out the influences that contribute to behaviors that result in lower success seems an almost impossible task.  No clear pattern or trend seems evident.