This semester has been a roller coaster. I struggled to implement my original PBL and had to go back to the drawing board in order to fulfill the requirements of this class. Thank you, Dawn, for being flexible and providing me an opportunity for success.
As part of the "I Have a Dream" unit, my students engaged in a number of text-dependent analysis writing opportunities as we prepared for the upcoming TDA portion of the EOC. Before beginning the unit, I gave my students a pretest, assessing how well they could incorporate textual evidence into their writing. What I discovered was that the majority of them either did not remember they needed textual evidence or could not remember how to insert the textual evidence. We spent the better part of a week perusing King’s “Dream Speech” in order to locate evidence to support conclusions we had for different TDA prompts. We looked at key phrases to use to introduce the textual evidence and practiced writing the paragraphs together and in small groups. This was the tedious portion of the PBL as opposed to the fun project portion that focused on incorporating personal experience into the creation of a speech. For the most part, with a few exceptions, the students were successful on their final TDA assignment they did for the unit--they incorporated textual evidence using appropriate phrases to support their conclusions.
I used to think that I could create PBLs on top of previously existing units, but I’ve discovered that I need to be a bit more simplistic in the creation of the projects. Every task they do should be leading toward one final product instead of multiple. This unit included a TDA, a personal speech, a class speech, and a Genius Hour. That was way too much, and I know it overwhelmed my students. It definitely overwhelmed me. This is likely why my Genius Hour projects didn’t turn out the way I expected, and I had to step back for a few moments to reconfigure my expectations. I believe next time I do the unit, I will focus on the speeches as the only project. The TDA can be a secondary parallel lesson to this as it will help us focus in on how to write an effective speech. I don’t think I will do this particular Genius Hour again.
I like the comment about being a bit more simplistic, I am finding that if I do a bit lest but require more quality I get better results. In my PBL we worked as a class to create a specific rubric for our presentation. It seems like it would be difficult to have multiple projects and have multiple student generated rubrics. I guess if all you do in class is PBL units it becomes easier to keep up with multiple types of projects being produced. The hard part would be keeping up with all the individual group rubrics.
ReplyDeleteHi Julianna,
ReplyDeleteI appreciate your reflective practice and how after giving this pbl unit some time and considering all the variables, you realize that pbl units do not have to include "all the things" in terms of multiple assignments and products, but can rather be a streamlined process where students focus on one culminating product with the effective elements of choice, critique and revision, inquiry, authenticity, etc. geared toward support of this product. I agree with you 100% and am reminded that as we are building our own capacity for understanding and implementing pbl, our students are developing their own capacity for independent inquiry and agency and sometimes simple can be powerful.
Sincerely,
Dawn