Blog Post 2; Sarah Garner

The DFC family had the opportunity to go and visit JL Mann's school within a school, New Tech. If I could sum up the visit in a few words, it decreased my worries. I got to speak with several math teachers and ask them a million questions. It was amazing getting to see a school just implementing PBL. Obviosuly I saw things that I thought were amazing, but there were some negatives.

I was talking to the math teacher and she gave me some great advice. With math, especially algebra, it is hard to create projects that last two or more weeks and cover the standards that we are required to cover. She told me she does a lot of problem based learning. Each unit she starts with a question and by the end they are able to answer the question. She does use some big projects throughout the year, but she focuses on more problem based. That relieved a lot of anxiety because at DFC we are looking at incorporating a school within a school, and it stressed beyond belief thinking how will I create a project for every standard. Also, they co-taught a lot of classes. For example, the science and algebra classes were taught together and the geometry and engineering were taught together. The only down fall is that there are almost 40 kids in a class together. YIKES! However, you do have another teacher in there with you.

Some of the things I saw that I felt needed some attention was that the students and teacher at New Tech were segregated from the other students of JL Mann. The teachers were telling me that the students of New Tech get very little interaction with the other students of JL Mann and the teachers do not really speak to the other teachers. However, the principal did say that they are working on that issue and bringing the whole school together more often.