Class 3: Blog Post 4 - 1st Observation

A few weeks ago, I blogged about the final presentation of our 1920s unit. Dawn’s first observation of my PBL instruction was during project work time for that unit. She was able to see each group work on research and product creation. Check my last blog post if you’re interested in learning a little more background information about this project and the final presentation that the entire 5^th grade created!

While Dawn was in the room, she was able to talk to each group of students to find out more about the projects they were creating. For the most part, students were able to explain their research and the purpose of their projects. The majority of students were on task during the presentation, though there were some groups that needed some redirection and guidance. One struggle I tend to have with PBL instruction is keeping up with all of the various projects that are being worked on around the room. With 25 students, it can be difficult to monitor what they are doing at all times. I also have trouble with pacing. It seems that some groups progress much more quickly than others. Luckily, my students really enjoyed their topics of study for this unit, and they practically begged to work on their projects every day – the benefits of PBL!

One thing Dawn mentioned in her notes was that there was not much evidence of this PBL unit in the classroom aside from the projects students were working on. This was mostly due to the fact that the majority of instruction took place before Christmas when we studied the 1920s. Evidence of our entry event and student wonderings was removed or covered due to the fact that we moved on in our SS instruction. I currently have evidence of our Ecosystems PBL on our classroom walls, but much of that display was inspired by our trip to J.L. Mann – which occurred after the majority of the implementation of our 1920s unit. Displaying project evidence is something I am working on. I think it is beneficial for students to be able to reference the driving question, problem statement, rubrics, need-to-knows, and resources as they work on their projects. I am definitely working on making that a focal point in my classroom. 

Blog Post #4 (Barwick)

I recently met with Dawn to discuss an idea for a new PBL unit for next year.  I actually wrote most of it for this spring but realized I would probably not be able to implement it because I have a full time student teacher right now and also wanted more time to flesh ideas out.  So, next year, I will be implementing a wax museum of historical figures as an end of the year project.  Dawn helped me decide on how to give the students as much choice as possible while still making it align with the standards.  At first, I wanted to let students choose any person they wanted (past or present) and represent them through  a wax museum, but in order to keep it standards-based, we decided it might be better to have students choose a figure from any decade we have studied in fifth grade (1860s through present), but the figure must have been influential in some way.  My plan is to integrate this social studies review with ELA, especially informational writing, poetry, and point of view.  Students will write a biography on their chosen person, write a poem written from the point of view of that person, and create an informational board that includes these written pieces along with pictures, a timeline, and anything else they want to share.  They will dress as their chosen person, and when a person pushes their "button" at their station, they will recite a short speech they have memorized that gives some details about their life.  Dawn also introduced emaze to me as a way to present information, so students could conduct their own mini genius hour in order to figure out how to use emaze as a way to present pictures, information, etc. Their laptop could be set up at their station for the audience to view as they walk around.  We also discussed collaborating with the art teacher to create a representation of their person using a medium they are studying in art.  I'm very excited about this unit, and I'm glad that it is already mostly planned so that there will be less stress when it's time to implement next year!

I also wanted to briefly talk about soft skills with my students because my next blog post will be on our peer presentation.  I think in some ways my PBL units helped with collaboration, creativity, communication, and technology skills.  I also have many collaborative activities in my classroom, so I think being in small groups constantly and working on things like book groups, Lego activities, etc. with other people in combination with the PBL units have increased these skills overall.  That being said, sometimes my students still struggle with effectively communicating in positive ways with each other.  There is always room for growth in these areas, and we conduct bullying meetings and morning meetings to try and work through some of these issues.  Creatively, I think students have grown tremendously.  They took more ownership of their work during the PBL units and most of them really pulled through and impressed me with their products.  For example, one of my students who generally doesn't care about school at all took his time outside of school to create a cool video showcasing animals that are extinct.  My kids that led the Peace Club group created a cool PowerPoint to share and they included pictures from their club and an imbedded video from Kid President.  As difficult as teaching through PBL can be, I can definitely see the benefits that go beyond learning the standards.  They are learning and practicing skills that will last into adulthood.

PBL Peer Presentation or PBLPP

I was very happy to hear before Spring Break that my principal was ready to move forward with my Peer Presentation.  I would love to hear any thoughts or suggestions my PBL friends might have to offer.
My guidelines for my Peer Presentation are the following:
 - work with Dawn (Yah)
- present 3 times during the morning of April 19
- 45 minute presentation during planning periods
- one presentation for each grade level (6th, 7th, 8th)
- introduce the elements of a PBL
- guide each group to design a PBL that will be implemented after state testing - kind of a mini-May PBL.
This leads me back to our time in summer Dawn asked us to create our first PBL using the strategies of PBL.   I am excited to "pay it forward" and see what wonderful ideas each grade level comes up with.
This will create a wonderful opportunity for our students to have a meaningful, learning experience during a time of the year which often falls short in the respect.

Blog Post 4 – Digital Curriculums and Naturally Integrating PBL

Over the past 4 years, I have worked to build a digital curriculum. It seemed like a natural progression for my program, as it allows for more time spent working on PBL projects and less time spent lecturing. To be honest, when I first started doing PBL, I did not even know what I was doing was its own thing. It happened organically; a PBL-style class was a natural fit for digital video production program. By the time, I was starting my photography program, the district had adopted an LMS, and I decided to go 100% with a digital curriculum.  

One thing to notice is that I am not calling my class a digital classroom. It is not. The classroom utilizes a digital curriculum, but you could not just take my class online, sans instructor, and get the same thing out of it. In-class time is vital; it allows for practice, discussion, feedback, and inspiration.  

In theory, you could “take” my class entirely online; the materials are set up in that way. However, you would be missing a lot, as many of the projects are collaborative, and because I use the online components to supplement the in-class learning.  

Here are some of the pros and cons I have encountered in my own classroom after switching from a more traditional to digital curriculum.  

Pros 

Less time spent lesson planning 

Easier collection of student work 

Hassle-free makeup work 

Flexible 

Easy opportunities for differentiation  

Modified/updated/etc. easily 

Easily fits into many different best-practices in education 

Authentic audience 

Easy to share and/or use for collaboration 

Lends itself to Project-Based Learning 
 

Cons 

Large amount of front-loading 

Technology-reliant 

Sub-optimal teaching style for less-motivated students 

Requires knowledge of current trends in both technology & education 

Easy to get stuck in a never-ending cycle of polishing/updating/expanding 

I will not cover all of the points above, but I would like to expand on a few of them.  

After you have established your digital classroom, it is simply a matter of updating, modifying, or expanding your resources as needed. I feel that up-front lesson planning streamlines the overall process of lesson planning. When I do lesson planning like this (have it all in one place where I can see everything,  A) not lesson planning several times a week and B) waiting in line for the copier. The con to this is that setting something up like this requires a lot of work on your end.

One piece of advice for this process; have backups of everything. Do not make your online repository the sole location where your resources are hosted. Something simple like an internet outage can ruin your teaching day if you do not have a local copy of your materials to pull up. However, something larger, like your web-hosting service shutting down, could mean the loss of all your data. Regardless, having backups is never a bad idea.  

One annoying thing using an online curriculum eliminates is students saying things like “Well I turned it in to you; you must have lost it.” They can’t argue with the submission status screen (I mean, they can, but it’s pretty pointless). Additionally, your data is now backed up on the cloud, without any work on your end (except for the initial setup). Backing up your data is important, especially if the student’s work does not stop after the initial hand-in (think long-term projects like portfolios).  

Having all of your assignments online has many benefits; one of my favorites is that students can access their entire curriculum without you, from anywhere with an internet connection (and, if they save things ahead of time, even without an Internet connection at all). This eliminates the issues of “I didn’t know what we were working on,” or students not picking up makeup work. The onus is now on the students to be responsible for keeping up with their work, because you have your materials available all semester long, with clear expectations for when things are due. Doing so also gives students a very easy roadmap to follow. A more subtle benefit is that as the semester progresses, students start to understand why your curriculum is arranged the way that it is; they can see the pieces beginning to fit together, thus making things more relevant for them.   

One point I think needs to be stressed is that with this type of classroom setup, the back-end work is, at least initially, much greater than your typical lecture-based classroom setting. I am constantly researching, updating, and expanding my curriculum. It is frustrating because I never feel done with it. I always find areas that need to be streamlined or improved, and I am coming across new, relevant examples that I want to add to inspire the kids. It winds up often being a labor of love. I think that it gets easier as you get used to it. You find you wind up having more and more time to simply help/guide/critique the kids on whatever project it is that y’all are tackling, as opposed to spending large amounts of class time teaching them how to do whatever it is that you need them to do. Often, you are simply filling in the gaps in the learning that they undertook themselves.  

One of the biggest drawbacks of this style of classroom lies in its core structure. At its core, it relies 100% on technology. If the tech isn’t working, the curriculum isn’t working. Therefore, if you have a technology problem, you have a teaching problem as well. Without some type of backup plan in place, you could find yourself in some difficult situations.  

The biggest issue I’ve found overall with this style of curriculum is that it requires a level of responsibility and motivation from students that they are often not used to. Students either do the work or they don’t; you cannot really force them to do it and if you go back and cover everything they were supposed to do in class, you are defeating the entire purpose of the initial setup. It’s great preparation for college. However, parents, guidance counselors, and administrators don’t always understand that by letting them make their own choices in how they choose to approach this style of curriculum, you are doing them a favor. You’re teaching them about personal responsibility, and how things work in the real world. In our current educational culture, if they don’t do the work and therefore their grade suffers accordingly, it must be the teacher’s fault. That’s not true at all, but don’t tell that to critics of education. Before I digress too much, I do believe that putting the information out there for to learn on their own time is the way to go, but it’s definitely going to take a paradigm shift in education for them to truly benefit from this style of teaching.

PBL and the Digital Classroom 

PBL feels like a natural extension of an online curriculum. The flexibility and adaptability of your curriculum allow for easy differentiation. I typically create all of my lessons with a “medium” and “hard” version. I have a baseline version that I expect everyone to be able to do, but I also include an optional extension of each lesson, for those students who get really into the assignments.  

An authentic audience is just a few clicks away with an online curriculum. With digital portfolios or presentations, an outlet to show off their work is just a few clicks away. These deliverables are easy to display to either a broad or targeted audience when everything is digital. With this content stored digitally, it’s easy to show growth over time, both on an individual basis and with a program as a whole.

  

Helen Reed - Blog Post 4 - Using Critical Friends

During my PBL projects, I did not have much success in using the Critical Friends protocol. This was the result from a few things; time, students not taking it seriously, and me not doing a good of enough job explaining it. But, after reading and hearing about you all talk about how critical friends worked for you, I wanted to give it another try. Since I had finished my Spring PBL I decided to use the Critical Friends protocol with my student's writing.

In the middle of our Westward Expansion unit, we began reading the novel, Dear Levi. This novel is written in the form of letters. Austin writes letters to his brother, Levi, who had to stay back on the east coast, telling him all about his adventure west. We used this novel as a mentor text to help us write our own letters west. The students got to be creative in their writing by making up what was going to happen on their journey, but had to format their writing in the form of a letter and include realistic events that could happen while traveling out west.

The students really took to this writing and were so excited to read and share their writings. It got to the point where everyone wanted to read everyone's story, instead of continue to write their own. That's where I decided to try Critical Friends. I asked the students, 'Who would be willing to let the entire class read their story?' Almost everyone's hands went up. Then I asked, 'Who would be willing to let us offer feedback and make corrections to your writing, in order to make it better?' Only a few hands went down. And with that, I knew Critical Friends would be more successful this time. I asked the students to choose one letter they had written that they wanted to make better. I would copy their writing from their notebook and project it onto the board to allow the class to read and offer feedback on. We reviewed the procedures for critical friends and then did our first example.

We read through through the first example then gave our 'I likes'. Naturally, the students mentioned parts they liked related to the content of the writing; 'I like how you included different hardships experienced along the trail. I like how you told us the reason you were traveling out west.' When we transitioned to the 'I wonders', I had to remind the students to again focus on the content, and not on, 'I wonder if you can spell x word correctly.' The students did a good job with the 'I wonders', for example, 'I wonder if you can tell us how you escaped from the Indians, not just tell us that you left when you saw them. I wonder if you can tell us how this person died on the trail.' This feedback was encouraging to me that the students were understanding how critical friends should work and about the content related to Social Studies that we had learned about. After the likes and wonders, I gave the student the opportunity to respond to their writing. The final part we added to Critical Friends was more of peer editing. The student whose writing we were reading told us that they knew they spelled some things wrong and wanted help on that too. So, their classmates readily volunteered to help them. Since I had projected their writing on the board, the students could come up to the board and make edits. The students made corrections with everything from capitalization, punctuation, grammar, word usage, to correcting the letter formatting. While all these corrections were taking place, the student whose writing it was was making corrections in their notebook. While not every student who participated in Critical Friends enjoyed watching their writing be marked up by their classmates, they were excited to share their writing, and know that it was indeed better after receiving feedback.

As a class we probably had seven or eight students participate in Critical Friends throughout the week. The students were motivated to do their best because they wanted to share what they had written and make it the best they possibly could. I am happy that I gave Critical Friends another shot and will continue to use this protocol with writing in the future, and try it again with PBL.

Blog Post #4-Genius Hour 2.0

For one of our fall assignments, I tried out Genius Hour within a current unit of study.  Since time was a factor, I had students write thick questions based on the unit we were currently working on, then complete research.  Students also recorded their new “I wonder” questions to add to the wonder wall.  I loved the excitement and enthusiasm, but hated that I did not have the time to devote to a “real” genius hour.

Over the last month, I have been working with our literacy coach to implement a “real” genius hour as part of a learning lab.  This learning lab will allow other teachers to come observe my class working on genius hour, and give a separate collaboration time for me to share the details, answer questions, and give support to all grade levels.  Since time was a factor last time, I have replaced my current morning work research time with genius hour as well as replaced my science time on Fridays.  This will allow students to have over an hour a week to work on what they are passionate about.

To start, I had students list all the things they were passionate about on a sheet of paper.  After that, they picked one and turned it into a thick question.  I was amazed at some of their questions, and I loved hearing the excitement of peers when they had the chance to share their questions. 

List of students thick questions:

As students are researching, they record their new learning in a genius hour folder and answer a weekly Padlet question.  I review their facts, write questions to help guide their learning, and make sure they are staying on track.  The Padlet is a great way for me to quickly see what the students need assistance with and find out their thoughts about this project. 

Sample of Padlet responses to the question-What do you need help with? (excuse all the spelling mistakes J )

As students research, I ask them to focus on what is important and determine the important information within a text.  I modeled how to do this using various text.  As students dug deeper into their research, they started to form other questions.  Students write these questions on a sticky note to place on our wonder wall.

In our most recent mini-lesson we co-constructed a rubric.  I have really enjoyed doing these and I am so glad my opinion of rubrics have changed. J

I have loved the excitement, motivation, and enthusiasm my students have showed during this project.  They often ask me, “Can we use our free time to work on genius hour?”  or “ Can I work on this from home?”  These questions are coming from students who struggle to complete daily assignments.  I am so excited to see how students use their research to create a presentation and present to parents and administrators.  I know that they are going to continue to blow me away.      

Jeneane Allgood-Blog Post #4--2nd PBL observation

In leiu of a 2nd observation, I asked Dawn to help me figure out a good way to have students individually upload pictures of their plants each week to chart their progress and hold them individually accountable. I was thinking I would use something like Dropbox or Google slides, but Dawn was able to offer me some other suggestions that she thought would work better and also allow for better collaboration and presentation. She showed me "emaze", and more specifically, demonstrated to me (one on one) how to use it. We discussed how students could use it and we felt like it would be a good idea to have each student make their own "photo album" in emaze (which kinda looks like a slide presentation). They could share it with their other group members and also share it with me.

We also realized that students needed more collaboration opportunities. So, today I introduced "emaze" to students and showed them how to use it, using a very basic example that I had created. I also typed up a direction sheet so that students could set up their emaze accounts at home and get started.  Students will be responsible for creating their own emaze. They are required to have a title slide, which details which factor they are investigating and which type of seed they are growing. They are also required to have an "experiment design" slide, where they will provide details about their experimental set-ups. Each week, they will post a weekly update with pictures and measurements of their plants (this will be due by Thursday morning). Thursday night, students will look at and write down comments and/or questions about their group members' weekly progress. Then, on Fridays, students will be given some time to meet with their group and troubleshoot any problems that they are having with their experiment.

I like that Dawn encouraged me to use emaze, a website that I was unfamiliar with. I believe most of my students are unfamiliar with it, too, but as I told them, "If I can figure out how to use it, so can you." I like that students are working on their own emaze (which we will later pull information from in order to make a group emaze). I am also trying to give them a lot of freedom on what their weekly update pages will look like, but I offered some suggestions on what it should include, like observations and measurements. I am excited to see what these emazes turn out like!