In what has been one of the most exciting curricular developments of late at St. Gregory, our ninth graders are tackling each winter an elaborate multi-disciplinary project on the topic of bioethics. The assignment comes jointly from the ninth grade biology and English teachers, and requires students in teams to research an assigned topic in bioethics, address driving questions, take it through multiple steps of revision and reflection, and then publish their completed work in a presentation which they deliver to other students, after which they actually provide a test-for-understanding quiz to those students about their presentation.
Below these four presentation Prezis and video (two prezis after the jump (more), which I am so happy to be sharing, is more detailed information about the assignment, including a rubric and the project “pitch” requirements. (You may need to click on “more.”) I thank the St. Gregory students whose fine work this is for giving me permission to share.
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Here is a link to the test for understanding quiz which was prepared to accompany this presentation, designed by the students as part of their project. (it is amusing to me to read question 4, multiple choice option b). (more…)
A recurrent theme on this blog is advocating learning by doing in the 21st century, and I argue that we should be seizing the opportunities new technologies present to facilitate our students in shifting their focus from consumption to creation, from receiving information to producing knowledge and applying it to become themselves active innovators.
We have been working throughout our curriculum to promote this idea– see the way that our AP Gov’t class has written their own textbooks or created their own political campaigns complete with TV ads and websites as examples. Our Design Built Tech Innovation class, often celebrated here on the blog, is a highlight of our efforts in this direction.
In the TED talk above, MIT Professor Neil Gershenfeld explains that we need in our schools a ”Fab Lab — a low-cost lab that lets people build things they need using digital and analog tools. It’s a simple idea with powerful results.”
We’ve won the digital revolution; let’s look after the digital revolution to what comes next.
I’ve never understood the boundary between computer science and physical science… Computer science is one of the worst things ever to happen either to computers or science.
I started a new class, How To Make Almost Anything. Students were not there [in this class] to do research, they were there because they wanted to make stuff.
Just year after year — and I finally realized the students were showing the killer app of personal fabrication is products for a market of one person. You don’t need this for what you can get in Wal-Mart; you need this for what makes you unique.
[paraphrase] When we opened FabLabs, we found a pattern: Empowerment begins, and then Education follows, serious, hands on education, Problem-Solving follows, and in turn Businesses grow around this problem-solving, and eventually there is Invention: real invention happening in these labs.
So, we’re just at the edge of this digital revolution in fabrication, where the output of computation programs the physical world. So, together, these two projects answer questions I hadn’t asked carefully. The class at MIT shows the killer app for personal fabrication in the developed world is technology for a market of one: personal expression in technology that touches a passion unlike anything I’ve seen in technology for a very long time. And the killer app for the rest of the planet is the instrumentation and the fabrication divide: people locally developing solutions to local problems.
With this as inspiration, we at St. Gregory are pushing ahead to develop further our own version “Fab Lab” in Dennis Conner’s Physics classroom. Already it is an astounding place, filled with terrific tools and resources for construction, measurement, and analysis. Students are building solar energy stations, trebuchet catapults, and much, much more in this FabLab. But we are not done: there is more to do.
Next on our list is the installation of a 3D printer, ordered recently from MakerBot and which will be ready to go for students next month. (more…)
Several of my great enthusiasms come together in the the video above and below from the School at Columbia and their outstanding, superb Tools-at-Schools project. Don Buckley, the School’s Director of Innovation, seems a prime driver here. For me, watching the videos is a wonderful learning experience; I was able to learn more about the design process (so crucial to innovation), visualize quality PBL in action, and at the same time gain new understanding of how school furniture can be updated to better enhance innovative learning environments.
Several elements stand out:
1. The program gives students real-world tasks connected to their own experience and relevant to their lives, tasks to which they themselves can bring their own expertise. (more…)
Good morning, and welcome to School year 2011-12, St. Gregory’s 32nd year! It is great to see you all here, and may I say, you look terrific today– such great looking style– and I want to especially welcome our new students, including those from China, Germany, and Alaska. They came all this way to come to St. Gregory. OUr student body is again over 300 students, and it feels great to have you all here.
Screening the following clip:
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I loved this film, particularly its treatment of the students working together to create their film. I realize that for me this movie, Super 8, had particular resonance, as it was about a group of 13 year olds in 1979, and I myself was 13 in 1979.
Super 8 the movie has great lessons and inspiration for us as learners, and I want to share with you my Super 8 takeaways, or Super 8 inspirations for a great school year of learning and growth:
These students identified and followed their passion. The main character did not want to go away to sports camp for the summer: his passion then was film and he pursued it vigorously!
They used the best available contemporary technology to create and communicate. They regularly went down to the camera store to see what was new, and they wanted to be informed and to use the best contemporary tools to accomplish their mission. (more…)
Our new St. Gregory Design Build Technological Innovation class continues to inspire me; it is so great to see students identifying their passions and designing projects around them, tackling difficult problems, and persevering through difficulties to design and build new technologies.
The video above showcases another example of the learning of this class, in this case the design and construction of a “Giant Trike.” My appreciation goes to the excellent teacher, Dennis Connor, who runs this class and also produced the video, and of course to our fine student Alex who designed and built the bicycle.
Posted by Jonathan Martin under Uncategorized | Tags: PBL | 1 Comment
“Are you going to make us craft as homework a home-made California mission in middle school and high school?”
No.
Sometimes when educators speak about project based learning (PBL), parents, students, and other educations think that what we mean by project based learning are at-home activities which kids are assigned as an extension of their classroom learning, and which parents often bear the burden of.
As regular readers know, I am passionate about the importance of project based learning as a core component of 21st century learning and of “becoming a school of the future.” But I am equally passionate about the importance of being more precise about our definitions of and standards for high quality PBL, and carefully distinguishing it from learning extensions or enrichment via “activities.”
So I am delighted to see the fine educators of High Tech High, which is proudly a high quality PBL school, offering videos to clarify further what is and what isn’t high quality PBL. In one video, entitled, What PBL isn’t, teacher Jeff Robin explains carefully what PBL isn’t isProject Oriented learning. (I really wish I could embed these videos here, but I could not get the video embed code to work. Apologies, but follow the link).
Project oriented learning looks something like this: First, teachers decided they need to teach students everything they need to know, getting all the basics down first, and then they ask students to do a project about what they learned.
“All right kids, two weeks to go in the semester,” the teacher says “ok, kids let’s make a project.” The project is oriented toward the things the kids have been learning in class. Then the kids do the project and then do the exhibition or presentation. There might be some smart things in there, but it is not PBL because the kids did not have to learn all these things to get the project done, the project didn’t run the semester: the semester ran and then kids did the project. (more…)
In a recent post I shared a guest post by a visitor writing about the excellent use of the block schedule format by teachers at St. Gregory. In that same vein I want to share my observations of a terrific 75 minute period I enjoyed last week in the classroom of Corinne Bancroft as she taught 6th grade English.
Sadly, this is all too rare an event, my spending an entire period in a single classroom, but I give credit to Ms. Bancroft for her persistence and warm enthusiasm in encouraging me to visit her classroom.
The 75 minute period was divided into three parts:
students worked in groups on a project for 35 minutes;
Ms. Bancroft facilitated a group book discussion for about 20 minutes;
and students worked individually on their laptops on an essay they were writing for the class while Ms. Bancroft individually conferenced with them for 20 minutes.
Class began with the direction to work in groups on their major end-of-year project, the Gathering Blue project based on the book of the same name. Ms. Bancroft developed this herself, derived from her classroom discussion of reading this YA novel (for more information you can follow the link or see at bottom, where I have pasted it into the post.) (more…)
Suzie Boss, co-author with Jane Krause of Reinventing Project Based Learning with Technology, visited St. Gregory for the past two days, and it was a great pleasure to share our school with her and discuss together project based learning with technology at St. Gregory. Her presentation to our faculty (to reiterate, it is Suzie’s presentation, not my own), is above, and it stimulated conversation for several days.
I have listed links to the resources she shared in her presentation below at bottom (click more).
After her presentation to the full faculty, she then was kind enough to spend the next day and a half visiting with small groups of teachers for a block at a time; in each block teachers shared with Suzie for her feedback projects either already implemented or already in development. I am intending in a near-future post to share some of our teachers’ “take-aways” from these conversations.
Project Based Learning with Technology has been identified by the National Association of Independent Schools Guide to Becoming a School of the Future as a core “Unifying Theme” of Schools of the Future. Many in 21st century learning, including the Partnership for 21st century skills, High Tech High, and New Tech Network Schools emphasize PBL-T as an essential vehicle for students to better actively learn and master skills such as collaboration, creativity, critical thinking, and communications– the skills we highlight as essential goals for our St. Gregory students.
I didn’t participate in most of the faculty sessions, but I enjoyed a sequence of dinners and lunches with Suzie and various others, and over the course of two days’ conversation several key themes about PBL emerged for me.
1. We need to be cautious about the idea that PBL can be effectively deployed as a primarily at-home/homework event. (more…)
Yesterday I had the great pleasure of sitting to hear a “pitch” from a group of four students proposing a new green energy patio area as a laptop recharging station. The students are all participants in our new Innovation course, called Design/Build Technology Innovation, taught by our excellent Physics instructor Dennis Conner.
This is the proposal the students submitted in advance of their “pitch.”
Proposal
Use the Maintenance Building as a “base” for a solar panel recharging system.
(Set up display that monitors energy output from the panels.
Construct a ramada/patio area that showcases these technologies.
In future, we would like to add a wind turbine to the power system.
Request
We would like to use the storage closet next to the storage room(old photo lab) to house electronics that should be shielded from the elements.
We would like to use the roof of the building to try various orientations of solar panels. (more…)
PBL being a favorite topic here, I am always excited to learn new opportunities and applications for project based learning in our classroom. NAIS, in its own hard thinking about the future of education, has identified high level, academically rigorous PBL as a centerpiece of the educational program of Schools of the Future.
Project-based learning, as an integral part of the school’s program, [should be] woven throughout all grade levels and disciplines.
My emphasis has been primarily on PBL with Web 2.0 technologies, as best demonstrated in the work of New Tech Network schools, which I have visited several times, and in the writings of Suzie Boss, which I have written about often.
But often it is great to set aside the computer (says the blogger who really ought to be packing right now for NAIS), and facilitate our students in making stuff from scratch with their own hands, knowing that this requires a thoughtful and thorough process of planning, preparation, design, collaboration, analysis, and action, and results.
One of the defining characteristics of our species: Our ability to construct the things we need to understand and function in our lives. How did we manage to get so far off course, to take something that is so quintessentially human and make it so alien? (more…)
HTH is one of a very few examples shown to me as a classroom teacher…over and over and over again. My colleagues’ reaction: “If it is so easy, why aren’t there more examples? How many times are we going to watch that video of the Blood Project?”
Here, for your viewing pleasure and information, are more exemplary videos articulating the value of PBL in forms more substantial and sophisticated than the disappointing PBL explained video. In each case, there is a demonstration of excellence in the completed student products that testify to the serious academic rigor PBL can accomplish, a rigor about which, I believe, PBL skeptics are often skeptical. Three school networks are represented in the following videos, New Tech Network, High Tech High, and Envision/Metro Schools, and I am pleased to say I have spent entire school days shadowing students at schools in each of these three networks.
“Are you going to make us craft as homework a home-made California mission in middle school and high school?” 
