Standard and essential skills involve deconstructing the standard and identifying the essential skills needed to meet the standard.
PBL Project Design Focus When designing a PBL Project, your focus is to teach students academic content area knowledge and skills drawn from district or state standards. Your project also focuses on building students’ ability to think critically, solve problems, collaborate, and communicate (3Cs), which are the 21st Century skills students need to prepare for life and work in today’s...
How Does Project Based Learning Work? Planning Steps of PBL Three planning steps of PBL are Step 1: Plan with the End in Mind, Step 2: Plan the Assessments, and Step 3: Plan the Teaching and Learning. These three planning steps are according to Ross Cooper and Erin Murphy, authors of the book Project Based Learning Real Questions. Real Answers. How to Unpack PBL and Inquiry. In this blog, I will...
Table of Contents Effective Feedback Effective feedback needs to be reviewed as just right, just in time, and just for me. It can nourish unprecedented growth in learning for all students. O’Connell and Vandas, authors of Partnering With Students Building Ownership of Learning, deconstructed feedback by synthesizing research and best practices into an easy acronym, using the word feedback...
Learning Progressions: A Pathway for the 21st Century Teaching and Learning Clarify Learning Progression Clarify learning progression within standards is a critical first step for teachers and students to share ownership of learning with students, according to Mary Jane O’Connell and Kara Vandas, authors of the Partnering with Students Building Ownership of Learning book. O’Connell...
Phase 1: Clarity Design PBL with Clarity Rigorous Project Based Learning by Michael McDowell Video Michael McDowell, author of Rigorous PBL Design, suggests 5 steps to ensure students can answer where I am going in my learning: Step 1: Prioritize key learning intentions. Step 2: Create success criteria at surface, deep, and transfer levels. Step 3: Design driving questions that align with...
Design Shift 1 Clarity Shape Project Design with Clarity Michael McDowell’s first design shift, Clarity, focuses on shaping project design (PBL) to enable students to address question 1, where am I going in my learning? McDowell ensures clarity by using two design challenges that emerge for teachers: Supporting context and tasks from learning intention and success criteria Scaffolding...
Create Effective PBL Unit Introduction To help facilitate Project-Based Learning of your own, a fourth-grade teacher and James Fester, author of Creating a PBL unit Based on Local History in Elementary School, give 5 important tips that are effective in creating a Project-Based Learning unit: Determine Your Learning Goals Provide Context to Sustain Inquiry Survey Communities for...
Using Community Challenges Using Community Challenges to Collecting Real-World Problems School Budget Cut Using Community Challenges to promote mind and skill sets is to collect real-world problems that are a challenge or driving question for students. This is PBL’s first step in the learning process, which is a challenge or driving question. It involves a project that matters in the real...
A Public Product and Sustain Inquiry Project Based Learning Defined Project based learning is “a systematic teaching method that engages students in learning important knowledge and 21st century skills through an extended student-influenced inquiry process structured around complex, authentic questions and carefully designed products and learning tasks.” This is according to the book...
The Elements of Effective Instruction According to the article “The Elements of Effective Instruction” by Great Schools Partnership, these 5 elements of instructional practice are intertwined to foster student engagement with the ultimate goal of improving student outcomes and achievements, and it is a necessary foundation for fostering student ownership of learning. So, what happens...
What Students Know and Do Introduction To ensure students demonstrate an increase in ownership of learning, authors Crowe and Kennedy focus on practices in curriculum by using Strategic Learning Practices, which research shows increase the opportunities for learning – by increasing the opportunities for student ownership. Review In my previous Blog Post, What is the Look and Sound of...
Standards Based Planning Introduction Standards Based Planning Process includes planning lessons and units built on standards, and creating assessments that measure student progress toward standards. From ASCD article on Developing Well Designed Standards Based Units The Process of Standards-Based Planning Identify Essential Standards In their book, The Essentials for Standards-Driven Classrooms...
Where am I going? What is Learning Target? Most teachers remember being required to write lesson objectives on the board for students to view. This enables them to be evaluated and gives students an understanding of the purpose of the lesson. However, it is unlikely that most students fully comprehend the intention or outcome. Therefore, I am proposing strategies to increase student learning...