Blog Post #11

What can we learn from these teachers?

In Brian Crosby's lecture, Back to the Future, he was trying to get across to why students are so disconnected. Within his fourth grade classroom, he shared several examples of projects he had done in his classroom. Mr. Crosby focused on empowering students to be learners in his classroom. With his projects, he wanted the students to do things on their own by collaborating, connecting, and motivating themselves. Towards the end of his lecture, he points out that he feels teachers who are not on board with PBL, are just racing their students through school. Crosby said we, as educators, have to make sure we give them opportunity to build schema in the world. Overall, we need to go back to building schools that honor kids.



The Blended Learning Cycle was a video made by Mr. Paul Anderson. His definition of the blended learning cycle included Blended learning and the Learning cycle. Blended learning includes information that is found online, mobile, and in the classroom. The Learning cycle is based around the five E's: Engage, Explore, Expand, Explain, Evaluate. With these two cycles blended together, he formed an acronym that he often uses to incorporate the Blending Learning Cycle in his classroom. His acronym is QUIVERS. QU stands for the question. I stands for investigate. V stands for video. E stands for elaboration. R stands for review. And S stands for summary quiz. With this acronym, Mr. Anderson saw improvement in learning. He said he now feels his students are actually learning and understanding the subject. One last thing Mr. Anderson noted was that he doesn't feel you learn something unless you can explain it yourself.

Making Thinking Visible was a short video showing how PBL is used in the classroom. In the video, the students were asked to come up with a headline for a project they were working on. Overall, this was the starter headline for a whole project coming soon to them. At the end of the project, the students were asked how the headline changed after going through with the project. We can see here that learning evolves and you can always build on what you started out with. Raise the bar, don't set standards.





In Sam Pane 5th Grade, the students in this fifth grade classroom were leaning how to be good digital citizens. To display what they learned, after discussing it as a class, the teacher let them loose in creating their own superhero. They were then going to make a comic strip with them and their super hero, showing how to be a good digital citizen. After a few minutes of creating the project, the teacher asked them to get up and move to another table to critique another students work. Overall, this teacher gave the students a sense of power and individualism. He also applied a real world situation, which makes it more meaningful in the end. They also had the incorporation of integrating subjects. The students were using dialogue and also building a complete narrative. Students are always exposed online, so the teacher was teaching, through PBL, how to effectively be a good digital citizen.

Project Based Learning was focused on a school in Canada. Three teachers of different subjects, collaborated to make learning more effective. This brings engaged learnings and deeper understanding. This cannot be easily accomplished in segregated classroom. In this video, English and History collaborated together. With collaboration, the teachers in these classrooms get more time which leads to more effective learning. It makes a difference from what students learn in just a one hour class. Overall, this is an example of collaboration working better for two subjects, rather than working independently and not getting as much across to students effectively.


Roosevelt Elementary PBL Program goes over the different steps and accomplishments of PBL. In Project Based Learning there are results of in-depth learning, integrated thematic instruction, a "real world" problem, research based, and project and presentation. Teachers are teaching students how to think for themselves while they themselves are learning to collaborate together. The educators of Roosevelt Elementary learned when students get to choose, it gives them a sense of power and a sense of ownership. It also lets them experience what adults do in the real world. Studemts learn to work independently but also in groups. Students social skills build on each other, especially when they get a sense of community. Overall, with PBL, there is more student engagement. Every child has a spark in them for what's in the world around them. Project Based Learning will allow them to focus and question what's around them.