Success
Set Up Guided By Students
I knew it would do me no good to set a schedule or ways of working without my students having input. Their world and mine are completely upside down right now. I suspect many of them are working even more now and some are taking care of siblings. Some have only their phones to use while others have computer with internet access. Therefore, it was important to get their input on how we would work together. I held some informal focus group sessions and got some guidance from the students.Google classroom is the platform students chose as their classroom management tool at the beginning of the school year during the Ultimate Classroom project. As I talked with students about how I can share with them the details of the project, I asked them to choose between Google Classroom or a simple website. One student in my first focus group suggested both. However, everyone else said Google classroom so majority won. I used the assignment feature but with a focus topic to help students access portions of the project. I also posted directions including video explanations of how to get to the assignments.
Students liked the idea of having times spread across the day for them to meet since work hours may be different for people. One student suggested 8 a.m., noon and 5 as asynchronous times to meet. I decided to go with these times and hold them on Tuesdays and Thursdays. It will act primarily as Q&A with an option of a miniature lesson if needed. As a school, we have a math help line where a couple of math teacher stays on a Google Hangout so students can join as needed. I also shared with students that I am on this helpline from 1:30 to 2:30 p.m. each day.
There are several social media tools I wanted to use but didn't want to use anything they would not feel comfortable. Everyone was comfortable with Youtube and Instagram however Facebook not so much. I decided to build out my youtube channel and add playlist sections to better help students use it through the rest of the school year. I will also use instagram for a few of the projects given students are comfortable.
Moderate Participation
Given the little contact I made with students, I was thinking only 3 or 4 may participate in the first project. However, I had 11 students work on assignments this past week. Near the end of the week a few more reached out as to how they can participate. I only had one person join me for the Q&A session but that may change this coming week. As I meet with my math department, I had the highest turnout of students actually completing work who were juniors and seniors. Freshmen teachers had a better response from students than I did.Spirit Rather than the Letter
I absolutely love PBLWorks structure for Project-Based Learning. I say all the time that the essential elements are basically best teaching practices put together. The project path helps plan how these elements work together in a simple process. However, the conditions and background of my students will make it difficult to follow all of these parts to the letter. Although they had grown in many areas of implementing the process, they still lacked certain skill sets. Add to this the lack of us being able to meet consistently every day and the result is an adaptation to the spirit of the structure.As a result of my students condition, I chose to focus on small amounts of elements and make the path a series of tasks rather than driven by questions. For this project, the focus was on challenging problem, voice and choice, authenticity and public product. I will change up the element focus based upon the project and how my students respond over time.
Lessons Learned
More Scaffolding
As always, I thought I provided the necessary scaffolding for students to make a video promoting people to complete the census. You can never have enough scaffolds in a project. However, distance learning has shown me that the scaffolds are very different than when you are in the classroom. Distance learning works best when students have a moderate to high ability to self-regulate and confidence in their ability to learn. My students are at very different levels with these skills. My scaffolds had some aspects that addressed this variation but not enough.
Going forward, I am going to have to make the connection from the learning to the product tighter. Rather than give students two days to work on the product, I will have them work on a small portion of it each day. I will also use nearpod as we did in class to help deliver lessons to go along with the assignment. I thought giving them voice and choice in reviewing different materials would be supportive of their needs however they need more structure.
What are your successes and lessons learned during this journey?
