So…like most teacher nerds, I have spent a good deal of time this summer planning the upcoming school year. I knew I needed to do some things differently–I didn’t have a great year, and I want to change things.
For years, I have felt that many students were just going through the motions–they knew how to play school, how to do just enough to get by. But they weren’t really invested in their learning. I’ve wanted to change that. Not that easy. Students, obsessed with the magical 70 that meant they were passing the class, didn’t try their hardest. Parents, not always willing to embrace anything new, anything that was too different, didn’t always know how to push students to work harder. Me, knowing things could be different, but not always confident that I could make it work, didn’t fully immerse myself into what was possible.
This year, my goal is to change all that. I’ve decided to try to attain this goal in a couple of different ways. One thing is project-based learning. I’ve done Genius Hour a couple of times, and most students really enjoy being able to learn about whatever it is that they’re interested in. So, I made the decision to turn the big units in my class into project-based learning units. I teach ELA, which is more specifically about writing, so there wasn’t much out there that I could pilfer from. But, after weeks of research, I feel pretty good about the ideas I’ve come up with. All summer, I’ve read books, and watched webinars, and listened to podcasts, and read blogs, and after all that, I’ve been able to come up with some ideas I think will work pretty well, and that I think students will enjoy. I haven’t planned them out completely, because I want students to be a part of that, but I’ve made a starting point.
The first unit will be a recap of grammar. I’ve checked the TEKS (Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills), and I know that students should enter the 7th grade with a pretty good grasp of the parts of speech, and basic grammar. But, that is not the case. Far too many students can tell me that a noun is a person, place, or thing, but not pick one out in a sentence. Some of the 7th grade standards are pretty specific about things–one of them talks about the subjunctive mood of a verb, which is fine unless students don’t really understand verbs. Another mentions appositives and appositive phrases–simple unless students don’t understand nouns. So I decided our first PBL unit will reinforce grammar. It will be more teacher-led than our subsequent units. To my knowledge, there are no PBL elementary schools in my district, so kids will not be used to this type of learning. That’s why I want the first unit to be more teacher-led. I can show them how it works, and then let them take the reins more on the following units.
I hope to tie the fiction unit into The Outsiders, which all the students will read in their reading classes. We can discuss the social issues in the book, and the students can decide on the ones they want to focus on for the unit.
For the nonfiction unit, I thought we would observe ant farms, research the habits and characteristics of ants, and that would be the focus of the unit.
I’d like to get some butterfly larvae for the poetry unit, and have students observe them during their metamorphoses. In my mind, metamorphosis is a great topic for poetry.
A month ago, I really had no idea how to make all of this work. I just knew that something had to change, because I didn’t feel that all kids were learning. Then, I started reading, and things started coming together. One of the best books I read was LAUNCH: Using Design Thinking to Boost Creativity and Bring Out the Maker in Every Student, by John Spencer and A. J. Juliani. This book is really incredible. I’ve told everyone I know about it! If you want to get kids thinking, and learning, and being excited about it, read this book, and do what it says.
I also read Project Based Learning Starter Kit. This book is from the Buck Institute, and they definitely know what they are talking about. Reading this book gave me the confidence to go forward with what I knew was the right thing. Right after that, I read Hacking Project Based Learning, and like all the Hack Learning books, it was full of great advice. I would absolutely recommend both of these books if you’ve toyed with the idea of PBL.
I love podcasts, because I can listen to them while I’m driving, while I’m getting ready for work in the morning, while I’m washing dishes, pretty much any time. There are lots of great educational podcasts, but lately I’ve become addicted to Jennifer Gonzalez’ Cult of Pedagogy. This podcast is where I first heard about the idea of self-paced learning (check out episode 30!). Once I heard it, I couldn’t think about anything else. It was an idea that wormed its way into my brain, and it was not going away. I did more internet research, and I ran across The Grid Method. This is a way of teaching for mastery, which is what we should all be striving for, and I knew I had found something that I had been searching for. The basic premise of the method is that students learn at their own pace, working from a “grid,” which is a list that starts with low-level tasks, and works its way to increasingly more difficult assignments for each standard that students need to learn. As ELA teachers will know, every unit we teach has about a million standards attached to it, and many of them are repeated in every unit. So it was clear that I would have to adapt everything I had learned to fit my curriculum. But, as I realized, it is doable, and the more I work on it, the more confident I feel. I combined everything I had learned into a hybrid of the grid and the playlist, and that’s what I will give my students this year.
I’ll keep you posted on how things go, but at the moment, I’m jazzed about the upcoming year.