"What Can Teachers and Students Teach Us About Project Based Learning?"
By: Noah Armstrong
Teachers- Teachers are how we learn anything as teachers. This isn't like the subjects that we as teachers plan to teach. In math or science or history there are facts that have been proven or recorded. In the art of teaching these facts we learn from the experimentation of ourselves and others. This is how we learn what works and what doesn't.
From the videos we were assigned for this blog post I learned how to break down a project to make sure that it follows PBL (Project Based Learning) principles. The point is to engage the students and empower them to develop real life applicable skills as well as learn the coarse material, apposed to the traditional project that encourages the attitude of just doing something for the teacher or just to pass a test.
Students- Students and their reaction to and performance in PBL is really the merit of PBL. You may not get it right the first time or at least not to your satisfaction. Like every new thing you introduce you may have to make some tweaks to your pet project to make it realistic or to get the exact results you want as far as preference and attitude.
Seeing the video of what motivates students and what they like as rewards was not only amusing but also informative. Some of the ideas for rewards like "classroom money" seemed like creative new approaches. To me it seems like a bit of bribery. The idea of edible rewards by the older student made me laugh because it sounds like something I would say.
It surprised me that some of the smaller kids had some of the same motivations for doing well in school as I do. Elementary school aged children are already thinking of grades as ways to get into good colleges and provide for their families.
This would be the smartest guy in class!
I really liked how you break it down into teachers and students into different paragraphs. That was a good idea.
ReplyDeleteHi Noah! I also really liked how you broke it down between what we can learn from teachers and what we can learn from students. I agree that the students performance in the project really matters and that it might not work out the way we want to at first. Just like everything else in life, you live and you learn from the mistakes made along the way!
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