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The Hobbit, Really? Really.
Jarret Kaufman
Wanting to encourage my freshly graduated co-teacher, who I was also mentoring, I reluctantly agreed to use The Hoobit as a fiction text for the entire 8th grade at Owen Middle School. I was none too thrilled, but decided to take one for the profession. At this point if someone said PBL my first thought would have been to correct them and say it’s actually PBR. I had no clue what was about to happen in my classroom. -
Frustration: the muse of invention
I asked a class of “high fliers” how they kept track of events and one girl mentioned she flipped to the map in the front of the book quite often. I mused that I wished other students would do that. Then a student suggested putting the map on the wall. I joked that they should do that for me. They begged to do it and poof: they figured out how to grid the map, break into groups, use my document camera to project the grid map, and proceeded to excitedly and with much engagement recreate the map. -
Incorporating the Common Core
After weeks of Bilbo, Gandalf, and company we were off to see the movie. It was a week before break and the original plan was to have the students write an essay comparing book to film and evaluating the director’s decision. Everyone was tired and an essay seemed tedious. Half joking I said just let them do whatever they want and the Media Center director said “Ah, a true PBL.” -
Shock and Awe
Student Work ExamplesAt this point I figured out PBL stood for Project Based Learning. I wasn’t sure what it meant, but the students took the objective of comparing book to film and evaluating Mr. Jackson’s film-making to heart. I had 100% engagement and no classroom management issues in the days leading up to vacation. I had projects ranging from cakes to origami to minecraft to video avatars…you name it. -
I need to figure this out!
PBL WebsiteOddly the projects from The Hobbit make me some kind of PBL “expert” and I’m asked to lead a PD on PBL. This forces me to do some actual research. I discover that assigning a project and PBL are not the same. The PD opened me up to other teachers who wanted to do cross-curricular assignments. -
Unsung Civil War Hero Project
Civil War Unsung Hero ProjectThe first cross-curricular project I completed was with the Social Studies teacher on my team. We told the students the Swannanoa Valley Historical Society has decided to build a monument to an “unsung” figure from the Civil War and has asked you to research and propose someone. The students used old civil war letters and primary documents and created a chronological presentation of a soldier’s experience. -
Civil War Unsung Hero Project Examples!
Student Examples<a href='http://www.buncombe.k12.nc.us/Page/35358' >More Student Examples</a> -
Biotech Want Ad Project
Project Description The first PBL with the 8th grade science teacher was a project, but not a PBL. She was uncomforatble with just giving the students task, which in this case was to create a want-ad for a bio-tech job. Instead she spoon fed the research using direct instruction and the project acted more as an assessment of whether they understood the lecture or not. -
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Interesting News
The Leaf FestivalThe Megaphone Project The Lake Eden Arts Festival uses my middle school's parking lot for their festival and in return supply us with festival tickets and artist residencies. This Spring, however, they let me, their in school liason, know that we'll be getting an art installation instead of a residency. Hmmm... -
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SOLD!
The science teacher decides to loosen control on her bored digital natives and free them from the direct instruction! I combine the work we've been doing on poetry and the economy of language with her unit on disease and we give the students a disease and have them create a PSA with only a sample of other PSA's as a guide. -
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The Megaphone Project
For this project I proposed that we as teachers take a step back and let the students take control of the whole project, not just the item to be presented, but the presentation and the organization as well. Attached to this Megaphone Project in our Media Center, student from the 6th, 7th, and 8th grade are going to open a Museum of Sound in which they will create displays which explore the science, math, art, music, and language of sound. -
Period: to
The Meagphone Project: What is actually happening
I wanted the idea of students constructing their own knowledge to break free of the normal school constrants: classrooms and grades. I wanted this to be a whole school effort. Instead, the pressure of testing has limited those willing to participate. At this moment I have the entire 6th grade working on displays, the art teacher and her classes working on crowd control and assembling the museum, and the health teacher is conducting experiments the 7th grade math will construct into infographics.
