by Mike Kaechele
I thought I would reply to Shelly's question about what is different this year. I am at a new problem based learning high school that opened two weeks ago. We have just over one hundred freshman coming from twenty different districts in our county. They have never been in a PBL environment before so we spent the first seven days on a project where students explored what our school is about through various activities. On the last day they had two hours to edit videos they had been taking through out the week and present to their class. The groups are allowed to go into the common spaces and work collaboratively. This is what it looked like:
As a teacher I find this type of learning exciting. We have an open filtering policy. Between the open internet and structure some students are a bit lost and off task at times as this is such a huge culture shift from the traditional classroom that they are accustomed to. I will not claim that we have this all figured out but I loved this moment of walking around and watching students work. I am fully prepared to be amazed at what students will do the next few years as they grow in our space.
Here is one of my favorites: