Carpe Diem!

After basking in the glories of the Roman empire, our students seized the opportunity to create a newspaper chronicling one year during the decline and fall of the once great empire. They researched the year to find information to write a lead news story, a human interest story, an article based on an "interview" of a key Roman figure of the time as well as writing two editorials that addressed two different causes for the empire's demise. Students wrote, revised, edited, and rewrote their stories before putting them into a Word template created to look like a newspaper. Most of them created publications well beyond what we expected to see! When we displayed the newspapers, the students were pleasantly suprised to see how well they turned out, and they were eager to share their work with the "judges" who chose the "Paw"litzer Prize winners for each house. We received many favorable comments from those who read the students' work. On debriefing day, the students felt that they had indeed learned a great deal about the Roman empire and were pleased with their final products.

Focused Freshmen-an oxymoron?

If someone had told me two years ago that it was possible for my freshmen to work in self-directed teams and be productive and only a handful would be off-task, I'd have laughed in disbelief. That was the case this Friday in our English/World History classroom. I didn't think much of it as our students worked with each other, dividing tasks among their teams, researching with the internet, textbooks, and other print resources. It was only that evening when I compared this group-work experience to any other project I'd tried in my traditional classroom that I realized how far we have come.
Looking back to our PBLs in September, I remember that our students needed us much more (to help brainstorm, divide the responsibilities, keep them focused, research, and coach them along with their final products). Although we still have to re-direct a handful of them to focus on the task at hand, our roles are evolving to less of the "micro-managing" and more to challenging them to go further with their ideas through questioning.
How did we get here? Through their previous team-work experiences, I think our students have learned that they will be held accountable for their work and that they will not be given extra time when they didn't use class time efficiently. It took those prior experiences, many of which weren't pretty and make me cringe to think about, to get them to this more focused and independent level.
Now the question is what do we focus on improving next?

Newspaper coverage of our Dropout Prevention Grant

http://timeswv.wv.ussrv07v.newsmemory.com/default.php?pSetup=timeswv

http://energizestudents.org/Article-View.aspx?story_id=168266601

Disruptive Innovation

Here is a 21 minute video about Disruptive Innovation, which is really important for those of us on the school reform frontier.  Scott McLeod blogs at dangerouslyirrelevant.org.