Congratulations Lee and Bianca. Look forward to following your future learning journey.
Tag: PBL
These project outlines are all based on my PBL model, which is explained in my two books Are Humans Wild At Heart? and Why Do We Tell Stories? Both of these are published through Hawker Brownlow Education and are full of projects for English teachers to run with their students.
Please, please if you use these projects OR if you use my model of PBL (discover, create, share), it would mean SOOO much to me if you credited my work. Many of the Praxis projects below were co-created with my very creative colleagues James Blanch and Kate Munro. Please respect our hard work by being thoughtful in your acknowledgement of your sources.
Bianca Hewes collects together a number of her project outlines that she has created with Canva. As with Kath Murdoch’s inquiry journeys, Hewes provides some great provocations. Although some of them could easily be translated, their strength lies in thinking differently. In addition, I too like Canva and use it to create the covers for my monthly newsletter.
From next week, each Wednesday afternoon throughout Term 3 there will be learning sessions which combine the interests and knowledge of students with their own strengths, talents, interest and/or hobbies. Adventure Learning will conclude with a Showcase event on Wednesday 26 September. Parents and the wider community will be more than welcome to view displays, presentations and projects delivered by students. We look forward to conveying more information to you throughout this term about Adventure Learning.
As always, this not intended to be an exhaustive list, but rather a series of reminders, starting points or check-ins. The continual pursuit of connecting learning and the real world will only get more vital and intense. These various paths to authenticity can help solidify that connection.
Proposal: Changing your high school structures to match the thinking of Finland, New Zealand, Ken Robinson, and many others will halve your class sizes and stress levels.
Richard Wells reflects upon the structures of high school and potential of projects to shake this up. He provides a series of ideas to support this:
It’s easier implemented as a full school and not in a seperate programme.
Teachers design a menu of interdisciplinary projects based around themes or phenomenon that have a focus on key existing curriculum.
All non-teaching / personal time slots are simultaneous for all. This means all teachers, rooms and resources are timetabled for simultaneous use, meaning each teacher shares the load and you have smaller student numbers to monitor on either a project and mentor group.
Consider Zoning groups of classrooms into Project zones. The usual 5 teachers from 5 rooms are timetabled into the zone to each mentor their smaller number of students.
All teachers take on a general academic mentoring group to focus on learning and project progress.
Teachers share the planning and monitoring of projects which makes the measuring of progress more palatable than traditional standardised teaching and marking.
Projects can be designed generically enough around a theme or phenomenon that they can be simultaneously offered to different age groups with appropriate expectations for outcomes. This can save teacher workload.