Thinking a lot about differentiation this week. Differentiation is one of those words, at least in my district, similar to progress monitoring or testing. It seems to have acquired a negative connotation, teachers hear differentiation and they hear "more work" or "I have to prepare 18 different lessons".
When thinking about how to add differentiation into our project I found myself thinking two things. First, differentiation is not more work, it is simply what good teachers do, you get to know your students and you meet their needs. Second, differentiation seems to be built into PBL. Student choice and an authentic, engaging driving question should inspire all learners to work at their level to answer the question. You, of course, would need to provide accommodations for students with skill gaps that would prevent them from accessing the information needed to work on the project.
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THIS. WEEK. WAS A. LOT. OF. WORK.
I am incredibly thankful that I am collaborating with an amazing partner. I could not imagine being able to complete all of the work that we did this week by myself. I think next time I create a PBL I will develop drafts of several of the documents that we were required to create this week much earlier in the process. Even if they change significantly as the project changes it would be much easier to have the frameworks ready to go. Although.... the next PBL I create probably will not be for a class and there for not driven by due dates. A reflection on myself... I have always preferred to work independently on assignments and projects. I am too much of a "perfectionist". However, now that I have 2 small children, a husband, a job, and graduate school, I have had to relax quite a bit in order to maintain sanity and actually sleep. Collaborating on this project, especially virtually, with someone whose name I did not even know 12 weeks ago has been a surprisingly wonderful experience. While Karen and I were not always 100% on the same page we were always able to talk or chat our way to an agreement. Creating our assessment plan was equally challenging and quite simple. I think for me the idea behind PBL is still a little disconnected from my grading (assessing learning) philosophy. When I think about grades, I think about 2-4 pieces of carefully chosen or created evidence that shows student progress toward a specific standard.
PBL, while clearly aligned to content standards, has a scope that it much broader. In my world, you would want to have an assessment or evidence piece for each of the standards incorporated into the PBL. That seems like it would take A LOT of fun out of the project. I guess my struggle is/was how do we create formative and summative assessments that address the progress toward and completion of the project goals and not just a single standard. I LOVE the idea of incorporating PBL into my classroom. I think I would need to go through the process a couple of times though before I felt comfortable being able to pull my content standard grades out when appropriate while still allowing the project to open kids to 21st century and technology standards. |
AuthorI am a mom, wife, student, teacher, and lover of learning. This blog is a record of my learning successes and struggles in EDTECH 542. Archives
August 2017
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