"PBL Unit"

Pella Externship

Days 21-24

 

The past week has been great here at Pella.  It feels like we have some results that will be useful after I'm finished with my time.  For the most part, the last couple days have been cleaning up a few numbers and some formatting issues with the Excel program.  I've also been toying with the numbers to verify that the correlation we got was more than a fluke.  As I tie up the loose ends on the project, my attention turns a bit to my teacher responsibilities.

 

Last week in my meeting with Comfort, we discussed some of the challenges that teachers face in the new era of education.  She talked about the difficulty college professors had conveying the multitude of expectations that new teachers would be faced with once they took over their own classroom. 

I talked about the some of frustration I dealt with my first few years as an educator trying to meet the District requirements as well as the Professional Development Models we were expected to incorporate.  More recently, we've been asked to add the Common Core and the 21st Century Skills.  Somewhere in there I have to factor in the content I believe is important for success at the next level (which may be different for each student).

For new teachers it is more difficult as they face the task of establishing classroom expectations, mastering attendance, determining grading philosophy, and communicating with parents for the first time.

They are taught in college to teach for "depth" in their subject area with Problem Based Learning and the importance of Authentic work developed by each student, but given an impossible checklist of skills to be taught and mastered for the high stakes tests.

In the spirit of solving problems, not just identifying them, Comfort and I talked about the importance of combining enough different skills and standards into one project based unit as possible to justify the amount of days we planned to send on it.

In evaluating the unit I was building for this Externship, I decided it was worth some time this week to looked closely at the Standards for Instruction in the Common Core.

They are:

1. Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them.

2. Reason abstractly and quantitatively.

3. Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others.

4. Model with mathematics.

5. Use appropriate tools strategically.

6. Attend to precision.

7. Look for and make use of structure.

8. Look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning.

I could honestly see most of these in the unit, but am still trying to improve some elements.