During Week 15, I had many opportunities to appreciate our teachers’ and students’ great creativity and communication skills. I watched teachers and students alike explain content in ways that were very clear and very engaging.
On Tuesday, I observed Mr. Adeboyejo’s and Mr. Ray’s Biology Applications class. Mr. Ray led a thought-provoking discussion on a Darwin article the students had read for homework. At the start of the discussion two students volunteered to give 30-second highlights talks about the reading. Both students raised a couple interesting and important points in their allotted times. The two talks provided a nice intro and set a really nice tone for the rest of the discussion. Many students participated and offered their thoughts regarding different types of evidence for natural selection.
On Tuesday, I observed Ms. Tillson’s and Ms. Thompson’s Grade 11 US History / ELA III class. After discussing notes on the New Deal, the students gathered in teams in order to analyze each other’s black-out poems. The black-out poems were created by blacking out words in a selection. They provided feedback to their peers by completing STRIDE analysis graphic organizers on their teammates’ poems. The students seemed really engaged in each other’s work. I also liked how the class’ Bookmas tree added a festive flare to the classroom.
Throughout the week, students in Mrs. Garner’s Painting 2 class presented their tattoo designs to their faculty clients. Here are the tattoo designs that were presented to me. I wanted a design incorporating turtles, robots, and data. I like elements from all 3 designs. I’m looking forward to owning all 3 sketches. I plan on framing them and eventually bringing them to a tattoo artist capable of melding all 3 designs into the design for my right arm sleeve.
The designs below were drawn for Mr. Foster. The student represented the 3 symbols for Mr. Foster and his two brothers: a tree, an ocean and a star. In the right drawing, the stars were star-shaped leaves falling from a cherry blossom tree. I thought that was neat because it was subtle representation of Mr. Foster’s Japanese heritage.
Here are more of the students’ tattoo designs. The top left drawings were drawn for Mr. Merced who wanted a combination of the Korean flag and the symbols for the years his sons were born, a snake and a tiger. The two top right and single bottom right drawings represent impending doom. These were drawn for Mr. Villarreal. The bottom left drawing was for Ms. Castro. The bottom middle drawings were drawn for Mr. Humphrey. They represent an aversion to the love of money.
On Wednesday, I observed Mr. Rodriguez facilitating a workshop on Adobe Illustrator. His explanation were really clear, engaging and tailored to each students’ needs. He had the class start by creating a red circle. Then he instructed them to use vector tools to convert the circle to a heart. Then he had them use more tools to convert the heart to a broken heart. At each phase, he monitored each student’s progress and provided just-in-time instructions to the students who needed his assistance. By the end of the exercise, ALL students were able to demonstrate mastery of several software tools. It was neat to watch a lesson that used solid formative assessment and differentiation techniques.
On Wednesday evening, I went to the PBL showcase at Shadowglen Elementary school. The showcase featured projects by students from grades K to 12. I really enjoyed seeing the progression in projects from grades K to 12 and was pretty impressed by the sophistication of some of the projects at the elementary levels. Here is an example of a kindergarten rubric and group contract. I really like how simple and visual these documents are. I also like the roles they used to organize the teams: timekeeper, materials handler and question manager.
Several of the PBL showcase projects used a strategy that resembled knows and need-to-knows that’s really neat. The students record: what they will DO in the project, what they will LEARN in the project, what’s INTERESTING in the project, and what QUESTIONS they have. I like how this creates a very natural separation between content and logistical knows and need-to-knows.
Mrs. Fain Jackson, Ms. Thompson, and Ms. Tillson represented our school at the PBL showcase. They impressed visitors with their entry documents, entry videos, rubrics, and sample student artifacts. One visiting principal left their conversations really excited and really eager to get training for his teachers to try out PBL. The highlight of my night was seeing Mrs. Fain Jackson’s epic Middle Ages entry video. She dressed herself and her dog as Robin Hood and Little John. She gave an impassioned soliloquy while her dog sat beside her in surprising and comical stillness. I thought he was stuffed animal until he blinked. 🙂
On Thursday while doing lunch duty, I saw Mrs. Pedroza doing a kinesthetic activity on angular and tangential velocity with her students. She had students rotate through one revolution when there was a single student, two students, four students, six students, and then the whole class. Then she asked them what they noticed about the the angular and tangential velocities of different students at varying distances from the center of the circle. The students laughed a lot while they tried to successfully complete the exercise.
In Thursday during Advisory, the students created chains of kindness as part of a series of No Place for Hate activities. Each link in the chain contains an idea for creating a chain reaction of kindness. Several advisories developed MANY ideas in order to create extra-long chains on how to spread kindness.
On Thursday, I watched students constructing their musical instruments for Ms. Davis’ and Mrs. Schimel’s Integrated Physics and Engineering class. Even though the students were constrained to percussion and string instruments, several students still found ways to get really creative. One student is creating a series of triangles to create her musical scale. Another student created a violin, complete with tunable strings for her project.
Throughout the week, I interviewed several teachers and students to learn more about how they conduct PBL presentations. This was done in preparation for an blog article and podcast on PBL presentations I am writing for ps21. I’m going to spend the weekend and next week preparing this article. I will post the draft here next week in an article called Another Awesome Presentation.