Final Round of CBL Projects

My tenth grade American Government class is moving into the final phases of their Challenge Based Learning projects.  These ten teams have been challenged to "Get Teenagers to Care about Politics."

This challenge has included a couple of new twists:

1) I have really emphasized the importance of the students' gauging the effectiveness of their solutions.

2) We are planning a "Fight Apathy! Fair to exhibit our solutions to invited guests.  This event is being planned in conjunction with teams from two other classes (17 teams total).  Other staff members are also assisting with this event.

As we move toward the finish line,  I plan to blog on the following topics:

Weird, Wayward, and Wonderful Solutions
Already, I have encountered new issues which have occurred primarily as the result of the teams' enthusiasm.  Some students have gone very public with grammar errors and factual mistakes.  In addition, the challenge has produced a surprisingly rich variety of solutions which I look forward to sharing.

Presentations as Assessment
Starting tomorrow, teams will be making in-class presentations about their challenge journeys. Once again I have given the students a "Ten Commandments" to follow.  This set includes the importance of evaluating the success of their solution implementation.

Fight Apathy! Fair
It all goes down on April 13, 5:30 pm - 7:00 pm in school lobby.  Hundreds of students, teachers, friends, and relatives will be invited.  (Wish us luck!)

Group and  Individual Reflections
Following the Fair, the groups will be completing a written reflection.  Individuals will submit audio files.  I'll be using new prompts in both instances.

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Flickr CC Photo by Dan Bock

An Experiment with Alternative Assessments

As I reported in Experimenting with Assessments I wanted to attempt some alternate assessment options in my American Government Class this semester, so I launched an experiment during our first unit.

Alternate Assessment Plan

I hoped to place less emphasis on points earned through "objective" quizzes and tests.  So I created a plan where performance on the final test could be used to determine the unit grade if scores on the earlier quizzes demonstrated to me that studetnts were engaging with the material.  More significantly, students could opt out of the big test altogether and substitute performance on a project:

Project Alternatives

The results were pretty disappointing:

1) Only about 15% were inclined to do the projects and their numbers were halved as the deadline approached for the project.  They decided to take their chances with the test rather than invest energy in a project.

2) The two project alternatives attracted equal interest.  The slides tended to be better, but two of the students disregarded basic directions.  The surveys were consistently executed well, but only one student (who sought feed back ahead of time) actually got at the main concept ("legitimacy" that lay at the root of the assignment.

3) The grading scheme helped several students, however only in a handful of cases did the alternative grading systems make significant difference grade

I am pleased to know that a few kids really responded to the project options and got more out of the projects that simply going ahead and bombing another test.  But before I try something like this again, I need to retool.

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A student's survey results pictured above.

Trajectory

Pardon me, but I'm going to be even more self-indulgent than usual.

Last summer when I came back from the '09 ADE Summer Institute, I was exhilarated, but also awed. I simply felt as though I was not in the same league as the other Apple Educators.

Nevertheless, when I learned that Apple would host an ADE "special event" in Florida this summer, I decided to overcome my apprehensions and apply.

Well, lo and behold, I received my acceptance on Friday. When I expressed astonishment to my wife, Barb, she replied that she expected this, considering my "trajectory since last summer."

Cool word, trajectory. It's been stuck in my head since she said it. Last year's Institute gave me the impetus to try out Challenge Based Learning and the confidence to make presentations. I even put myself forward to conduct the staff in-service on Personal Learning Networks. So I guess I have upped my game over the last year.

By the way, the themes for July's "special event" will be

*24/7 Access to relevant digital repositories through mobile devices.

*New pedagogies for learning, including Challenge Based Learning.

Should be a terrific opportunity to give another boost to my trajectory!

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"Estela de vapor" Flickr Creative Commons photo by pablodf

Procrastination

Having taught at one school for 35 years, I don't have a broad perspective on the subject of procrastination. But I observe that procrastinating has become a deeply embedded part of my school's culture-- students and adults are rather notorious for waiting until the last minute.

Why blog about such a mundane subject at the Drive-thru? Because multimedia and procrastination are a very bad mix.

I'm thinking of a student group that had all sorts of interesting ideas for expressing information about "equality under the law" on a wiki. They started plans for doing interviews with experts and creating a dramatic enactments on video. None of these came to fruition. They severely underestimated the logistics for achieving their best ideas. Appointments were postponed, technical complications were unanticipated.

Now, before you chalk this up to immaturity, consider this. I've had two academic departments at school approach me about the possibility of helping with video presentation. Cool. I'm glad they see that video can be an attention grabber. But I don't think they appreciate the logistics of making something good. Anyone can turn on a camera. But certainly they don't want to ad lib information about their departments. Who's going to story board this? How may takes will they need? I'm willing to edit their best takes, but not the night before the presentation. As I've warned them, editing is time intensive if you care about production standards.

I'm guessing that at least one of these adult groups goes belly-up with the multimedia. Likely cause of death? Procrastination.

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"07072007012" Flickr Creative Commons Photo by petemaskreplica

A New Approach to Student Presentations

It's strange how these things happen. I expend all this energy integrating technology and applying the Chllenge Based Learning model to my social studies classes this school year, yet my biggest break through may have been something tangential to these pursuits. I have required presentations to the class about these projects. Reorienting the requirements has produced some very pleasing results.

First, a confession: Like many of us, from time to time I have assigned students to "research" this or that and then "present" it to the class. To often, this produces a mortified kid trying to memorize information so that she can disgorge it to her bored, captive audience. Even worse, the student will try to read the information via note cards or her power point. And trust me, the situation can go even further south if you ask this student a question about what he or she has just rattled off. Dazed and confused.

I've tried a different approach with the challenge projects, using instructions like the following:

Each group will make a slide presentation describing their group process, what they learned, and what they hope they achieved by their solution to the challenge.

Group Process -- This includes the mistakes the group made. Wrong turns, rejected ideas, etc. They are also welcome to explain what they might have tried to do with more time or in retrospect.

What They Learned -- They are urged to address this broadly. What they learned may have involved group dynamics, technology tools, how to request an interview, etc.

What They Hoped to Achieve by Their Solution -- This is so much more interesting to listen to than a report on retrieved information, and like the other requirements, it helps them to see their experience as more than a checklist they completed for the teacher.

In addition, groups are told that all members must participate and that under no circumstances will they be allowed to read. I encourage them to be casual and to narrate the group's story.

I admit that not every group project effort has been a raging success this school year (More on that in another post). But I can honestly attest that all of the presentations have been interesting and invariably classmates have paid close attention. Not bad, eh?

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"WhatUp Gov Challenge Based Project group.

AP Government CBL - Student Presentations

This is the 3rd post in a series on my Challenge Base Learning project with AP American Government. Their challenge: "Develop an authentic medium for improving our democracy."

As I expressed in my last post, as we grew closer to the project due date I became less and less assured about the progress the five cbl groups had made toward their solutions. Consequently, their presentations were wonderful revelations.

Strengths
Two features of the presentations were remarkable. First, literally all members participated. There was 100% attendance by presenters and for each group members made informed, intelligent contributions. But the most exciting feature involved the unplanned portions of the presentations. Each group was given a full class period and time was allowed for Q & A. This turned out to be the best segment of the presentations. The depth of the students' understanding was revealed here and the process by which the students' arrived at their solutions came through answers to their classmates good questions. What's more, group members were candid about mistakes and adjustments they had made en route to their solutions. This only solidified my impression that they had truly engaged in their material.

Weakness
Ironically, the visual presentations themselves by these 12th grade students were inferior to my tenth graders' "modified challenge" presentations. I attribute this to the fact that I spend a half a class period with the tenth graders illustrating how to avoid "death by PowerPoint." The younger students did not fill slides with bullet points, nor did they read from their slides (how refreshing). In fact, some of them have referenced my presentation after seeing teacher or student presentations in other classes ("Mr. Baker you would have hated the presentation we just saw in . . . .).

While the seniors did not read to us, many of their slides were busy with text. Their graphics were far less likely to be interesting. Certainly, I would be inclined to give some presentation tips to my seniors the next time around. As I've mentioned in this space before, they are exposed to some horrible modeling.

Conclusions
Besides giving students a bit of coaching for their slide presentations, I would make one other adjustment. In order to encourage peers to be attentive to (or not duck out of) their classmates' presentations, I told them that they would be quizzed on highlights after all five groups had presented. The quiz itself was a good idea, but I found myself mildly distracted by the task of creating a quiz when the groups were presenting. I assigned this task to myself because I find that student generated questions have a tendency to be far too difficult or easy. I will attempt something like this next time, but surely welcome suggestions from readers!

Other than the adjustments above, I would change nothing about the presentation formats. They were a highlight of 2009.

My next post starts the really good stuff-- The groups' solutions to their challenge.

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Screen capture is taken from a web page of group #4.