After
teaching my lesson this week I realized just how difficult it is to plan
lessons for an Enrichment class. The hour I attend my placement is not only the
last hour of school but the students’ second Language Arts class of the day. I
know that if I had to attend two Language Arts classes a day in middle school, I
would be pretty bored and burnt out. My mentor teacher’s vision for her
Enrichment class is a project-based classroom where students would mainly be
applying what they are learning in their Language Arts classes to demonstrate
their learning. In a chapter of The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning
Sciences, Joseph S. Krajcik and
Phyllis C. Blumenfeld explain the purpose of a project-based classroom, stating
it “allows students to investigate questions, propose hypotheses and
explanations, discuss their ideas, challenge the ideas of others, and try out
new ideas” (1). In an Enrichment class, this would mean thinking about themes
in literature and exploring how they work in real, everyday life.
But if we are going to give them these kinds of
performance tasks, how do we go about introducing and assigning them? In an Edutopia article, Shawn Canney provides
six pieces of advice to teachers who are trying a PBL classroom for the first
time. The advice I found most helpful included giving concrete deadlines and
setting goals: in order for the project to work, students need to know what is
expected of them and when (Canney). One way to achieve this is to provide a
detailed assignment sheet and scoring guide or rubric. Much like Canney, my
first try at the PBL classroom will probably look like a huge failure, but this
is why it is so important for teachers to reflect on what is going well in
their classroom and what isn’t. During his projects, Canney reflects personally
as a teacher and has an open discussion with his students both during and after
the project. In order to have a successful PBL classroom, it is clear that I will
need to be both reflective and thorough in my planning and teaching.
One idea to implement in a PBL classroom is the
alternative book report. With these projects, students are required to apply their
understanding of a novel and respond to it in a new way with more insight than
a summarization. Some examples of an alternative book report include creating a
social worker’s report about the home life of a character, a character’s
college application, and found poems from an important chapter in the novel.
You can read about 50 different project ideas here.
I think the students in my mentor teacher’s Enrichment class would really get
into this project and enjoy picking their own topics. Right now we are writing
our own mystery stories and it has been so fun watching them talk about their
ideas and feed off of each other for inspiration. Allowing them the freedom to
make their own decisions and be creative would definitely help keep them
engaged in their second Language Arts class of the day.
Canney, Shawn. “Learning by Doing: A Teacher
Transitions Into PBL”. Edutopia, 21
September 2015. Web.
Krajcik, Joseph S. and
Blumenfeld, Phyllis C. “Project-Based Learning. The Cambridge Handbook of the
Learning Sciences. (2006). R. Keith Sawyer (ed). Cambridge University Press.
