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Let Flexibility Lead To Alignment

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  In my previous school district, I was the only teacher teaching a physics course with set, district-wide learning outcomes. These same outcomes were also taught in physics classrooms at the other high school in our district. But at our school, I was one of the 2 physics teachers. The other teacher taught the AP-level physics courses. So, in many ways, I had opportunities to incorporate strategies I believed were best for learners and that I found worked best for them without being seen as out of alignment with anyone in our building. My amazing friend and one of my teaching philosophy goddesses, Katie Novak, stated the following misconception about alignment: All teachers must deliver instruction in the exact same way. True alignment, she says, is about shared goals, rigor, and outcomes. Thank you, Katie! Katie has taught me to truly believe that learner variability is the rule, not the exception. I encourage you to take 10 minutes to listen to Katie Novak explain it in the ...
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What Is CCI?

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Having been an educator for 15 years now,   I have been to many professional development sessions.  Most of them had been uninspiring.   This clip is a perfect example of bad PD.  (So, the clip I had planned on putting in here would be entirely inappropriate for any blog intended for general audiences.  It is without a doubt the greatest monologue from the past 50 years - either in the stage play or the film adaptation.  But, again, entirely inappropriate. So in its place, here's a more tame but still edgy version.  Please forgive the ad at the front end of the clip.) I was lucky enough to be a part of a great professional development opportunity today presented by the School District of Menomonee Falls.  The professional development was focused around the continuous classroom improvement model, CCI, the district has implemented within all classrooms K-12 and across all components of the district operations from facilities management to...
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What Students Want in PBL Classroom: Round 1

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 When students have completed and presented their work, the project isn't over. We don't just throw it out like the trash.   One of the key design features of Gold Standard Project Based Learning is reflection.   We ended our first project in AP Physics 1 today,  and I asked students to reflect on the project process and reflect on what helped them learn and what improvements could be added to the system.  So, here is what they said was good for their learning. The big takeaways for me are that although I assign problem sets to be completed outside of project time, they still find them beneficial.  Project time does take away from the ability to go over problem sets together or correct them as a class.  So, having a posted solution has been key.  Also, I have the feedback board where students can list problems that we can go over as a class when necessary.  We used this a few times in the momentum unit and I though it wa...
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Performance Data PBL vs. Traditional

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When making changes to our instruction, educators need to know if these changes are leading them in the right direction.  Sometimes this data is hard to come by. But, responsible educators need to look for any signs they can face going the wrong way too fast. The 2013-14 school year was my initial implementation of project based learning in the classroom.  I have lots of anecdotal and qualitative observations of student achievement that tell me I am going the right way with my curriculum redesign.  It is still important, though, to have some quantitative data to back up my decision to stay the course with PBL. Following the completion of term 3, I administered a test to 51 students in the project based setting and 29 students in the traditional setting.  The test measured mastery of 7 key physics objectives taught during term 3.  The test was given 3 weeks into term 4.  Students were given no prior warning to the term.  This means th...
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