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 ...
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 other comments include AP review sessions which aren't necessarily tied into the project based course. It is a strange situation. We are on the block, so I'll be done with my students in January and the AP test is in May, so we will need to have several review sessions in preparation. I did 5 last year and about 20% of students attended. We'll see what the turnout is like this year.
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 was a great way to help with the most difficult problems that I'm guessing most students had problems with but we're afraid to ask about.
The next feedback board features what we did that did not help. Looking at the first point, there seems to be some disagreement about the comment. I didn't have time to talk about it today, but we'll definitely need to clear that up. The next comment about not wanting to derive formulas in lectures goes to the what students want when we take the time to go over information, if they really want to see the derivation of formulas, they could do that in the book. That is not what is going to help them complete the task at hand.
The last category of feedback was to see what we should be doing that we are currently not doing. The biggest thing is more quizzes as a class. Now remember these are the practice quizzes we use to track progress. I look forward to building more of these in to help break up a 90 minute class period of project time. But, as you can see students were still asking for more time to work on the video. Hopefully as time goes by, the students will become more familiar with the workflow of creating the video, but I understand the desire for more time. But, we can't have more quizzes and example while still adding more project time. If we tried this we wouldn't be able to cover all the required AP content in the course.
The other comments include AP review sessions which aren't necessarily tied into the project based course. It is a strange situation. We are on the block, so I'll be done with my students in January and the AP test is in May, so we will need to have several review sessions in preparation. I did 5 last year and about 20% of students attended. We'll see what the turnout is like this year.
Moving to a curriculum that is not focused on testing as the primary summative assessment, it's interesting to see students ask for a practice test. I think it could be interesting to assign a practice test and go over it in class the following day. I'll definitely take this suggestion to heart.
As my stu dents continue to move forward with more projects, it'll be interesting to see what the feedback will be like as it relates to the projects. Right now, though, it seems like the major feedback is trying to find a way to include a little more assistance with content not directly tied to the project work.
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