Student Exhibitions, an Integral Part of Project Based Learning

Student exhibitions are not the traditional open house you might have experienced, where the teacher selects some material to show to parents, and breathes a big sigh of relief when "cookie cutter" projects finally make it home. In the project based model we use at AdVENTURE, exhibitions have the students front and center as they present work, chosen by them. The students are doing most of the talking and are actively explaining their work. 

Student exhibitions are about celebrating hard work. They give students an authentic audience to present their work, and showcase their learning. The final product often takes a secondary role as the emphasis is put on the journey the student took to get there. The celebratory nature of the event gives students an opportunity to engage in deep conversations with community members, and take on the risk of becoming a "teacher of adults".

Exhibitions promote deep learning of the content. The projects being presented are the end result of an extended, in-depth period of learning, and require that students demonstrate mastery of the content and standards. Students show that deep explorations in learning can have many different paths, and provide students with new questions to guide their inquiry.

Exhibitions are also about accountability. Community members get to see first hand what the students are learning. This goes beyond rigorous academic content, and includes 21st-century skills. During the event, students get to demonstrate how they have grown in leadership, responsibility and innovation, as well as practice communication skills authentically.

Student exhibitions provide a sense unity of within our community. Although our PBL is not static, and new essential questions lead our students down different paths, the content remains. Our older students are given an opportunity to reminisce about favorite projects, and often take on the role of mentors for the younger students, giving knowledgeable and caring feedback. On the other hand, the younger students get to see what older students have done, and on occasion, even begin to plan for what they now know they will work on in the upper grades.

Finally, student exhibitions increase student engagement. Students take ownership of their work because they know their work will have an audience beyond their teachers and classmates. Although at times, students have been known to say "Another exhibition night? We've had like five...", you just need to see the pride on their faces during the actual event to know that our exhibitions are here to stay.

What do you think? Leave your comments and let's start a conversation.

Two great sites for improving Science literacy

 As a middle school teacher, I want to expose my students to as many science related content as I possibly can. In my head, I envision a classroom where students would come in ready to discuss a topic after having been able to read several pieces. Unfortunately, finding those sources can be time consuming and frustrating. Let's face it, most science articles are not meant for this age group. Even then, my student's have vast differences in reading abilities, so I often end up having to assign different readings just so that we can all discuss a topic somewhat intelligently.

That is where two websites I recently found come in. NEWSELA and BirdBrain Science. Both offer science related articles at different reading levels, with the possibility of taking CCSS aligned quizzes after the reading, and a way for teachers to track student progress.

Bird Brain Science is more textbooky. The science articles are informational in nature, and are presented within specific science topics. Although there is the option to assign readings as "interest", most are not particularly interesting to students. I see and have used it more as a supplement to instruction since I can assign a specific topic (i.e. I used the "Where did I come from?" article from the Genetics unit - to review the concept of heredity).

NEWSELA takes recent scientific articles and adapts them to different reading levels. Although much more interesting to read, the articles themselves do not lend themselves for use as part of my instruction. For example, although it might be nice to read about "Cuban crocodiles losing their identity", unless we are specifically studying the plight of the cuban crocodiles, I still have to scour the site to find articles to broaden the topic. I see this site as an enrichment opportunity or as a way to give my lower readers access to what is going on in the scientific community.

Now, if these two sites had a baby... Just imagine leveled reading for science content and science interest. What about you? Do you prefer one over the other?

Surprise Journal

A while back I wrote about transforming my students' blogs into a more reflective space (Reflective teaching and learning - the blogs). This practice has had the desired effect in my students, allowing them to put their learning in perspective and becoming more aware of the meaning behind their experiences in my classroom. It has helped clarify goals, and moved them away from the superficiality of  "My goal is to get straight A's", to the more meaningful "My goal for next week is to pay close attention when writing my notes and keep them in an organized binder so I can use them when I study for Friday's quiz."

However, for some of my students they have also become a little bit formulaic, lacking in that elusive element that makes students attempt to go beyond the obvious.This is why I was very happy when I read the Surprise! article by Julia Galef. Her ideas led me to think about how my students' blogs could also include a simple "surprise" statement. The goal is to have students acknowledge the fact that there are everyday moments that lead us to curious discoveries. That being open to those moments of surprise gives us permission to explore creative solutions, and that being wrong is most definitely not a "bad" thing as long as we take a moment to think about what we can from it.

We have barely started including these surprises, and I am once again having fun reading their posts. My students continue to grow and explore the world around them with curiosity, challenging each other to find the most interesting surprises. That is what teaching is all about.

Using Blogger

Setting up a gamified classroom

Last year I toyed with gamifying my classroom (Gamification starting really small), and while not everything went as planned (Gamification-lessons learned), this year I'm going ahead with a more complete experience.

Eventyr is the name of the realm. Each of my classes belongs to a clan and the purpose of playing the game is to train a dragon to the highest level possible, earning the rank of Supreme Grand Master.

Dragon training - Students start their journey as Noobs, and train their dragon by writing a weekly reflective blog. This blog awards XP points based on a rubric. Weekly leaders from each class gain blog immunity for that week. This means they do not have to write a blog, but they also do not earn XP that week. There are eight levels, with each rank becoming increasingly difficult to get. Students are able to go back and correct postings in order to gather more XP. The prize for achieving the highest rank is blog immunity for the rest of the year.

Power-ups - I also set up a series of power-ups that are tied to each of my units. The power-ups include things like listen to music, open note quizzes, use cell phones and such. The power-ups are gained if the student achieves at least an 85% of the total number of points in a given unit. This is what I am really excited about. Students can continue to improve upon the early submission even if we have moved on in the course. Why am I excited about this? I find it very frustrating when students turn in work that we both know is not their best effort, they get it back with detailed instructions on how to improve and it goes to the bottom of the backpack never to see the light of day again. The power-ups are privileges that my students have repeatedly asked for, so if they really want it they will need to revisit their work until it meets the standard.

Easter eggs - These are really my class participation points in disguise. Individual students or teams may gain extra XP during class discussions and activities. I am leaving myself open to when to give out Easter eggs so I can use them really to promote any display of good citizenship or behavior.

It is important to note that in my classroom XP are not tied to grades. There is a correlation between the two since students that score well will tend to initially have more XP, but since the main purpose for me is for students to revise their work, they might have gotten a low original grade and the grade-book closed, but since they revised the work, they can obtain a power-up after the fact. Last year, this separation allowed me to publish my leader board without getting any push-back from parents. The only comment I got was from a parent that stated that the public leader board actually made her daughter work harder because she really wanted to move up.

To keep track of all this, I created a Google spreadsheet. I explained how to do this and made one available for copying in a previous post.

Here are some other examples of XP grading in case you are interested:

Mrmatera
Gamingmatter
Teached Up Teacher

Leaderboards with Google Spreadsheets :)

I have spent the last week gamifying my 5th grade. I developed my theme, posted everything up and so forth. Then I came upon the "Hall of Honor", which is basically the leader board for my game. I had previously created a leaderboard for my blogs (see Gamification, starting really small), but this time, I wanted the sheet to automatically assign all badges (images) in response to inputting the XP scores.

I knew that I could just use something like Edmodo to keep track, but that meant that I would have to create a bunch of small groups and assign the badges manually. As much as I love Edmodo, this seemed like a hassle, and I could just see myself forgetting or clicking one student instead of another. I turned to my trusty internet in search of something already made, and although there were several sites that came up (Badgeville and Leaderboarded, for example), they did not meet my most basic need - "FREE".

So, with a very rudimentary understanding of Google Spreadsheets and the help of Youtube tutorials, I developed my own.

What the students see:

What the students don't see, and might be of interest to you:

The spreadsheet has one dedicated page for the leader board and then 9 others for the different units.
The data is pulled from the different sheets using the ImportRange function
All image URL's were shortened using https://goo.gl/
The images were placed inside the cells using =image("URL")
The ranks were assigned using formulas like :

=IF(B2>=300; "Supreme Grand Master";IF (AND(B2<=349;B2>=201); "Blogging Grand Master";IF (AND(B2<=200;B2>=161);"Master";IF(AND(B2<=160;B2>=121);"Magus";IF(AND(B2<=120; B2>=81);"Adept";IF(AND(B2<=80; B2>=61);"Journeyman";IF(AND(B2<=60; B2>=41);"Initiate";IF(AND(B2<=40; B2>=21);"Apprentice"; IF(B2<=20; "Novice" ; ""))))))))) - For text

 =IF(B2>=850; image("http://goo.gl/lnjj1i");IF (AND(B2<=849;B2>=750); image("http://goo.gl/vWDG5F");IF (AND(B2<=749;B2>=560);image("http://goo.gl/r8CoiU");IF(AND(B2<=559;B2>=420);image("http://goo.gl/MCq2UA");IF(AND(B2<=419; B2>=250);image("http://goo.gl/qQRxrZ");IF(AND(B2<=249; B2>=170);image("http://goo.gl/YtKEjl");IF(AND(B2<=168; B2>=85);image("http://goo.gl/XKdggM"); IF(B2<=84;image("http://goo.gl/JNWjSf") ; "")))))))) - For images

I could not figure out how to use just one formula for text and images AND that responded to the value of an imported range, all at the same time, so I solved the problem by populating an extra set of columns using import range (not shown to students) just with the values and then used =IF(M2>=100;image("http://goo.gl/f8Gjbj"); IF(M2<=99;"Locked";)) to display either the image or the word locked on the Unit cells. This made the look quite cluttered, so I went with white text on those cells.

My end result, a sheet that responds to and assigns badges automatically as soon as I update the individual values for a student. Since all is tied together, I can also sort the columns any which way I need without worrying about "messing up" someone's badges or XP points. Just be aware that changes are not instantaneous; it sometimes takes a little while to load and update everything.

If you would like to view the full spreadsheet, and perhaps make a copy to modify to fit your needs, click on the image.

I will still need to input the individual XP for the assignments myself, but I have saved myself from the tallying and badge awarding. I also think that if I'm careful about naming conventions with the students, I might just be able to automate the input of XP directly from Flubaroo graded assignments, or from Google Form assignments. Now wouldn't that be a dream?

If you find this useful, or if you have found other ways to do this, leave a comment. I know that I will be grateful.

Beyond "I really liked this project"

Another school year has ended, and as I sit down to ponder what went well and what I would like to change, I once again am stumped by what I can do to improve reflection in my students.  Paolo Freire, in his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, states that reflection is an essential part of learning and of becoming an agent of change in the world:

"Within the word we find two dimensions, reflection and action, in such radical interaction that if one is sacrificed -- even in part -- the other immediately suffers . . ."

If I am to promote changes in my students' thinking and growth, I need to improve their ability to reflect. So, last summer I read everything I could on the subject and promptly set about attempting to create a classroom where reflection was a big part of our daily and weekly activities, as well as a final requirement for our projects. I made a cutesy chart that was prominently displayed and used.

I made weekly reflective blog posts a requirement, and at the end of every project assigned a reflection, which was graded on a rubric. My prompt for the reflections went something along the lines of: "Describe what you learned in completing the assignment, identify what went well and detail what you will improve on for next time."

Most of my students did well with just this; however, even as I tried time and time again to give pointed feedback on the reflections, about 20% of my students seldom went beyond:

"I really liked this project/assignment because I got to work with my friends..."

"Next time, I will stay on task more and not get distracted."

What to do, what to do...

Recently, I came across Edutopia's 40 reflective questions, and I particularly liked how they separated them into categories (Backward-looking, Inward-looking, Outward-looking, Forward-looking). I think that by naming them, the respondent gets into a different mindset as he/she prepares to answer. As I move forward, I will be modifying them a little bit  to address not only the end products, but the weekly work. I will also ask students to "ACE" their answers, citing examples and non examples, as well as expanding with a "what it looks like or sounds like". Of course, there will be a rubric.

Will it work? I don't know, but I would love to hear your thoughts. How have you improved student reflection in your classroom?

Further reading:

• Block, Joshua. "Let It Marinate: The Importance of Reflection and Closing."Edutopia. Edutopia, 18 Apr. 2014. Web. 13 June 2014. <http://www.edutopia.org/blog/let-it-marinate-reflection-closing-joshua-block>.
• Boss, Suzie. "High Tech Reflection Strategies Make Learning Stick." Edutopia. Edutopia, 4 Mar. 2009. Web. 13 June 2014. <http://www.edutopia.org/student-reflection-blogs-journals-technology>.
• Yoshida, Clyde. "Creating a Culture of Student Reflection: Self-Assessment Yields Positive Results." Edutopia. Edutopia, 1 July 1997. Web. 13 June 2014. <http://www.edutopia.org/creating-culture-student-reflection>.
• Clements, Mark. "Using Reflection to Help Students Learn." Edunators. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 June 2014. <http://www.edunators.com/index.php/becoming-the-edunator/step-5-reflecting-for-learning/using-reflection-to-help-students-learn>.