Reading Reflection 7

During project implementation classroom discussions take place on several levels. 

Teacher to teacher: Working with other teachers to help with classroom discussion is a good idea. Conversations between teachers will likely touch on everything from the procedural to formative assessment. Have your colleagues look over students work and see what they think about it.  Colleagues input with benefit because they could have an idea that you might not have. Make use of a project blog, wiki, or other collaborative tools to keep your teacher-to-teacher conversations going. 

Student to student:  Students should be talking about their learning experience with other students. It’s important to let your students be aware that good communication skills will benefit the team and will help the team stay organized.  When students explain their thinking with other students it’s a great opportunity for them to learn and to also challenge each other. As a teacher take time to listen in on the student’s discussion and join in if necessary, but don’t take over the conversation. 

Teacher to student:  Make sure that you are circulating, observing, and talking with smaller groups of students. This with help you practice your own listening skills and help you ask probing questions that will push students toward higher-order thinking. 

There are some questions to ask students during their project. 

Procedural: Are we staying on schedule? Do we have the right materials available? When’s the best time to schedule a field trip, expert visitor, or other activity?

Teamwork: How are team members getting along? Is one student carrying too much of the load for the whole team? Are students able to manage conflict themselves, or do they need my help?

Understanding:  If you see opportunities for students to go beyond expectations, encourage them to push themselves. Have you considered this research?

Self-assessment: To find out what students are thinking about the project, ask questions that encourage self-assessment and reflection. Use project journals or blogs to offer space for students to describe there thinking or challenges. Ask them questions that they may not feel comfortable asking in class.

During implementation, it’s important to make sure that your technology choices are helping students reach their learning goals. Make sure that the technology is helping your students to stay organize, helping them to expand their horizons by connecting to outside experts, and the technology is accessible. Students will learn how to communicate with a culturally diverse audience.  

Troubleshooting and teamwork are 21^st century skills that can make or break a project. As the teacher, we want to help students understand that real-world projects come with real-world challenges. Help the students learn from setbacks and fine-tune their strategies for getting a project back on track.  It’s important for students to be able to manage their own team conflicts. Working with a team is something the students will have to do in real-life and for years. Some teachers ask their students to evaluate their peers on a teamwork scoring rubric as an assessment. This will help the teacher with grading because it’s not fair if there is one student who isn’t putting forth the effort compared to the rest of the students.

 In this chapter there are a few concepts that relate to our own classroom and projects. It’s important that we communicate with our teacher and our group members. We need to make sure that we are all on the same page and that we are all doing our part in our group to get our project moving along. We need to make sure we have a teacher-to-students relationship so that we are fully aware what is being asked of us during our project process. In our class we are using technology throughout our whole project to communicate with our peers and our teacher. In order for our project to be a successful we need to make sure that as a group we are communicating and doing the best that we can do. I think overall my group and I have been doing a great job working together.