Brilliant or Insane?: projects

Tuesday, December 17, 2013

Year-long projects inspire independent learning

The year-long project is a key piece of the Results Only Learning Environment. Obviously, project-based assessment is not new. Year-long projects in the ROLE, though, differ in the way they help fan students' intrinsic motivation, leading them to embrace learning rather than grades.

via: wikimedia commons

A year-long project is one in which students set a long-term goal and work backwards, creating checkpoints that the teacher can set. A smart year-long project will foster autonomy, collaboration and mastery of learning outcomes, while inspiring independent learning.

A model project

I have a variety of year-long activities, one being our Reading All Year project. We set a "Barnes Class" goal of 2,500 books read by June. This averages to roughly 25 per student. Of course, some will read 50 while a few will read 15. Along the way, we learn genre, book structure, literary elements and the fundamentals of writing.

As the year moves forward, students become engaged in the project and all of its parts, mainly because they are interested in reaching the final goal. They value the narrative feedback I provide and never ask, "What's this worth?" I'll have more on year-long projects later.

Meanwhile, consider how a project like this can change how you teach and how your students learn.

A version of this was cross-posted at www.resultsonlylearning.com.

Saturday, October 22, 2011

Feedback and mastery learning

This is a guest post by Justin Vail. A junior high social studies teacher in Indiana, where fellow guest blogger, Joey Till, works, Vail, like his colleague, has committed to results-only learning this year.

How Self-evaluation Drives Students to Mastery Learning

All of my activities are either simple completion assignments or projects. The completion assignments are essentially deconstructed parts of the project.

When I grade a completion activity I sit down with the student and we scan the various parts of the document. If the basic requirements are met, the student moves on to the next activity and I put a 10/10 in the grade book. If the basic requirements are not met, we identify the problem areas and the student makes a second attempt---this is repeated until the student meets the basic requirements.

When I grade the project (most recently a Regional Geography Video Podcast over the major physical features of 8 different regions), I sit down with each student individually for a more in-depth evaluation of their work. We listen/watch the podcast together. Afterwards, I ask the student some or all of the following questions:

What do you think is the best part of your final product?
What parts of the building process will you do again (reviewing how they worked)? What worked?
What is the biggest weakness of the product?
What parts of the building process do need to change next time?
What did you learn from this whole process?
If you were to grade yourself from A+ to F, what grade did you earn?
How can I change the project to make it better?

The self-evaluation process is difficult for some kids. I sometime have to prod the students to express themselves, but eventually they are very honest about their work and their work ethic. In fact, students are often harder on themselves, than I would be. I have evaluated nearly 200 projects this year, and less than 5 times have student's suggested a "grade" higher than what I thought.

Saturday, October 8, 2011

Fun lessons with Voki

I've written widely about using Web 2.0 and social media tools to introduce and teach mini lessons. Here is an example of using the podcasting application Voki to launch a strategic reading activity.

After the brief podcast, I place simple, short step-by-step instructions for GIST on the Interactive White Board, and the students are soon working the strategy in small groups.

There is no more than three minutes of direct instruction, not including the Voki. So, as I always tell the students, it's less from me and more from them.

Of course, they love it this way, and they learn a lot more.