Reading Reflection #4

Corin Justa

February 15, 2013

Reading Reflection #4:

1.      The potential pitfalls of project design include:

a.       Long activities that are short on learning outcome, meaning that the project may be busy or too long that it does not provide the level of recall and understanding because of its lengthiness.

b.      Technology layered over traditional practice, where students research topics online, but present their knowledge using their traditional presentations with things such as PowerPoint.

c.       Trivial thematic units that may lack the big picture of many other aspects that may correlate with the topic being studied.

d.      Overly scripted with many, many words, which can cause students and teachers to go through many steps to find the key things they are searching for and be led to a dead end.

2.      Some features of a good project include features such as:

a.       Being loosely designed with the possibility of different learning paths.

b.      Being generative, causing students to construct meaning.

c.       Centering on a driving question or are otherwise structured for inquiry.

d.      Capturing student interest through complex and compelling real-life or stimulated experiences.  

e.       Reaching beyond school to involve others.

f.       Having students working as inquiring experts might

g.      have students learn by doing

3.      Project ideas come from:

a.       new stories

b.      contemporary issues

c.       student questions or interests

d.      a classroom irritant put to educational use

e.       a “mash up” of a great idea or a new tool

f.       a tried or true project with potential for more meaningful, expressive learning

g.      project plans developed by and for other teachers

4.      The steps to design a project include revisiting the framework by doing such things as making a final list of learning objectives for core subjects and allied disciplines. It is important to decide on what specific skills should be addressed and to identify the learning dispositions. With these skills, teachers can establish evidence of understanding among their students, identify what they will acquire and plan the project experience.

5.      Discussion in this chapter relate to our group topic by providing examples of what does and does not work when trying to incorporate project based learning into our lesson. With this new knowledge of good project features and pitfalls, we can stay clear of certain teaching styles that may defect our topic by avoiding them and try to incorporate the successful ones to become efficient in our ways of teaching.