Since Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe published their signature book, Understanding by Design, the idea of planning “with the end in mind” has become an important part of educational parlance. There are few endeavors where this advice is more important than Project-Based Learning.
Because a project, by definition, has a prescribed outcome, it’s tempting to focus on the material objective rather than the accompanying learning. Regardless of the nature of the project, the important questions are:
Small children learn by asking questions and testing the answers they receive. This tendency forms the roots of critical thinking. Unfortunately, question-generation eventually takes a backseat to receiving and storing information both at home and at school as children mature. In a traditional classroom, questions are the provenance of the teacher. In a project-based learning classroom, however, questions drive the entire learning process.
In my last post, I covered the importance of satisfying students’ curiosity about why they “have to learn” various skills, facts and processes by connecting curriculum to real world applications. Project-Based Learning (PBL) is one important approach that accomplishes this task and far more.
I’ve spoken before of my mentor in graduate school, Donald Graves. He used to say that one of the most important questions we could ask, as educators, citizens or even humans, was: What’s it for? Whether an educational policy or a political stance, he’d tell us, “What it’s for has everything to do with what we’re for.”
Concept mapping in math is often overlooked yet it can significantly deepen students’ understanding of mathematical concepts, particularly those that are complex or hard-to-understand.
According to authors Pamela Grossman, Alan Schoenfeld, and Carol Lee, writing in the book, Preparing Teachers for a Changing World: What Teachers Should Know and Be Able to Do, mathematics education should focus on helping students learn when a particular approach is useful and how to apply appropriately, which greatly depends on robust understandings of concepts. They state, “robust understandings come from seeing the same concepts from multiple perspectives and representing and using them in multiple ways, thereby developing connected webs of understanding rather than rote memorization of facts and procedures. Common Core and other state standards require students learn math concepts as rigorously as they learn skills and fluency, necessitating a shift from past teaching practices. Students must be able to access concepts from a number of perspectives in order to see math as more than a set of mnemonics or discrete procedures.
Fake news sites. Post-truth politics. Media fragmentation. In the digital age, it’s arguably more important than ever for students to develop new literacy skills. These skills are critical for students to be successful not only in college and in future careers but also in civic and economic life.
According the National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE): “To become a successful student, responsible citizen, productive worker, or competent and conscientious consumer, individuals need to develop expertise with the increasingly sophisticated information and entertainment media that address us on a multi-sensory level, affecting the way we think, feel, and behave.”
This month we launched our online concept mapping environment for individual users, becoming the first concept-mapping tool that integrates seamlessly with a wide range of digital resources. No other products on the market offer semantic analysis of digital content to aid learning and ease-of-use nor present resources side-by-side the mapping canvas. The timing of our kick-off couldn’t have been better.
While we were embarking on a historic journey in edtech, another momentous occasion began in August in Brazil.