From Classroom to the Real World with Project-Based Learning

Celebrating Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month

This project is a part of the Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month celebration because it supports a Latino teacher or a school where the majority of students are Latino.

My Students

Create. Collaborate. Think critically. Communicate. Do it all in multiple media, with many people, for different purposes. These are the 21st-century skills we want students to master, but yet we give them one textbook, one seat, and one rule: do your own work and be quiet.

My students live in a high-poverty downtown urban area in a very diverse and exciting city, yet most rarely leave their homes and schools.

Approximately half are English Learners. High-tech products and mass media memes surround us, but students remain mere consumers: they watch YouTube videos on a friend's phone but get frustrated performing a web search and have never published anything. My students attend a historically low-performing middle school, with a huge push for direct instruction and standards-based learning. They are tested to the max, pushed at every minute, and bored to tears. They have short attention spans but infinite interest. They tire of school but have endless thirst for learning. My students want to experience the world beyond the classroom and dive deeply into their interests, but they are stifled by worksheets, textbooks, and the confines of the school day.

My Project

I want to transform my classroom in 2013-2014 to an exploratorium of project-based learning. I will teach students academic skills they need with highly effective direct instruction, then set them loose in pairs and groups to collaborate and apply the skills I've taught in real-world applications. To do this I want to approach content delivery using a Universal Design for Learning. I want to teach skills, not facts. Students should be able to access our literature stories, our Ancient Civilization information, and each other's work in multiple media. This project doubles the number of in-classroom laptops I have available every day. I can occasionally (once/week) reserve a laptop cart for our entire class, but this schedule stifles the flow of projects. I have three old MacBooks in our class now that suffice for web searches but cannot publish through Google Drive. By adding 3 Chromebooks, students can work independently in small groups on project work as I assist others.

This project will make my class into a student-owned space of inquiry, collaboration, and hard work.

I've taught my class to use Google Drive and collaborate with each other online and off, and I've posed engaging questions to set their gears spinning. This project provides the needed resources to set students off on their own, learning, producing, and collaborating without my constant intervention. Forget limiting our work to talking and textbooks; let's open up the WORLD and get to work!