Grady: Ch 4 RR

This chapter focuses on selecting and designing projects. When doing this, you are going to encounter some pitfalls. One of those pitfalls is long on activity, short on learning outcomes. This means if the project is busy and long but reaches small or lower-order learning aims, it's not worth investing your students' time or yours. Looking at the outcome is very important. Technology layered over traditional practice is another potential pitfall. You don't want your students' to research something and just throw it all into a powerpoint presentation. You want them to make use of using technology and really decide if technology is something that is crucial to their project. Another potential pitfall is trivial thematic units. Some teachers' use this approach but you have to think about how it could be be repeated. The last pitfall is overly scripted with many steps. The best projects have students making critical decisions about their learning path. Look to the description of learning objectives and student outcomes as you evaluate a plan and if it seems too lengthy, you might run into difficulty. The best projects share important features. They are: loosely designed with the possibility of different learning paths, generative, causing students to construct meaning, center on a driving question or are otherwise structured for inquiry,capture student interest through complex and compelling real-life or simulated experiences, realistic and cross multiple disciplines, reach boyone school to involve others, tap rich data or primary sources, structured so students learn with and from each other, work as inquiring students might, get 21st century skills and literacies, including communication, project management, and technology use, get at important learning dispositions, including persistence, risk-taking, confidence, resilience, self-reflection, and cooperation, and have students learn by doing.