Spangler: Chapter 7 RR

The levels of classroom discussion include teacher to teacher, student to student, and teacher to student. Teacher to teacher communication is very important throughout the implementation of the project. Whether your colleagues are close by or from far away, it is important to keep in contact with them throughout the project to help. Teacher to teacher communication about procedural and formative assessment needs to take place. For example deciding who is going to lead what lesson and suggesting a mini-lesson on a topic students’ may be struggling with.

In a project, different groups will work at different paces. For this reason, it is important for you as the teacher to be able to “check in” and monitor each individual group’s progress throughout the project. Some assessment questions you might ask are procedural (how is the scheduling going?) , teamwork (how is our group working together?), understanding (observing teams working and making sure that they are finding relevant information and are on the right path for the project), and self-assessment (project journals or blogs where students can reflect on their personal experiences.

It is extremely important the technology used for the project is helping students reach learning goals. Some questions to think about when determining if the technology is being used to its full potential are if it is helping students reach learning goals and not becoming a distraction for them, and making sure that the students are using all the available technological tools to keep their project organized.

Troubleshooting and teamwork are two 21st-century skills that can make or break a project. With troubleshooting, it is important for the students to know that this project is just like real life, and in life we make mistakes. With troubleshooting in the project, there are always methods to fix and fine tune problems that occur. Teamwork is another important 21st-century skill to recognize because if students don’t realize the importance of working as a team now, they won’t understand it in the future. It is an important component of project-based learning to emphasize and can be assessed by peer evaluations, or even just journal entries on how the students felt they worked as a team.

Chapter 7 relates to our project because it is very important to know what questions to ask and how to assess student progress throughout the project. Also with our project being about healthy living, obviously we want the skills they learn to translate to the real world. Finally, it is very important that we work as a team throughout our project and have teacher to teacher discussions on a regular basis.