Marshall: Chapter 1 RR

Facilitating a well-designed project is key in making a lesson memorable, enjoyable and able for students to learn. You need to get comfortable with change as it occurs often. A major benefit I see to the PBL approach is that the students are doing hands-on work that will allow them to learn from the first hand experience. All of the research and work that is put into the PBL is in real time and relevant to the world in which we live. Students who participate in PBL will benefit by developing good communication skills, inquiry skills, how to be flexible, develop a fuller understanding of how our world works and how they can change it. Using the PBL approach is an investment of time. It will require doing research and developing lessons for PBL to suit the needs of the material to be taught. Sometimes starting a project may not take you and your students in the direction you had planned and so you will need to make up for time lost as well as moving in into the direction that the student needs to be. How the classroom is set up could be an issue. There will need to be technology readily accessible and desks arranged for students to work collaboratively. Another issue is how to grade students and measure their success. This will not mean that every assignment is graded and collected and that there will be 100 question assessments for every benchmark learned. The homework and assessment will need to be based off of what the student is currently working on and if they are making progress. The New Technology Model used in New Technology High is something that I think most teachers would want their classrooms and schools to look like. Having a cap on how many students are accepted into the school does allow for better classroom management and more time for learning. I really enjoy how there is a collaborative approach for everything. The students have time to work with each other and share their ideas. Teachers are also given time to work together and plan lessons.