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Every year I have gifted and/or extremely strong students walk through my classroom door. Although I always make an effort to differentiate my program I struggle with keeping this group engaged and following through on their assignments. I have tried both accelerating and enriching the program. I feel pretty good about our math program right now but am always open to suggestions. I would like to see if bringing more project based learning into the program could ignite a greater interest in learning, and keep motivations high enough to see things through to completion. My greatest concern is that my program remains manageable while meeting the needs of the lowest performing students and engaging the highest.
Some questions I would like to explore are:
- How can I use project based learning to engage more students?
- What can I put in place to help the children be reasonably independent?
- How can I help students see independent projects through to completion?
- How much time should be allocated towards project based learning?
- Which project based skills will be most valuable to teach grade 2 students?
- How can I make these changes manageable?
Lots to think about before Saturday!
Hi Keri,
The Buck Institute (http://www.bie.org/) is great place to start for some of the answers to your questions. My school partnered with them this past August to run a 3 day PBL conference (I attended and it was great), and I think they are running it again this summer if you’re interested.
We can chat more tomorrow.
MM
@kdavis,
Love that you listed some possible questions. It all starts with questions and you will find that a deep dive into Design Thinking at tomorrow’s F2F will help you sharpen your extension tools even further.
E.B.Daigle
You have asked some really good questions, @kdavis – and congrats on your first blog post! Wahoo! I’ve just posted my first blog post of this season myself! 🙂
I also work with gifted students, especially in the areas of mathematics and computer science, so I would love to chat with you more about your questions and ideas for improving engagement (and meet you F2F as I wasn’t able to be at the first one!).
My math department actually focused our 2016-17 action plan around intrinsic motivation and engagement in math. And, although I work primarily with older students, I would be curious to discuss similarities and differences we might be facing! See you tomorrow!