Project Description: Students worked in teams of 3-4 to design their own food truck business. Students focused on 5th grade math standards such as: adding/subtracting decimals, multiplying/dividing multi-digit whole numbers and decimals.

Major Products: Students presented their food truck budget and financial plan . They shared a printed menu with prices, their model trucks, and commercials.

Public Audience: Parents of two fifth-grade classrooms (~50 parents) and other school faculty.

PBL Teaching Reflection: I grew tremendously as a teacher and a person through this project. I witnessed students taking charge of their own learning and teaching me a lot in the process. Students helped show me the importance of PBL and adopting this method of teaching in all grades. Students respond so positively to PBL because they were given the opportunity to collaborate with their peers, have a voice, be creative, and actually present their learning and final products to the public. Throughout the learning experience, students were constantly amazed at the math and deeper-level thinking that is involved in starting a business, specifically a food truck. Students were constantly making connections to their own knowledge of food trucks and they could see the real-world value to what we were learning and practicing in the classroom.

Project Description: Students identified and researched an area of interest in a neighborhood park (e.g. flowers, plants, stream component, rocks, erosion). Students presented a call to action about why that aspect of the park's environment is important to protect.

Major Products: Students created individual pages in a guidebook that is available in the school. They were docents in the park educating their audience on their area of interest and call to action.

Public Audience: Teachers, students, families, administration were invited to come to the park to learn from students’ docent presentations. The guidebook continues to be available in our building for other students to read.

PBL Teaching Reflection: With careful planning and scaffolding, our students were able to learn a great deal about an area of interest in a neighborhood park that all of them visit. They have invested time into understanding how human and environmental actions can change a place where they enjoy playing and have pride in protecting it. Students watched Austin’s Butterfly video on giving good feedback, created several drafts (starting with a guided draft and then eventually turning it into their own) with the help of peer feedback. Feedback was initially facilitated through a “silent” gallery walk activity. We also chose a group of 5th grade students to show the Austin’s Butterfly’s video and guide in giving feedback for docent speeches. Throughout the process, the students demonstrated perseverance and took great pride in their work, as did we!

Project Description: The students designed a tiny house containing a minimum of fifteen pieces of furniture. The project addressed several geometry standards as well as addressing the design process.

Major Products: The students each designed and built a model tiny house which were combined on at the public presentation to create an entire neighborhood.

Public Audience: The entire school and district administrators visited our tiny house neighborhood.

PBL Teaching Reflection: Never underestimate the creativity, perseverance or ingenuity of a student. We completed this project with students of varying levels of academic performance. Initially, we were a little worried about whether all our students would able to complete this project. However, after the first day of working on their blueprints for their houses, we were completely blown away by the work our students were creating. We realized that as teachers, we should have high expectations for all students and encourage each student to do their best work.

Major Products: Each group produced a brochure and a billboard to encourage people to live, work, and play in our community.

Public Audience: We showcased our work with the 4th and 5th Graders in our building first, and then to parents and staff. During their presentations students shared their brochures highlighting our community.

PBL Teaching Reflection: There were so many take-aways with this project. The first being that we needed to allow for the messy middle to happen, because it truly is part of the process that they have to go through to get to a quality end product. When we started, we didn’t know what that middle was going to look like. That led us to reflect daily on what we thought went well and what we thought we needed to do to guide the process better. One need we recognized was to improve students’ interviewing skill. We added an extra round of practice interviews to improve their questioning skills. In our first round of interview we noticed they weren’t really thinking deeply about why adults make their housing and work choices. We had them they revise their questions and practice their questioning skills with each other. They became more familiar with how to ask questions that would produce more than just a yes or no answer, which they learned did not help them with their project. They learned through the process how to become more specific and less broad in their questions. We did a lot of group and individual conferencing to help them improve their questions. Once they rephrased their questions, the responses became better and they were able to use their interview data to create a persuasive writing piece (which became part their brochure). All of our reflecting, rephrasing, and guiding, based on our observations of their work, helped us to work through the middle and led to better quality products in the end.

Project Description: Students researched proper techniques on the care of and maintenance their instruments to teach beginner band students.

Major Products: An informational presentation to teach beginner band students how to take care of their instrument.

Public Audience: The 7th grade band students taught the 6th grade band students. We will also be sharing our work at our concert in February.

PBL teaching reflection: There was SO MUCH that I didn’t know about PBL before joining Out of the Gate. As a band director, we work on team projects all the time as we learn but PBL is so much more than that. The students have more ownership of what they are learning and how they are learning. The excitement from the students blew me away. We had some pretty amazing classes.

The entry event, “Instrument Testers”, was not only fun but really got students excited. We got volunteers to test school-owned instruments during class that we had rigged to sound bad or NOT play at all. When the testers joined the whole group to play a simple, easy band song. The reactions were fantastic--some looked annoyed, confused or shocked. After the song, we reflected on what was it like to play a broken instrument or to play next to someone with a broken instrument which launched us meaningfully into what could have been a mundane topic.

There was so much learning taking place. I don’t mean just the students, either. We learned how to organize sustained inquiry and how to help students learn to take effective notes and how to cite them correctly. We learned that this is so much easier when students are one to one with computers. We learned that even if one class is not a success, we have tools to turn things around and continue to be “learning guides” to the students. Our first PBL was hard...but so, so worth it.