Lessons Reviewed:

• Grades 3-5 Project for Computer Technician: School Technology Team

• Grades 3-5 Project for Mechanical Engineer: Roller Coaster Designer

We piloted this in a general education 4th grade class comprised of various levels of ELLs, several students with IEPs and several students receiving RTI Tier 2 Reading support

Our general impression of this project was that it is a really GREAT one to start off with in this grade band.  GREAT meaning that it is extremely comprehensive, customizable, and able to be adapted to meet the needs of our diverse learners.  We implemented this with a 4th Grade class.  We observed high interest among the students as well as students being able to relate easily to the job presented in the project in addition to the skills they would need to utilize in this role.

As you will soon see in this review, YES, we would recommend this curriculum to others!

The cohesion of the PBL process was nearly seamless for using this product for the first time.  Each lesson comes with a student goal–this is very helpful as we are required to utilize learning targets in our district and we could easily develop one from the student goal provided by Defined Learning.  The timeline provided for completion was also a helpful reference for us.  It did in reality take longer than the time suggested, however, we feel this is due to the learning needs of our diverse student population.  Defined Learning also provided additional resources for Teachers as well as students with the Educator Task Plan and Student Task Plan.  These can be seen as guidelines for project completion.  In our experiences, we printed out the Student Task Plan for and added it to a packet along with the project description and rubrics to create a “journal”/reference packet for the students.  

Defined Learning offers a few different options in regards to rostering students and pushing out material.  This can either be done by linking DL to Google Classroom or manually entering students into the DL dashboard.  Material can then be shared with the class right on Google Classroom or through a shareable link.  We decided to use a shareable link since our district uses a different learning management system.

We found it very useful that the slide presentations are already completed for teachers to present to the class.  Each presentation is able to be edited or adapted to meet the needs of the learners.  The presentations had an Introduction, Real World Connection, Check in Questions, Goal, Role, Audience, & Situation, Product Choice, and Design Process.  The introduction presents a quick engaging video about the career and what the task is focusing on to “hook” the students.  This sparks the students’ interest and allows them the opportunity to stop and think about whether this is a job they have heard of or not.  The Real World Connection video shows practical application of this career in the real world.  We loved the Check in Questions that were provided to allow students to follow up and reflect on the Real World Connection video.  These questions can be answered on the DL platform or in the Student Task Plan guided notes. The crux of the project is the Goal, Role, Audience, & Situation piece as it takes students through their responsibilities as a person who holds the particular job the project focuses on.  As DL continues to be flexible and adaptable, this portion project can be presented with subtitles in English or Spanish.  A script of the video can also be printed with questions and vocabulary to focus on.  A constructed response is also included for this prompt with a rubric (we added this rubric to our student journal).  There are also additional research links available where teachers can select the appropriate sources for their students.  DL does provide book suggestions as well, but for our purposes, we used online resources only.  As the presentation progresses to the Project Choice, this is yet another fully customizable component for teachers.  This piece of the project is where students have the opportunity to select the project they want to create to show what they have learned.  There are several options for teachers to give their students to choose from and the teacher can present all of them to the class or give them only two or even one option.  Something that we were indifferent about is that while DL has a suggested materials list, they don’t send material kits for each project because the projects can be completed with everyday consumable classroom materials.  While most of the time these materials are easily accessible, our class sizes are very large and the materials we do have are fairly limited.

We did provide additional web-based resources for the students to utilize for their research of each job/project.  When we printed out the paper resources (i.e., project description, rubrics, and the Student Task Plan, we felt that they were not very visually appealing to students—or teachers for that matter.  We feel that the layout of each item could have been presented/organized in a more approachable format.  For the sake of staying true to this curriculum, we decided to implement all components as they are to obtain a genuine review of everything it has to offer.