Objectives:
Assess the impact of real world design on student learning and motivation
Blogging on RWL
This blog post from the early part of the course does an effective job pulling together many of the key ideas and themes from research on RWL. It both lays a baseline for my own experiments and summarizes the current research with my past experience. NACE statistics serve as key data points in defending my course goals in future work.
Reflection
This project started as a simple review of top literature and responding to a few questions. As I invested time, I found that RWL was very personal in my past as a student and present as a teacher. Given my emphasis on relationships in teaching, I found that RWL gave me a foothold to more personally engage each of my students. RWL makes it hard for teacher and student to simply go through the motions, requiring instead a lot of conversation, co-planning, and student initiative.
This artifact also helps me in my future planning. Looking forward, I also want to hold true to my goals to improve verbal and oral communication in Grand Challenge Design, goals that have been on the backburner lately as we deal with a variety of challenging technical problems.