Goals & Activities Rubric Data Insight Next Steps
My inquiry for this cycle of the research focuses on how the project-based learning deepens learning. When describing learning environments in which children collaborate around meaningful projects and powerful ideas, the learning theorist, Seymour Papert states that kids will work in communities of common interest on rich projects that will connect with powerful ideas. ( Seymour Papert ). Would the project that the students designed in the second quarter allow them to get a new sense of themselves as learners - that setting a goal and working to achieve it is something valuable to them?
Ongoing assessment helped students review, revise, and improve their learning and their products. Students would use the numerous reflections they had done during the course of the first semester to reflect upon their learning in their own portfolio. Would their reflections reveal meta cognition?
In this cycle, the students will continue to use communication and multimedia technologies, as well as video presentation technology as tools which scaffold their collaborative knowledge building.
I designed a project for Chinese IV students to engage in the student-centered learning where students taught themselves. My role in this project was to facilitate student's learning. I divided the class into small learning circles, and each learning circles designed its lesson plans/big ideas, created its timeline, made rubrics for assessment, and prepared the lessons that they would teach their classmates.
The learning circles then took turn to teach the lessons. Each circle employed a unique, creative, and efficient way of teaching. They not only wanted to make sure that their classmates received a deep understanding of the materials, but also they liked to see their classmates learn in a fun and interactive way. They used various games for learning the vocabulary. Of all activities, a popular one was the "quick takes" that one group did to help their classmates learn the new vocabulary by connecting the student's prior knowledge with the new learning. This was a fast paced series of questions that tested the ability of each student to know the Chinese words without even having to think about it. They also played a flashcards vocabulary game in which the students were asked to match their flashcards with the corresponding cards that they had laid out on the floor. This tested the students' ability to recognize the Chinese characters, and it also gave them practice in writing the characters as they each made their own set of flashcards.