Reading Response Chapter 7

1. There are three levels of classroom discussion:

1. Teacher to Teacher: Since you are most likely collaborating with other teachers during the course of your project, whether or not they are within your local learning community, chances are you will be communicating with them at least once during the project. If you are working with a teacher in your local learning community, or even within the same school, it is probably possible to find time to bring the two classes together or find one on one time to converse. If you are working with a teacher from another country, it is a good idea to stay in touch electronically, via e-mail or even video chats. 
2. Student to Student: This obviously goes without saying, since this will be a class wide project. Students will need to collaborate with each other and discuss their own findings and even ask each other questions and get feedback.
3. Teacher to Student: In a traditional classroom, the teacher tends to dominate the teacher-student interactions, with a few students asking questions here and there. With project-based learning, however, the teacher acts more as a springboard for their individual research and the teachers have more time to speak to their students one-on-one.

2. The questions that need to be asked students when "checking in" with them, need to be high-order, critical thinking questions that do not have an easy to find answer. If the question is easy to answer, the student will most likely just Google the question the next time they have access to a computer and leave it at that. There would've been no curiosity involved, no research done aside from the initial Google search, and no in depth analysis of the question. Some good questions to ask are: What do you mean by that? What did you try next? Why do you think that happened? Tell me more.... These questions require you to listen in depth to what the student has to say, which is a skill that we want to instill in students as well. There are also several questions in different categories that should be asked while checking in with students. These categories are: Procedural, Teamwork, Understanding, and Self-Assessment. Some Procedural questions include:

• Are we staying on task? 
• Do we have the right materials available?
• When's the best time to schedule a field trip, expert visitor, or other activity?

Teamwork questions include:

• How are the team members getting along?
• Is one student carrying too much of the load for the whole team?
• Are the students able to manage conflict themselves, or do they need my help?

Understanding questions include:

• Have you thought about...?
• Have you considered this research?

Self-Assessment questions are questions that encourage the student to think about the project critically. The textbook didn't provide any examples of these questions. 

3. Technology can be our greatest strength and our greatest weakness. Even now as I'm typing this post, a mere 10 minutes before I have to submit it, I find myself dashing back to Facebook and Skype to check if people messaged me, or I'm grabbing my phone to text my boyfriend. However, when technology is optimized, it can make a multitude of things easier for students, and you may be surprised when you find students gaining benefits that you did not imagine at the start of the project. Case and point: I had no idea with what I could do for my lesson plan that was due in our class ("My topic is history! What type of data could I possibly collect?!"), but after some quick research online, I managed to find an idea that I had not even come up with before, and I used it for my lesson plan. 

4. Teamwork, a 21st century skill that is taught through PBL, can make or break a project. Sure, students might get along at first, but that doesn't mean that conflicts won't arise later in the project. It's always important to watch for any subtle changes between team members attitudes towards one another and see if the team dynamic has shifted too far towards one person. It is common for a lot of students to just push all of the work onto the "smart" kid, in the hopes that they will receive a better grade. 

5. This topic talks a great deal about optimizing technology. Since we have a rather unique topic, it is sometimes hard to come up with ideas for what we could do with our project. But using proper online research techniques and optimizing our use of technology, we should be able to come up with a great final project, with very few bumps along the road.