Guest Blog Post: Bianca Hewes

I'm not entirely sure how many students in the CLN647 unit are visiting this blog (hellooooo...? add a comment!) but for those that are, we have quite a treat!

Fellow education blogger, English teacher Bianca Hewes, has kindly agreed for me to REPOST one of her recent blog posts HERE on our blog!
Thanks Bianca :)
The post is focussed on 'Project Based Learning', an approach to pedagogy that Bianca advocates and is currently exploring in depth.

While this post doesn't deal with the same content/topics that YOU are posting about for assignment 2 (i.e. video games, mobile media, film & TV etc.), you can see how she blends personal comments, topic/concept explanation, and research findings in her reflection.

There is a link below to click through and read the full post at Bianca's blog. Have fun exploring it if you go!

PBL: Giving the students a voice and choice (Part 2)

(original post September 5, 2011)
This is the second part of my series reflecting on the implementation of my current Year 10 project.

My last project included an elaborate gaming design that was pretty much seriously confusing and ultimately distracted students from the actual project simply because they were rushing to finish ill-defined missions in order to earn XP and top a leadership ladder. Despite this I know my students learnt some really important lessons about team work and time management and they (surprisingly) did as well as their peers in the other non-PBL classes – my kids didn’t go backwards and that’s a big PLUS!

OK … so what am I up to? Oh yeah … my pre-project explicit teaching lessons – haha. One of the elements of PBL planning is idenitying what skills and/or content needs to be taught explicitly pre-project. In my current project students needed to be taught two model texts that represented the relationship between individual and authority. Unfortunately due to extra-curricula activities (work experience which is very important so I can’t get grumpy about it – lol) I only had seven students in my class each lesson. Despite this I soldiered on with the learning, knowing that all resources, discussions and reflections would be posted to edmodo for those absent students.

The focus for the four lessons was on the WHAT and HOW of two different text forms that represent ideas about individuals and authority – a short story ‘Hell is Other Parents’ by Jo Case and a short film ‘Tent City’ by Aldo Velasco. I have been reading Geoff Petty’s ‘Evidence Based Teaching’ and decided to use the ‘whole class interactive teaching’ method (it has an effect size of 0.81 – impressive given that an effect size of 1.0 ‘gives a two-grade leap’ for students). Basically I knew that a specific ‘skill’ needed to be taught before the project could begin. In this instance it was the ability to understand the purpose of a composer – to encourage a specific emotional, intellectual or imaginative response in the responder. After a teacher-led example on the board, students were given a scaffold (in this case a table) to complete with a partner. In an ideal world where time is not a constraint, students would have then shared this work with the class and teacher/peers would have provided immediate, timely feedback to correct any learning mis-steps. We kinda ran out of time so an important stage of this approach was missed … however we did return to it briefly the next lesson when the same approach was used again when the focus was on analysis – deconstructing HOW the composer manipulates certain responses from their responders.

My favourite activity for this pre-project explicit instruction was our edmodo backchannel whilst watching the film Tent City. My students had never heard of the term ‘backchannel’ before, although they did know about twitter..."

READ THE REST OF BIANCA'S POST HERE (click me!)
http://biancahewes.wordpress.com/2011/09/05/pbl-giving-the-students-a-voice-and-choice-part-2/