To create a successful learning community, it is necessary to have respect and collaboration with everybody.
Along with that, teachers need to be respectful and collaborate with other teachers if they want PBL to be successful. Often times, teachers will need to restructure the way that they interact with other teachers in PBL because it is still a learning process. Keep in mind that you can learn from other teachers, and working together based on the shared goals that you have will make an even more meaningful project for your students.
High Tech High is a school based on a "head-and-hand model of learning" (pg. 41), where they know that it takes action to really teach a student something. They go out into their community to practice what they have learned in the real world for things that actually matter. Teachers can learn from HTH because this head-and-hand model is just like PBL - making learning meaningful for the students. Teachers can also learn that collaboration is key to this model (HTH even has glass walls separating the classroom). With HTH, the teachers learn to become skilled designers of lessons. They want to do this because that's how they want their projects to be, but also to emphasize that we are a collaborative adult learning community.
To help have a successful collegial conversation, make sure that you have made time for collaboration. PBL is something to get excited about, but you need to make sure you have enough time to get ideas rolling. The most important concept about this is that teachers share their work. Everyone has ideas that you can use in your class and visa versa.
Some of the benefits of professional learning communities and online communities are that the you are not restricted to just utilizing the people in your own school, especially if there are not a lot of PBL teachers in the school. All of the teachers are like-minded colleagues that lobby together to make necessary changes (pg. 48).
Some features that the community involving digital-age projects should share are having a clear sense of the mission along with the conditions they must have in order to reach the mission, goal and result oriented, student-focused, and commit themselves to continuous improvement.
To take advantage of online supporting materials, all you need to do is get involved in collaborating with the teachers on some of the websites. The book recommends that before launching a project that you alone have came up with, first try to join a project that has the same goal as you and collaborate with the teachers involved in the creation of that project.
I like that you could see that PBL also needs to be incorporated by teachers. Teachers could use PBL to best learn what works for other teachers and be able to utilize their skills in their classroom. Teachers can expect PBL to work out well in their classroom so we need to be able to learn how to use PBL with our peers as well. Students learn through examples, if we are able to show our students correct ways to collaborate they will be able to flourish using PBL.
ReplyDeleteI love that you brought up that teachers have shared goals. This is very important to remember because it is very important to work together to help teach each other, as well as the students. This is very key in the process of PBL and I feel that collaborating with other teachers is the best way to go about this.
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