Bruner: Ch 3 RR

Imagining the Possibilities 

You have to be able to set up your project, visualizing the end goal and destination, to set it up properly for your students. It's important to make the project complex, making it better suited for the format of Project Based Learning in the 21st century. By looking at what you have to teach (standards, books provided, etc) you can pick out the big ideas and decide what the projects should be about from there. By looking at your content and then relating it back to your students, linked through their references, interests, and experiences, you as the teacher can create a meaningful project that they are sure to remember. Textbooks are a tool at this time, instead of the main medium for learning. 


For example, Robert Griffin took a writing assignment to the extreme for his students, with valuable lessons and rewards at the end. He uses an everyday writing assignment as a real life application by having his students write letters into the Minister of Fisheries. He states that real-life journalists turn letters into the paper and so will his students. The editor of their paper can make a decision to publish one of the student's letter, if he so wishes; the reward being $15 dollars and the satisfaction of having their letter in the paper for the student. Real life application in learning. 


When creating a project, we want our students to be experiencing learning in the top 3 levels of Bloom's taxonomy; Analyze (investigating, classifying, and discriminating), Evaluate (selecting, justifying, improving, and debating), and Create (composing, inventing, designing, and imagining). For example, the book talked about a boring biography assignment, that I'm sure we all had to do one time or another (or another or another!). Instead of finding one person to research and then writing a paper on them, decide to do a classroom "Hall of Fame" for the era your students are researching. Have them look at 3 different people each, deciding which one to put into the Hall of Fame and why. Then, they can create a special award for the chosen person to put on the Hall of Fame. 


Finally, we can think of project based learning as passion based learning, when trying to decide exactly what our students will be doing. Why should they care about this project? Will they be interested? What will spark their creativity?