So during the last 3 days of each school year, for the past 15 years, I do an assignment called The Courtesy Contract. Sometimes, students reach out to me years later to see what they had written during middle school and I get to search through these time capsule notebooks and find those names from long ago. Last week, I was contacted by a senior in high school who remembered this assignment and wanted to see his. He told me his name and the year I had him so I could easily go back in time and flip through the artifacts to find his. What I found, but hadn’t remembered, was a document writ ..read more

Research has shown that collaboration is one of the most effective strategies in student achievement. But to be really successful, a classroom needs to use collaboration techniques beyond the time period alotted for a any one project. It has to be a part of the classroom culture.  From there, collaboration can be used in research, in presentation, in culminating artifacts, in drafting/prototyping, etc…You can always find a way for students to work together. Here is a 10-min How-to video on 9 different collaboration tips to use during any project. Use them during any PBL unit or to simply ..read more

Ihave been using revision stations for a few years now in one way or another. Revision stations are a way to structure learning that allows a student to rotate to different locations and/or activities that each serve a different purpose.   Revision stations are fantastic for a number of reasons. They are.. Self-paced Multimodal Collaborative Individualized Engaging Of the list above, I think there are a few here worth mentioning in a bigger way. For one, revision stations in a 1:1 classroom help combat the “they just sit there looking at the screen” argument. Revision stations, eve ..read more

  Here’s my new screencast showing two ways I ensure that any unit I design or adapt is aligned to our required standards. In a nutshell: Plan around a particular standard and design with that standard(s) in mind from the get-go. Design the unit that engages you, the teacher, and your students.  Then, look at the standards, check off those the unit hits, and then go back and fill in the gaps. Remember, if you’re a history, science, or math teacher, you should be doing this exercise with not only your content standards, but with the literacy, listening, speaking, and writing standa ..read more

For Part II in my PBL video series, I thought I’d share how I integrate student-generated questions throughout the sequence of the unit.  In other words, the students generate the prompts that help propel them along the PBL journey. This post picks up with my last one left off.  In PBL Secret Sauce: Entry Level Event, I covered how to launch the overall unit. This video represents the very next step, that of having students develop questions generated by their curiosity from that launching element. And while these videos are meant to chronologically follow the day-to-day implementati ..read more

PBL is about meaningful learning, and sometimes that means keeping my antennae up to identify possible ways to bring that authenticity to my students. Sometimes, however, an opportunity falls into my lap. Such is the case with this book review of Melissa and Eva Shang’s Mia Lee is Wheeling Through Middle School. A couple of weeks ago, I was approached by Melissa Shang, a student-author with great grit and chutzpah, to write a possible review of her book. She co-authored Mia Lee Is Wheeling Through Middle School with her sister, and it chronicles her difficult transition from elementary to midd ..read more

I know that when teachers learn about Project Based Learning, many times they walk away with the rationale, the research, and the overview of what a unit might look like.  But sometimes teachers still have questions about the day-to-day implementation.  Totally understandable: PBL, after all, is complex.  It’s not something you really “get” until you jump, feet first, into the PBL pool. Nevertheless, I want to make unit development more transparent so that the strategies ripple out to more schools and students. So I thought I’d create a short series of videos that shared differe ..read more

So it’s the beginning of the year. You’ve probably spent a few out-of-contract days setting up your classroom to look ready for the masses. You’ve hung brightly colored bulletin boards and surrounded them with stapled up content-related borders. The same borders you recycled from last year because, let’s face it, borders are flippin’ expensive! The school poster of rules that goes something like: “No Gum, No Foul Language, and No Tardies” hangs somewhere hidden in the corner above the whiteboard. After all, how inviting is the reprimanding “Don’t do this” poster anyway? Maybe there’s your own ..read more

My kid is now deep into his 11th year on this planet, and as such, will begin middle school tomorrow. Now, with my area of expertise, you’d expect me to find some relief in this fact; after all, up until now, I was really winging this parenting thing (although those toddler years do strike a familiar cord). In reality, however, that first eye roll still came as a surprise. It was then that I woke up and realized that I had a tween living under my roof. What’s also true, is that my kid woke up and realized he had a tween teacher living under his. Ben is my oldest son of two and he’s a great kid ..read more

As we’re ending the school year, I know that the tween brains in my classroom are all silently deciding what information will be transferred to long-term memory and what will forever be taken out with the trash. To hopefully avoid your content being left to the dump, it’s really important that you help them reflect on what they learned and how they learned it. This one step can help ensure that more of your lessons and units are deeply embedded than deleted. So as we’re wrapping up the school year, I wanted to share a lesson that I do that helps my tweens reflect back on all that we have done ..read more