Chapter 4 Reading Reflection

Project design is a wonderful concept of creating projects. Whether through adaptation, creation, or selection, designing a project has many components, as this chapter Strategies for Discovery have brought out. There are many pitfalls to project design however. One pitfall is having a long activity, but few learning outcomes. A teacher should design their project to be equally stimulating and knowledgeable  As the chapter brings out, a project should be "right sized" for what it accomplishes.Our learning outcomes must be more than what they can learn from a text book- higher order thinking that challenges their minds. Another pitfall to watch out for is technology layered over traditional practice. We must focus on reaching significant learning outcomes through the use of technology applications. Integration is the key to PBL- our projects should effectively use technology, but not be dependent on them, or use them as stand-alones. A third pitfall may be trivial thematic units. As teachers, we may create a theme, as long as our students work is interdisciplinary, collaborative, and/or rigorous. Themes should unify projects and help to make important connections. One final pitfall is having a project that is overly scripted with many, many steps. Students must become their own teacher essentially in PBL, so we don't want to create a project that has only one set of outcomes or predictable results. We want our students to be able to explore, and divert if they find that is what they want and need to know. When we are flexible with our projects, our students are able to fully grasp the entirety of the project, and what the big picture is.
Although there may be pitfalls, good projects are attainable. As Canadian educator Sylvia Chard said, a flexible framework should guide project design. As mentioned earlier, flexibility allows students to create their own thinking, and apply real world skills and resources to create their projects. When we let students' interests and curiosity drive the learning experience, our students respond much more favorably and are readily accepting of the knowledge and skills we are trying to teach them. Our projects must also be unconventional and innovative. Author Diane McGrath points out we must "set up a situation in which they want to ask questions, learn more, need to know something they don't already, and believe it is important to them". Students become the driving force of the operation to get the most out of the experience as possible. Furthermore, good projects share qualities such as generativity, reaching beyond school to involve others, having 21st century skills and literacy  tap rich data or primary sources, realistic, center on a driving question/inquiry, and have students learn by doing.
Project ideas come from many different places. Ideas can come from a project that had already been used, but not to its full potential; a project plan developed for and by teachers, but adapted to students; news stories; contemporary issues; issues in the community; student questions or interests; classroom "irritant" put to educational use; or a mashup of great ideas and a new tool. Many times, as Canadian educator Robert Griffin says, one successful project will grow and develop to lead to another successful project.
When designing a project, there are a few crucial steps involved. The first is revisiting the framework. Deciding what benchmarks your children need to learn, and what skills you want them to develop is key to creating a project. Next, you must establish evidence of understanding. Determining how students will express what they have learned is crucial because we must be able to assess a tangible result. We must also plan the "vehicle" (theme or challenge). Our project themes/challenges must provide enough structure to learn, but enough flexibility to alter their learning if necessary. Finally, we must plan entree into the project experience. How can we make our students excited and eager to participate?
This chapter is crucial and correlates well with our project of food preservation. The steps to designing a project are ones that are applicable to all teachers, but especially to those that are trying to create a PBL project for the first time. I hope to use those same steps when creating my project for food preservation. Another point that can be used for our project is structured flexibility. When designing a lesson plan, this chapter reminds me to keep it structured in the way of delivery, but not so rigid or demanding of precise steps that the students lose focus of what we are trying to achieve, which may not be the actual project at all. It was also good to review potential pitfalls to designing a project. When creating our project for food preservation, I was able to hold the project I had created up to those pitfalls and measure whether my project falls into any of those categories.