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What is the importance of Building the Culture of the teaching and learning environments for project based learning?

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Project Based Learning Handbook Chapter 3: Building the Culture

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Project Based Learning Handbook Chapter 3: Building the Culture

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pp. 77-90

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Make a Copy of the Following Document to use as you read thru Chapter 3: Building the Culture (pp.77-90)

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Make a Copy of the Following Document to use as you read thru Chapter 3: Building the Culture (pp.77-90)

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What do you need to know to successfully build a PBL culture in your teaching and learning environment? Click on the plus link below to share your questions about Building a PBL Culture.

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Review the Following Video (Use pg.76 in your PBL Handbook to record What do you See-Think-Wonder?)

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Review the Following Video (Use pg.76 in your PBL Handbook to record What do you See-Think-Wonder?)

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Project Based Teaching Practices: Build the Culture - Look & Feel of the Classroom

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https://youtu.be/kzvm1m8zq5g

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Final Tips & Ideas for Building a PBL Culture (pg.90)

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Final Tips & Ideas for Building a PBL Culture (pg.90)

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Final Tips & Ideas for Building a PBL Culture (pg.90)

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If you need to review  "See-Think-Wonder?" use this video.

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If you need to review  "See-Think-Wonder?" use this video.

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CREATING AND USING NORMS TO BUILD EFFECTIVE CULTURE

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CREATING AND USING NORMS TO BUILD EFFECTIVE CULTURE

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http://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/bie-ootg/documents/Creating_UsingNorms_final.pdf

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Article: How Being a Part of a 'House' Within a School Helps Students Gain a Sense of Belonging

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Article: How Being a Part of a 'House' Within a School Helps Students Gain a Sense of Belonging

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Principal Hayes believes these mentoring activities are to thank for helping reduce bullying and other behavioral problems. Since the house system was introduced at Lake Canyon, suspensions went from nine to zero, she said, and instances of students being sent to the office for discipline greatly decreased.

A sense of inclusion and engagement in a common enterprise can have academic benefits as well as social-emotional ones, according to Jennifer Kloczko, the principal of Stoneridge Elementary School in Roseville, California. Two teams of her teachers traveled to observe Lake Canyon's house system in action as they launched their own. "When kids are really excited about school," Kloczko said, "they are happier and they tend to learn more." It's a proposition supported by scholarly research tying a heightened sense of belonging to increased achievement.
HELPING KIDS TRANSITION
Another touted benefit of houses is easing transitions. Last year the incoming kindergarten students at Lake Canyon were welcomed by sixth-graders who had planned a new tradition. The big kids formed a cheering tunnel, placed a Hawaiian lei in one of the house colors around each little one's neck, and invited them to play. Jeff Gilbert, the principal of Hillsdale High School in the San Francisco Bay Area, credits his school's house system with helping ninth-graders acclimate to a student body of nearly 1,500 and what can be an overwhelming roster of classes and teachers.

Each Hillsdale ninth-grader spends five periods a day-math, English, social studies, science and advisory-with their 111 housemates. Four teachers coordinate with one another in mostly adjacent classrooms as they teach those subjects, and each takes responsibility for advising 28 of the house's students, whom they follow through the end of sophomore year.

"You talk about students all the time," Gilbert said. "You know every family, and you know every student. You stop dealing with them in these sort of large abstract cohorts." In addition to allowing for "much more individualized responses," he said, the house system helps replicate the coherence of the elementary experience. "Our honors students know our special ed students," he said. "It's not always perfect, but those cliques and those tensions have dramatically reduced."

Modern elementary and secondary house systems aren't just a California thing. The 735 kindergarten through fifth-grade students at Richard J. Lee Elementary School in the small Dallas suburb of Coppell, Texas, eat lunch with their houses. Ottway Elementary in Greenville, Tennessee, provides students with lanyards marked by the colors and names of the school's four houses, each named for a rare gemstone. And at Jackson Road Elementary School in Griffin, Georgia-where houses have not just missions, colors, chants and symbols but also hand signs and mottos-each classroom contains four colored containers. Students who earn a house point are given a bean to place in their house's container which, along with the others, gets periodically emptied into a larger one near the front office.
BENEFITS TO SCHOOLS
Educators at schools like these claim additional systemic advantages. Gilbert said he thinks Hillsdale's house system empowers teachers and in so doing gives the high school an edge in recruitment and retention. Kloczko said Stoneridge's houses help attract parents in Roseville's choice system: "It makes us special." And according to Hayes, the staff at Lake Canyon is more united "because now they have another small group ... they are collaborating with."

Of course, the specific successes of Lake Canyon might have something to do with the way the school rolled out the idea. In the spring of 2016, Hayes, Seamons and six others traveled to the Ron Clark Academy in Atlanta, a nonprofit middle school created to serve as a model school for educator training programs. After observing a house system in action there, the group volunteered to form a committee, calling themselves "the Hags" for "House Advisory Group."

They introduced staff to the concept before school let out for summer and asked for help choosing the six character traits that would determine the house identities. "We really wanted a buy-in from the rest of the staff," Seamons said. "They were familiar with the Harry Potter books," Hayes added, "so it wasn't a completely foreign concept," but she made sure to hammer home the potential benefits. She was also careful not to demand too much extra work from teachers, setting aside about 25 minutes out of each 90-minute staff meeting for planning house meeting activities.

"There was no rhyme or reason" to the way Lake Canyon split students, teachers and staff up into six groups. They didn't even pay attention to gender, but Hayes said, "It all kind of worked out." (One thing the committee did massage: placement of children with special needs to ensure proper support.) Some people anticipated problems with students wanting to switch houses, but Hayes said that hasn't really happened. "With the older kids, maybe their best friend is in a different house, and that's an issue at lunch perhaps," Seamons said, "but not really."
TOOLS FOR IMPLEMENTATION
One focus the Hags maintained throughout was positivity. In order for the house system to function as an effective way to reinforce desired behavior, unlike at Hogwarts, teachers and staff at Lake Canyon only award points, never taking them away. Seamons said teachers also take steps to emphasize the "friendly" part of "friendly competition," because students need to be taught "how to compete successfully."

Dan Green helped launch a house system at California's Goleta Valley Junior High in 2003. In a paper on the topic, he wrote that some teachers worried competition might decrease collegiality and self-esteem. Administrators there responded by carefully calibrating the point system "to award participation, effort and growth just as much as achievement," Green reported.

Lake Canyon's experience would seem to provide a roadmap for successful implementation, but it might not be that simple. Hayes paid for things like the banners and T-shirts with a portion of federal funds the district won in 2012. At Stoneridge, Kloczko relied on the financial support of the school's Parent Teacher Club, as well as nine teachers who fundraised to attend the Ron Clark Academy. Gilbert said Hillsdale received a smaller learning community planning grant in the late 1990s and another grant in 2002.

Aside from some expense, "it requires a long-term commitment," Hayes said, as well as whole-school involvement.

There also doesn't yet seem to be reliable data on the efficacy of houses. Lake Canyon's suspensions decreased, yes, but causation is difficult to establish since the school launched a restorative justice discipline model around the same time.

Hayes was careful to add a final caveat: For a house system to succeed, there has to be something substantive behind it, an underlying ethos being reinforced. At Lake Canyon, that's a list of 33 "soft skills" such as "do not brag" and "be courteous."

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How Being Part of a 'House' Within a School Helps Students Gain A Sense of Belonging | KQED

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Principal Hayes believes these mentoring activities are to thank for helping reduce bullying and other behavioral problems. Since the house system was introduced at Lake Canyon, suspensions went from nine to zero, she said, and instances of students being sent to the office for discipline greatly decreased.

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https://youtu.be/oRXYc4xmvwg

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Fostering Belonging With Classroom Norms

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Gamestorming – A toolkit for innovators, rule-breakers and changemakers

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