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Hi! I’m Marsy. I’m Portuguese and live on the beautiful Island called Madeira. I teach English and German, teenagers and adults. I want to learn new strategies to use in my classroom.

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Hi! I’m Marsy. I’m Portuguese and live on the beautiful Island called Madeira. I teach English and German, teenagers and adults. I want to learn new strategies to use in my classroom.

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When using PBL it's important to:
- set the right environment,
- build up positive relationships,
- offer space for independent decisions,
- develop an entrepreneurial mindset and skills,
Students must be challenged and along the process they should show confidence, energy, persistence, initiative and resilience. However, they can fail but it's important to learn from the mistakes and failures. Thus, students are being prepared for life!

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MODULE 1
TELL ME AND I FORGET,

TEACH ME AND I REMEMBER,

INVOLVE ME AND I LEARN

Benjamin Franklin

PLB seems interesting but hardworking. I believe it is very important to make students learn life skills, and not only theory! As a teacher of English, the question is how to keep students talking/discussing among them in English! From my point of view, the biggest problem about (not) using PBL approach has to do with our current school system, which assumes a certain type of evaluation, tests, percentages…. another situation has to do with the fact that some (many?!) teachers are “tied” to the past and accommodated and it’s hard to introduce innovation.

I think PBL approach will make lessons more interesting. In fact, it’s difficult to make students memorize things, so I have to repeat and revise frequently. A strategy I like to use very much is pair work activities and information-gap activities. I try to reduce teacher talking time and increase student talking time, so I believe this is a good strategy and a good opportunity for students to talk and discuss in the target language – I mostly use this strategy in the adults classes. I also participate in a kind of project, in a 8th grade class, that also involves a lot students' cooperation throughtout the course and at the end they are supposed to present a final product. Last year, the 7th grade class, presented a portfolio and organized a conference. It was chosen a concept which they had to develop and work in the different subjects.
Context of my lesson plan: I teach English to 8th grade students. This class has 25 students between 12 and 13 years old. We don’t have computers in the classroom, but students have smartphones and they can use them for learning purposes. I’m thinking of experimenting PBL approach with the topic environment.
Driving question:
How eco-friendly is your village?

What makes a good driving question? It must:
- identify a project question or problem
- be open-ended, engage and inspire Ss
- arise curiosity
- be aligned to the learning goals
- be non-Googleable

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I chose this picture (Internet) because I believe it represents my idea of collaboration. If we work together and share ideas and experiences, it will be easier to achieve our goals and each member in a group can somehow contribute to the final project.

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Finding collaboration partners outside the classroom. 

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Finding collaboration partners outside the classroom. 

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My school is situated in the centre of a village and I think that's an advantage and our nearest city is not far. We already take advantage of this situation and it's very common in our school because we have some courses with many training hours and our students do this part of their course outside the school: in the city hall, hotels, parish council, IT companies, libraries, .... We also have partnerships with sports associations, church, police, health care centre, social assistants, bank,....

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http://learningdesigner.org/viewer.php?uri=/personal/Marsilia/designs/fid/0d5e8498ae3fcee7fc06815000f34f4381861a5feae5da6b49ad13b51990e19c

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Assessment should happen throughout the PBL process. A good strategy is to promote peer assessment because students help each other giving feedback on their colleagues' work and get involved in the process of learning. A very useful tool to help students with peer assessment is using the Ladder of feedback because it helps to generate kind, thoughtful and effective feedback. It is composed by four steps:
1- Clarify - students ask questions to clarify some points;
2- Value - students point out the positive aspects;
3- Concerns - students identify concerns they may have about the work;
4- Suggest - students make suggestions that can be used to revise or improve the final work.
The teacher should monitor all the process and guarantee that this ladder of feedback is properly applied and students get useful feedback.
Rubrics can also be used for PBL assessment whether formative or summative assessment.