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Experiential Learning Cycles (various theorists)

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Experiential Learning Cycles (various theorists)

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Experiential Learning Lesson Plan Template 2

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Experiential Learning Lesson Plan Template 2

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Experiential Learning Lesson Plan Template

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Experiential Learning Lesson Plan Template

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Research on effectiveness of Experiential Learning

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Research on effectiveness of Experiential Learning

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beyond learning by doing: theoretical currents in experiential education

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Beyond Learning by Doing: Theoretical Currents in Experiential Education

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What is experiential education? What are its theoretical roots? Where does this approach come from? Offering a fresh and distinctive take, this book is about going beyond "learning by doing" through an exploration of its underlying theoretical currents. As an increasingly popular pedagogical appr...

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Includes steps to change a regular lesson into an experiential lesson

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Engage students with experiential learning in your classroom

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A how-to interactive training for teachers to help them learn how to use experiential learning in their classroom. Easy and fun activities that they can immed...

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Team-building and trust-building activities | National School Reform Faculty

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Team-building and trust-building activities These NSRF activities were designed to help groups build the foundation of safety and trust necessary for a fully functional Critical Friends Group® learning community. They allow participants to transition out of the usual working relationship structures, so that they can connect more deeply and collaborate more effectively when they transition into doing the work of the CFG® meeting.

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Classroom Clock

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Andrew Stadel gives a talk on April 15, 2016, called "Classroom Clock" at the Math Forum Ignite event at the 2016 NCTM Annual Meeting in San Francisco, CA. @mr_stadel

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This is just a teacher's blog post, but this was where I built my proficiency based rubric from.

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Ah, the interminable design cycles that we as teachers put ourselves through! Something that I often find challenging is how lengthy these cycles can be-I mean, if the day after you've shared a lesson with kids you have a great idea about how it could have been way better, it could be up to a year or more before you get a chance to try it out. And that's if you remember your idea.

The cycle that has thrown me for the biggest loop is the one I've been in about SBG (or Standards-Based Grading). When I first got into this mathedtweetblogiverse two years ago, I was excited by the work Dan Meyer and others had done to make their expectations about skills clear to their students. Until that point, my own assessment arc had not been going well. From the start, it had been really hard to match up my previous experiences with assessment with Saint Ann's culture and ideals. Giving quizzes and tests in arbitrary and knee-jerky fashion after we had covered "enough" material fizzled in the face of not giving grades. Also, neither the tests themselves nor the feedback and corrections I labored over seemed to improve anyone's understanding.

When I pulled back from those traditional assessment methods, however, I found myself in something of a vacuum. The fact that I'm in charge of my own curricula and evaluations with little to no constraint-coupled with the fact that I tend to spontaneity and disorganization-often meant that I did few formal assessments whatsoever. I knew that my students were learning things from the work they were doing for my class. I could make records about my observations of their activities to include in my anecdotal reports. Still, I couldn't help but to think something was missing-my students just weren't being best served by the lack of clear expectations, a systematic way of pursuing them, and a feedback cycle.

Enter SBG.

Trying to bring Standards-Based Grading into a no-grades school was an interesting adventure. Suffice it to say that after trying out several different formulations over the past two years, I'm really excited to try out my new approach very soon. I've decided to go binary with respect to my skills quizzes, since trying to measure progress toward understanding numerically never felt fruitful to me in practice, and there's no need for me to establish a final "average" for each kid. (Shawn Cornally's thoughts here also helped to get me there.) I'll continue to have skills lists for my kids and weekly quizzes for them to choose from in order to demonstrate their mastery. I'll be giving them copious feedback and letting them know if they nailed it or still have work to do, and we'll both keep track of the skills they've mastered.

Still, I really wanted to find a way to encourage students to see that skills mastery is the beginning of the story, rather than the end. Skills are tools that let you do new things, that empower you, that even give you a new bit of social capital. With these thoughts in mind, I designed the following sheet to help kids to track their progress toward skills mastery and to inspire them to use their knowledge in fruitful ways. I'll be using the same document to track their progress.

That first column gets checked off once a kid aces a weekly skills quiz-that's the binary got-it-or-don't. The space below is for me and students to keep track of feedback that I give them and reminders they might make for themselves. The other three columns are by no means sequential and don't represent "stages" past mastery. Rather, they are suggested asperations and goals for the newly-minted master geometric-series-summer. Would you like to try a non-routine problem that involves geometric series? Just ask me for one. Does someone you know-in our class or out of it-need help with this topic, or just curious about learning some new math? Share your new knowledge and document it by journaling, snapping a photo, or making a video. Did you recognize three months later that knowing how to sum geometric series opened up a route to solving a problem as you worked on a project? Sweet! Include it in your project write-up.

The point is that those other columns are an ever-present alert: You know things! You can seek out ways to use your knowledge! All three of the " choice prongs " are here-the suggested tasks are big and open-ended, the timeframe is as long as needed, and students can choose these for themselves as goals and record and reflect on their successes as they happen.

A final thought: it seems to me that something like this could be easily adapted to a grades environment. I'm not well-practiced at designing grading schemes, but I'm thinking:

non-mastery of a skill in isolation is a high F

mastery of a skill in isolation is a high B or low A

mastery of a skill in isolation plus a further use of the skill is a high A

And then average them up.

Thoughts on the practicality of such a grading scheme? Comments on the set-up I'm going to try out? Ideas for other ways of building and sharing skills mastery beyond use in isolation?

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SBG: Skills Mastery as the Beginning, Not the End

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Ah, the interminable design cycles that we as teachers put ourselves through! Something that I often find challenging is how lengthy these cycles can be--I mean, if the day after you've shared a lesson with kids you have a great idea about how it could have been way better, it could be up to a...

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a collection of materials and research papers

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Shell Centre for Mathematical Education Publications Ltd.

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Shell Centre Publications Ltd. was set up to distribute and license materials developed at the Centre, and offers a range of innovative teaching materials for mathematics education, together with research publications and tests from the Centre and its collaborators.

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An open source collection of DOK 2 and 3 problems that have an “open middle” meaning that there are multiple ways to approach and ultimately solve the problem.

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Open Middle - Challenging math problems worth solving

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Open Middle offers interactive math problems designed to foster critical thinking. Explore unique challenges that boost problem-solving skills and creativity.

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The materials were originally developed to meet the needs of teachers in pre-algebra, Algebra I and II. As you will see there are a few higher level lesson plans as well as a strong link to statistics.

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Robert Kaplinsky's Problem Solving Framework

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Robert Kaplinsky's Problem Solving Framework

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Great for use with 3-Act problems http://robertkaplinsky.com/resources/

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Transmission vs. Connected and Challenging

Odd one out
Sometimes Always Never

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Teaching Channel

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Thematic learning activity for trigonometry class. Using their knowledge of trigonometry and laws of sines and cosines, students solve for real world scenarios.

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Teaching Channel

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Math.A.REI.1

Common core State Standards

Math: Math

A: Algebra

REI: Reasoning with Equations and Inequalities

1:
Explain each step in solving a simple equation as following from the
equality of numbers asserted at the previous step, starting from the
assumption that the original equation has a solution. Construct a
viable argument to justify a solution method.

Download Common Core State Standards (PDF 1.2 MB)

|

Math.Practice.MP2

Common core State Standards

Math: Math

Practice: Mathematical Practice Standards

MP2: Reason abstractly and quantitatively.

Mathematically proficient students make sense of quantities and their relationships in problem situations. They bring two complementary abilities to bear on problems involving quantitative relationships: the ability todecontextualize--to abstract a given situation and represent it symbolically and manipulate the representing symbols as if they have a life of their own, without necessarily attending to their referents-and the ability tocontextualize, to pause as needed during the manipulation process in order to probe into the referents for the symbols involved. Quantitative reasoning entails habits of creating a coherent representation of the problem at hand; considering the units involved; attending to the meaning of quantities, not just how to compute them; and knowing and flexibly using different properties of operations and objects.

Download Common Core State Standards (PDF 1.2 MB)

|

Math.Practice.MP3

Common core State Standards

Math: Math

Practice: Mathematical Practice Standards

MP3: Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others.

Mathematically proficient students understand and use stated assumptions, definitions, and previously established results in constructing arguments. They make conjectures and build a logical progression of statements to explore the truth of their conjectures. They are able to analyze situations by breaking them into cases, and can recognize and use counterexamples. They justify their conclusions, communicate them to others, and respond to the arguments of others. They reason inductively about data, making plausible arguments that take into account the context from which the data arose. Mathematically proficient students are also able to compare the effectiveness of two plausible arguments, distinguish correct logic or reasoning from that which is flawed, and--if there is a flaw in an argument--explain what it is. Elementary students can construct arguments using concrete referents such as objects, drawings, diagrams, and actions. Such arguments can make sense and be correct, even though they are not generalized or made formal until later grades. Later, students learn to determine domains to which an argument applies. Students at all grades can listen or read the arguments of others, decide whether they make sense, and ask useful questions to clarify or improve the arguments.

Download Common Core State Standards (PDF 1.2 MB)

Thought starters

1. What do students learn from collaboratively viewing student work samples?

2. How would you decide to group the students for this activity?

3. Why is it important for the groups to have guiding questions for the activity?

School Details

Turkey Foot Middle School
3230 Turkeyfoot Road
Edgewood KY 41017

Data Provided By:

Teachers

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Learning from Mistakes: Linear Equations

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A small group of students in Susie Morehead's eighth grade class analyzes student work samples for clarity and accuracy. They discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the work, and use a list of guiding questions to focus their conversation. The students learn how to better approach and organize their own work from this activity.

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from EdWeek

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Researchers explore group work in class

At its best, collaboration in the classroom can help students think more deeply and creatively about a subject and develop more empathy for others' perspectives. At its worst, group tasks can deteriorate into awkward silences, arguments-or frustration for the one child who ends up doing everyone else's work.

Now, as the teaching technique gains new prominence in state standards, researchers and educators are working to understand how to help students gain the skills needed to learn and work in groups.

"Learning through doing is an important component in this, ... but by itself, it's not enough," said Emily Lai, the director of formative assessment and feedback for Pearson, the educational publishing company. "Students go into these experiences with very little understanding of what they should be working toward-and so students walk away from these experiences a little jaded. Collaboration is just like any other skill; it has to be taught."

The ability to collaborate with others has become one of the most sought-after skills in both education and the workplace. A survey by the Association of American Colleges and Universities found that more than 80 percent of midsize or larger employers look for collaboration skills in new hires-but fewer than 40 percent of them considered new graduates prepared to work in teams.

Collaborative Standards

Partly in response to industry and higher education recommendations, both the Common Core State Standards for reading and mathematics and the Next Generation Science Standards call for students to develop skills for collaboration and group problem-solving.

Even assessments are changing to focus on the skills needed for group work. In 2015, the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, added interactive tasks that gauge how well students can develop shared understanding of a problem, take action together to solve it, and maintain a team organization. The first results of that test are expected this fall.

The nonprofit Partnership for 21st Century Learning, along with Pearson, this month released a report breaking down three main aspects of collaboration that need to be taught: communicating with others, resolving conflicts, and managing tasks.

Without a task that requires multiple perspectives, Lai said, students often simply divvy up different aspects of a task "and then sort of smoosh it together at the end. That's not really collaborating."

That's what Emma Mercier, an assistant professor of curriculum and instruction, and graduate researcher Susan Kelly, both of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, are also finding in a large, ongoing series of studies of middle school students working in groups.

For one forthcoming study, the researchers assigned groups of students using electronic "smart" tables to answer questions on the nutrition and energy costs of different foods, using different data sources. In the 45 discussions studied, all the students could identify and repeat data facts, but the groups that engaged in more discussion of the data were able to begin to synthesize different sources of information and how they were connected.

Yet none of the groups was able to synthesize data from several sources without help from the teacher.

Mercier found in a separate study that regardless of whether middle schoolers collaborated using paper and pencil or smart tables to solve complex math-based "mystery" problems, the groups in which a student generated the first idea and then students responded to each other produced more ideas for solving problems than those in which the first idea came from a teacher.

"The elephant in the room when you have students work in groups is, if you don't explicitly teach them how to collaborate, they are not going to do it. If you just put them in groups and give them a task, that's not enough," Kelly said.

Equitable Benefits

Kelly was among several researchers at last month's meeting of the American Educational Research Association who are exploring how collaboration can improve student learning.

The quality of group discussions can be more important than the individual student's previous knowledge about a subject, according to a separate series of studies previewed at the meeting by Joshua Adams, a science of learning researcher at Arizona State University. Adams tracked the growth in understanding of small groups in secondary school and college, some of which paired students of roughly similar background knowledge and some

that had large gaps in knowledge between students on the team. While that sort of mixed-ability grouping sometimes prompts concerns that more-gifted students will be held back, Adams found students' learning was better predicted by whether they engaged in substantive conversations than by their previous knowledge. In fact, among high schoolers, the longer that students of different abilities participated in engaged groups, the more the knowledge of the subject improved for all students.

And just as students' background knowledge differs from subject to subject, Mercier found in a separate study that students' leadership roles in the groups can vary as well, even though students who are naturally more outspoken do tend to be more likely to be primary leaders. When the researcher kept the same students in groups for math and history projects, she found different students led the group in the two subjects, regardless of who had higher social status.

"A partner can bring in information that's not in the learning materials ... [such as] procedures they've used to solve other problems," Adamssaid. "Students can generate new knowledge and work at a higher learning level. Instead of trying to choose whether the high-performing students will benefit the most or low-performing students will benefit the most, if teachers focus on prioritizing interaction quality, ... both benefit."

Teachers can set the stage for better student discussions by only using group work for tasks that "are too cognitively large for any one student to do on their own," Mercier said, and by discussing and modeling appropriate talking and listening in a group.

Building Strong Discussions

One Ohio State University researcher is piloting a program to build up students' social skills so they can better function in group work. In the program, Collaborative Social Reasoning, developed by Tzu-Jung Lin, students are separated into small groups over the course of a year and receive direct instruction on providing clear arguments with evidence, disagreeing with a teammate respectfully, providing substantive feedback, and understanding each person's responsibilities for group learning.

Teachers receive training on how to devise the kinds of tasks that will spur constructive group work. For example, the pilot study asked students to analyze the history of Japanese-American internment camps during World War II and compare them with modern debates over immigrant and minority groups.

"Through these historical backgrounds, students were able to relate the reading to their personal experiences," Lin said.

Shufeng Ma, another educational psychologist at the University of Illinois, found that students who participated in group discussions created longer chains of reasoning to answer complex essay questions. Even students who spoke less than others in a group learned more when their group engaged in complex conversations.

Ma analyzed the group discussions of 160 students in eight schools across Illinois who took part in a six-week reading unit on ecology, economic, and policy issues related to wild wolves near a community. Of more than 3,300 conversational turns, students engaged in 122 discussions in which one student explained and expanded on another student's thought.

Once those conversations started, students were more likely to generate multiple chains of logic together, she found. "Reasoning is forged in talk. ... Children adopt the way other people think and talk, so conceptual relationships and the words to represent those become more accessible to children in a group discussion," she said.

Published in Print: May 17, 2017, as Classroom Collaboration: Seeking the Secret to Success
Back to Top

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Children Must Be Taught to Collaborate, Studies Say

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At its best, collaboration in the classroom can help students think more deeply and creatively about a subject and develop more empathy for others' perspectives. At its worst, group tasks can deteriorate into awkward silences, arguments-or frustration for the one child who ends up doing everyone else's work.

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Middle school example

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steps for teachers (Marilyn Burns)

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High school

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Student Discourse - Students Making Math Connections

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Nrich mathematics: discourse development

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Developing the Classroom Culture: Using the Dotty Six Activity as a Springboard for Investigation : nrich.maths.org

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This article suggests how to dig deeper into who answers questions in your classroom using the game Dotty Six.

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Links from Illinois DOE

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includes links to progressions

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Edutopia article which includes several examples of how high school math standards apply to real-world concepts.

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Karim Ani

Former middle school teacher and math coach, founder of Mathalicious

Dear Math-Teacher-To-Be:

According to a recent Raytheon survey, 44 percent of middle school students would rather take out the garbage than do their math homework. On the 2012 Programme for International Student Assessment, American high school students placed 27th among their OECD colleagues, demonstrating a troubling lack of problem-solving and critical-thinking skills. Only 11.6 percent of high school graduates express an interest in pursuing STEM in college. Of these, just over half meet the ACT college readiness benchmark in math.

To many students, math is a bunch of random skills to memorize and regurgitate, a series of steps with no meaning or relevance to their lives. For generations, an emphasis on rote instruction -- do this, then do that -- has left students wondering, "What does this mean?" and "When will I ever use it?"

What students are really asking, of course, is, "Why math?" It's a good question. You're about to enter the classroom. Before you do, ask yourself: Why do you want students to learn math? Why do you want to teach it?

A 2012 MetLife survey found that teacher job satisfaction is at its lowest in over 20 years. I imagine this is particularly true for math teachers who, along with their ELA counterparts, operate beneath the specter of annual high-stakes testing. In this environment, a meta-reflection like "why?" may seem unaffordably luxurious, like contemplating the nature of happiness in a hurricane.

But let's give ourselves permission to silence for a moment the cacophony that we've constructed around education, and to consider: Why math?

Why Math? The Typical Answers

The obvious answer is, "Because students will need it one day." That's true. Many students will also need bifocals one day, but that's probably not enough to convince a 12-year-old to start saving her allowance. "One day" is pretty abstract and honestly a bit of a punt when used to justify, "Do page 17, 1-73, odd."

Another answer: "Because math helps students solve problems." That's also true. There's a classic task in which students are presented with two scenarios:

1. They can choose a one-time payment of $1 million.

2. They can receive a penny on the first day, two pennies on the second day, four pennies on the third, and so on, for a month.

Students work in groups to determine which option is better. Some draw pictures. Others create tables. Over the course of the task, students discover that on the tenth day, the penny option would only yield 512 pennies. But by the thirtieth day, it would yield 2 ²⁹, or roughly 1 billion pennies: more than $11 million.

While this is a surprising answer, the goal of the task is less the solution and more the act of figuring out. Students get an opportunity to become more flexible in their thinking, and also to reveal some underlying mathematical structure (in this case, exponential growth). This is important. Indeed, it's crucial.

But it's not enough. For some student will inevitably ask, "But nobody offered me $1 million. This is stupid. Why should I care?" And when he does, how should we respond?

Why Math? A Possible Answer

Why math? Why exponential growth?

Because exponential growth allows us to determine how fast the human population is growing and to discuss its implications for global food production and clean energy. Exponential growth allows us to explore how video game consoles have changed and to predict whether we're building the Matrix.

In sixth grade, students learn how to convert from fractions to percentages. Why percentages? Because they allow us to determine whether Wheel of Fortune is rigged and debate the fairest way to tip at a restaurant. Students learn the difference between median and mean, and how to draw a box plot. And these tools allow us to analyze how wealth is distributed in the U.S. and consider what it means to live in a fair society.

Unit rates? How long does it take to burn off a Big Mac, and should McDonald's rewrite its menu in terms of exercise?

Ratios? How does the media we consume affect our happiness?

Permutations? How many shoes can you design on NIKEiD, and at what point does this cause paralysis-by-analysis?

Linear functions? Is college worth the cost?

Why math? Because math helps us to be healthier. It challenges us to be kinder. It motivates us to be more curious.

In 2009, we as a country tore ourselves apart in our debate over healthcare reform. We screamed at one another at town hall meetings and called those who disagreed with us traitorous and un-American. And yet there's nothing inherently divisive about health insurance. It's just expected value: the probability of your getting sick multiplied by the cost to treat you.

Mathematics allows us to discuss important issues in a meaningful, constructive way. Why math? Because it allows us to be better citizens.

Math: A Lens Onto the World

The Common Core State Standards define "rigor" as an equal emphasis on three areas:

1. Procedural fluency

2. Conceptual understanding

3. Application

Students need to develop basic skills; they must be able to solve a proportion. Students must also develop an understanding of concepts; they must understand what proportionality means.

And yet while math is an object of inquiry, it's also an object for inquiry. Galileo spent many hours studying and refining his telescopes, yet his primary motivation was not the device itself but what he could do with it: gaze at the cosmos. For generations, we have presented to students a version of mathematics characterized largely by rote procedures and conceptual puzzles. A math class without authentic applications is like an astronomy class where students spend the year calibrating a telescope but never actually look at the stars. Math allows us to better understand the world and to live more meaningfully in it.

How do temperatures fluctuate over the year, and do you see evidence of long-term climate change? (Trig functions)

What is the likelihood of finding life on other planets? (Fraction multiplication)

How does your memory deteriorate over time. . . and how much can you really trust it? (Exponential decay)

Why math? Why math class? Because math class can be the place where students discuss the most important and thought-provoking questions that face us as a species.

Your Legacy as a Teacher

You are about to enter teaching. Sometime this fall, you'll open your classroom door for the first time. That's a huge moment. Congratulations. One day, though, you'll leave teaching and close that door for the last time. In between those moments, what do you want to accomplish? There's an entire structure to help decide that for you: standards and tests, interventions and curricula. Yet even in the most rigid of circumstances, the most important decisions ultimately come down to you.

When you close that door for the last time, what conversations do you want to have had? To all your former students -- thousands of adults now out in the world -- what lessons do you want to have taught? What thoughts do you want to have inspired? And how do you want their lives to be better for their time in your classroom?

Or to put it another way: Why math?

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Karim Ani Former middle school teacher and math coach, founder of Mathalicious Dear Math-Teacher-To-Be: According to a recent Raytheon survey, 44 percent of middle school students would rather take out the garbage than do their math homework.

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Best Math Resources for High School Educators

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Best Math Resources for High School Educators

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Edutopia article with links to many valuable resources on CCSS.

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Common Core has certainly raised some questions -- from what assessment will look like, to curriculum development and how the standards are in practice. There are others, I'm sure.

But currently, education nonprofits and researchers are developing materials to help educators, parents and students understand them. With that in mind, here are some of the best resources for understanding how Common Core will shift high school math classrooms, with example videos, articles about assessment and lists of tech tools for educators.

21 Common Core-aligned Math Apps: Are you looking for some useful tools to be used for Common Core math? Well, this TeachThought.com post highlights some great, mostly free apps that can be used in high school math classes. All of the examples are featured on edshelf, a website that provides parent/educator reviews of tech tools. The only catch: Most of the apps were designed for Apple devices.

Common Core Resources from Illustrated Mathematics: This video series from Illustrated Mathematics offers in-depth, real-life examples of the processes and proficiencies of Common Core math. In each video, students work through math problems and display Common Core proficiencies. It's certainly interesting, and they'll be useful for teachers who are using Common Core in the classroom. There's also a user-friendly menu of five high school math categories, with quick drop-down menus for the domains of each category.

Common Core Overviews from Shmoop.com: The CCSS are laborious to read, but here, Shmoop.com turns them on their head, providing a witty look at the high school math standards. These are engaging to read, and they cover all six math standards. If you have some time, they're definitely worth a read. Also included are some useful practice quizzes that will provide ideas for assessment strategies.

Common Core Proficiencies From Inside Mathematics: What does the Common Core look like in the classroom? This great video series from Inside Mathematics offers a definitive look at practice standards for each grade. Not to mention, the videos also offer a examples of the each proficiency in the context of lessons. On the site, you'll also find links to useful classroom tools for the Common Core.

Common Core High School Math Lessons from LearnZillion: This user-friendly site offers lessons aligned with various standards. You can browse based on category, then choose lessons based on a proficiency. Another great site -- OER Commons -- also features a wealth of CCSS math resources for high school educators.

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Common Core Math: Best Resources for High School Educators | Edutopia

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Common Core has certainly raised some questions -- from what assessment will look like, to curriculum development and how the standards are in practice. There are others, I'm sure. But currently, education nonprofits and researchers are developing materials to help educators, parents and students understand them.

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Edutopia article with embedded video

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Everyone knows that the attention span of a 14-year-old can be short, but we intended to create a year-long project for our freshmen course. How on earth were we going to sustain engagement among our students on one project from August to May?

At Mid-Pacific Institute in Honolulu, we teach MPX, a completely project-based curriculum that fulfills the ninth grade requirements for biology, mathematics, social studies, and language arts. The MPX curriculum needs to be as rigorous as it is innovative, so we spent the summer planning out the details for a challenging, interdisciplinary, yearlong project that would center around the concepts of sustainability and food security.

Our project would require students to work in teams:

Designing high-density garden systems

Constructing the garden systems

Participating in culinary lessons

Cultivating crops

Competing in a cook-off using the crops

A Firsthand View of Sustainability

The key to keeping our students engaged in this project work was beginning the process with field trips to help them understand the need for sustainable practices. Some of the essential questions embedded in this exploration were:

Where does our food come from? And where does it go?

What is sustainable farming?

What are the similarities and differences between ancient and modern farming methods?

We toured a waste-to-power plant and a recycling plant so that the students could see the amount of waste our community generates and how it is processed in order to lessen the burden on our environment. We were able to assess that the field trips were well worth it through the students' reflective blog posts written as part of their homework. One student posted:

Going to H-Power was undeniably one of the most educating field trips I have ever taken. I never really grasped how much our community conserves, but during the field trip, I was given an idea, as for every ten garbage trucks that enter the plant, only one leaves full of ash.

Then, we toured a lo'i, an ancient (and still completely sustainable) Hawaiian way of farming the taro plant.

As the students began to collect research regarding high-density gardening techniques, we took two more field trips to let them ask questions for modern farming experts, like "What is an air pump?" and "How much money does this type of farming cost to maintain?" The first destination was an aquaponics farm, where the students observed high-density farming at the commercial level. The second was a tour of soil and soil-less gardens at the local university.

Through these field trips, the students became concerned for their community and invested in the theme of this project.

Hydroponics in Action

Each of our seven freshmen teams then designed their own high-density garden system. Every team reached the same decision, to pursue hydroponic gardening. The student teams revised their designs many times before we approved them to move forward with construction. Students applied geometry and scale factor in creating scale drawings of their hydroponic systems.

To keep the process authentic, we required the students to adhere to a budget and to price out materials for their garden system. Then, we took all 30 freshmen on a field trip to Home Depot. There, the students spent the morning finding building materials, budgeting, and making on-the-fly decisions regarding selecting and altering materials.

The seven teams then spent the rest of the semester constructing their garden designs. It was not easy! There were mismeasurements, leaks, and creative repairs, but every team successfully completed a working hydroponic garden, designed to fit in a very small yard or on a lanai/deck space.

Each team was given the choice of what to grow in their constructed garden system. The students spent the majority of the second semester cultivating their crops. They grew green beans, cucumbers, tomatoes, lettuce, spinach, and a variety of herbs. The students spent a great deal of time learning how to balance the nutrients and pH levels in their soil-less garden systems. Nearly every day, they would visit their gardens to conduct readings of the water in their systems, balance pH and TDS levels, and prune their plants.

Freshmen Iron Chefs!

Meanwhile, we were able to partner with the culinary department at a local community college. The students tutored under an instructor chef in the training kitchen one day per month from November to February. In between each culinary lesson, we assigned "cooking homework," including blog posts about students' experiences in both the training kitchen and their homes. One student wrote:

I definitely see improvement from my first cooking experience, however I did get ahead of myself again. For example, I started boiling the water before I even had all of my ingredients gathered! Planning better is something I need to work on next time.

Through these culinary lessons, the freshmen learned a multitude of real-life skills including safety, sanitation, heating techniques, and flavoring. The science behind food preparation, such as emulsification, dovetailed nicely into the curriculum.

The culminating event for this project was a public exhibition and competition. Each team created a display that included posters with their learning points on sustainability, binders that included their garden system's manual and maintenance log, and video documentaries of their team's project process. (See the example below.) Each team also competed in the "MPIron Chef" cook-off, using the vegetables they grew in their garden systems. The students had one hour to prepare their dishes before they presented them to a panel of judges including an executive chef and a local food critic. The students had to speak to the judges, as well as an auditorium full of parents and community members, about their garden system, recipe, and experience in the kitchen that evening. It was meaningful for the students to explain their decisions both in the garden and in the kitchen.

On so many different levels, we saw our freshmen grow during this project, just as much as their vegetables! As one of our students reflected:

I can't say how fortunate I was to be able to be a part of this incredible experience. I feel myself swell up with pride at the accomplishments of not only myself or my group, but our class as a whole.

For the full documentation of this project, visit the MPX9 Humanities Class Blog. And please share your own adventures with teaching sustainability through PBL in the comments section below.

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From Modern Farm to Sustainable Table: Teaching STEM and Humanities with Authenticity

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Everyone knows that the attention span of a 14-year-old can be short, but we intended to create a year-long project for our freshmen course. How on earth were we going to sustain engagement among our students on one project from August to May?

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Info for teachers, parents, and students with a focus on algebra

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Focus in High School Mathematics - National Council of Teachers of Mathematics

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Focus in High School Mathematics: Reasoning and Sense Making is a conceptual framework to guide the development of future publications and tools related to 9-12 mathematics curriculum and instruction.

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NCTM Reasoning and Sense Making Task Library

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NCTM Reasoning and Sense Making Task Library

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Lessons for high school students aligned with CCSS

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Geared for high school teachers to use for connecting math to engaging, real world situations. Lessons and interactives, as well as places to reflect with other teachers after trying the lessons.  I found this link through NCTM, and they are also connected to lots of other high quality math partners. (Offers a 30 day free trial, then you have to pay for the resources.)

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Research-based lessons and interactive tools for all levels. Just search your topic and grade level, and you will have a plethora of options to select from. (Not sure why the photo that comes up is the IRS...Lessons from Illuminations are much more engaging than doing your taxes!)

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Classroom video where students are discussing properties of quadrilaterals. Lots of great math discourse in action.

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classroom videos /public lessons /9th & 10th grade math - properties of quadrilaterals /

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9th & 10th Grade Math - Properties of Quadrilaterals

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Problems of the Month: Can be used with other grade levels, to do a common theme. Or you can just pick the ones that fit with your needs and do levels D and E with higher level students. Lots of possibilities for differentiation here.

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CCSS aligned performance tasks with rubrics.

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Performance Assessment Tasks | Inside Mathematics

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These tasks are grade-level formative performance assessment tasks with accompanying scoring rubrics and discussion of student work samples. They are aligned to the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics. You may download and use these tasks for professional development purposes without modifyi…