S5EP11 Hacking project-based learning: tips for management, assessment, & more from Ross Cooper & Erin Murphy

Angela Watson's Truth for Teachers

Angela Watson

Education, Courses

4.8 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 16 April 2017

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For many teachers, PBL is a very different way of facilitating learning, where kids are identifying a real-world problem and developing its solution. It's an incredibly powerful, effective, and cross-curricular way for kids to learn. But it's not always simple to plan, and manage, and assess, so we're going to talk about some practical teaching strategies.

We're also going to look at how to address some of the pitfalls that students face. PBL is incredibly rigorous, or should be, and we all know that kids aren't always excited about rigor and working hard--they can't just pass a test at the end of the unit and be done. With PBL, kids show what they learn as they journey through the unit, interact with its lessons, collaborate with each other, and assess themselves and each other. It's pretty complex stuff. It's a tough juxtaposition with the "fill in the bubble" standardized testing mentality that most are expected to juggle simultaneously.

I have two guests on the show today to help us explore these issues--they are the co-authors of the new book Hacking Project Based Learning: 10 Easy Steps to PBL and Inquiry in the Classroom. You'll hear from Erin Murphy, who is an assistant principal and certified literacy specialist in the East Penn School District in Pennsylvania, and Ross Cooper, who is the Supervisor of Instructional Practice K-12 in the Salisbury Township School District in Allentown, Pennsylvania.

Erin and Ross are passionate about inquiry-based learning and have supported countless teachers in implementing it, through not only their school-based work but also through the PD and workshops they conduct. I'm really excited to have them here to help us move past the jargon and buzzwords, and talk about the realities on doing PBL with kids.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Season 5, episode 11 of Angela Watson's Truth for Teachers.
0:05.6	I'm your host Angela Watson and I'm here to speak life, encouragement, and truth
0:11.0	into the minds and hearts of educators and get you energized for the week ahead.
0:15.6	Today I'm going to be talking with Ross Cooper and Aaron Murphy co-authors of
0:20.0	hacking project-based learning and we'll be talking about how to manage some of the trickiest aspects of PBL
0:25.2	including assessment. Visit truth for teachers.com to get the transcript
0:29.6	links to recommended resources and to share your thoughts on the show.
0:34.4	So I have two guests on the show today and they are the co-authors of a new book called
0:38.3	Hacking Project-based Learning, Ten Easy Steps to PBL and inquiry in the classroom.
0:44.0	So you're going to hear from Aaron Murphy,
0:45.6	who is an assistant principal and certified literacy specialist
0:49.0	in the East Penn School District in Pennsylvania.
0:51.5	And you'll hear from Ross Cooper, who is the supervisor of
0:54.6	instructional practice K-12 and the Salisbury Township School District in
0:58.9	Allentown, Pennsylvania. So Aaron and Ross are both very passionate about inquiry-based learning and
1:05.1	they've supported countless teachers in implementing it through not only their
1:08.8	own school-based work but also through the PD and the workshops that they conduct. So I'm really excited to have
1:14.7	them here to help us move past some of the jargon and the buzzwords and talk about the
1:19.8	realities of doing PBL with kids. For many teachers it's a very different way of
1:25.6	facilitating learning where kids are identifying a real world problem and they're
1:29.8	developing its solution. It's an incredibly powerful, effective cross-curricular
1:35.1	way for kids to learn, but it's not always simple to plan and manage and assess.
	...

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