PBL Plan

After watching Chris Lehman: Education is Broken and considering the themes of

• live & matter
• classes should be lenses to open your eyes
• School was based off of information scarcity, but now there is information overload.  We need to help kids find, understand, sort through, and apply valuable and reliable information.
• Can we fail?  failure is important: Angry birds: number of apps that failed before that?
• Be comfortable with being uncomfortable

I have decided that it is time to give my students opportunities to discover themselves, learn,  investigate, question, create, take action, …

    The question I started with was "What's the point?"  In order to be sure discussions stay possible, I thought more about "What is the purpose of schooling?"  From that I researched the number of teachers in Wisconsin and in the United States.  The Institute of Educational Science explains that, "Public school systems will employ about 3.1 million full-time-equivalent (FTE) teachers in fall 2014."  This gave me my first talking point:  Why would 3.1 Americans dedicate their lives each day to teaching?  After explaining to the students that our primary objective as an educator is to give students the tools they need to be successful when they graduate, I started the discussion of "What are we preparing for: 2020?"  As students who will graduate in  2020, and as a teacher whose job is to get you ready for 2020, what is it that we need to prepare yourselves for?

While the above was the start of the PBL unit, places I would like to take the students include:

• Where have we come from? (students need to understand the speed at which technology is advancing in order to understand where we are going)
• Primary vs. Secondary Sources
• Successful Internet Researching Skills
• different search engines
• key search terms
• basic layout of a search
• scanning / searching for key words
• Touching base with employers around the world to find out
• what qualities do you currently look for in an employee?
• what do you feel most of your applicants are lacking?
• what skills do you think applicants will need 10 years from now?
• Researching 1 particular career to find out
• what degree will you need
• skills required
• estimated demand in the future
• Making contacts with people outside of the United States to compare and contrast how American schools are working to prepare students for the future as compared to other countries
• Possible end:
• youtube video to explain skills needed in 2020 for a particular career
• letter to the superintendent / school board / Wisconsin Department of Education as to standards that educators should be teaching in the everyday curriculum
• Letter / Opinion Column expressing concern with or support for where technology is headed.
• Debate on: Is technology advancement getting out of control?