It's a New Week....

It's Monday. It's a New Week. Things appear to be brighter on a Monday, regardless of what the weather is like outside. I have learned through the years that whether the sun is out or not has a huge affect on my outlook for the day. (And today is not looking so hot!)

But I have 9 days of this quarter left, 8 with seniors, and we have things to accomplish. Web Design has a Photoshop Unit to wrap up and a final Website to create (good thing we are on a block schedule). Accounting has a simulation to complete (we'll be working right up to the end on this one) and IT/Game design has, well you guessed it, a game to design and prepare for their classmates to play.

I love PBL work. I love that students use the skills they've learned to create something real, or use their knowledge to analyze real problems. What I don't love is how a group of otherwise capable students suddenly look at you as if you had lobsters crawling out of your ears and you were asking them to hike across the Grand Canyon on an invisible bridge. 

Schools mostly have consisted of students learning and regurgitating information, following step by step instructions to complete a task, or following a rubric. While there is absolutely nothing wrong with any of these methods (they all have their time and place) it has created a contentment to follow a path created by someone else, instead of forging ahead in their own direction. Employers today want the employee that will create and collaborate without being told to, the employee that can think for themselves, can find the solution before the problem exists. PBL lends itself to that, if you allow the student the freedom. This is where they start to freak out.

Right away they all want to know about the grade, what am I looking for, what do they HAVE to do. Whoa, back up there, when did this project become about me? This is your class, your project. Don't you want some say so in it?  Why are you so ready to hand the power over to me? Now I've done class created rubrics, giving the students some say in their grade, but again it's coming back to a grade. I get it, there is a bigger monster called GPA that affects so many things beyond my little class, but how can I get my students to see that the work they are doing is far beyond what a grade on a transcript says they did? 

This is not new, I realize this. And I don't know what the answer is, but I'd love to hear what you all think.