Reading Reflection Chapter 3

After reading chapter three I found “the Big Idea” for a project to be the main big picture/concept that you are trying as a teacher to teach your students or what the big things you want them to take away. The chapter referred to this as the overarching concept. One thing I noticed was that the big idea needs to be relevant to what your project is, and something that connects learning to the real world so that students are gaining a higher level of understanding and knowledge. On page 45 they discussed how after identifying the overarching concepts that are important and relevant to your project but after that is established one needs to reflect on why the concepts are important and the importance of doing this is because it gets you to think about their application or relevance for the student to make the real life connections as well as how to adapt your lesson to meet the needs of your students and to make it meaning full to them. The 21st century skills has students understanding the big ideas but they also need to imagine how the project will help the student to create the 21st century skills. I liked how they said on page 47 that “a well-designed project causes students to stretch their intellectual muscles in ways traditional learning activities may not. One way to ensure rigor in a project is to plan for learning actions associated with the higher-order categories of Blooms Taxonomy of Educational objectives”. I found this to stick out in the reading and was something that I could relate to because the special education department has us include Blooms Taxonomy in our lesson plans and because of that we have learned so much about it. I feel as though it is important to include that in a lesson because it does get students to the higher level thinking. The different levels of Blooms Taxonomy include analyze, evaluate, and create as listed in the chapter. The 21st century literacies pointed out that “learners acquire learning dispositions less through direct teaching and more through experiences and encouragement” (page 52). The section also bought up the term metacognition which is when students start to realize how they learn and because of that they can reflect on their own processes. This is a term that we just learned about in one of the sped classes and our teacher placed high emphasis on it because it is such an important term. There are eight essential learning functions. The first one is ubiquity: learning inside and outside the classroom, and all the time. This is a function that is an overarching term but it supports project based learning, because it is allowing students to learn not just in the classroom but outside as well. This is having teachers look at providing students with the tools that help them to be more mobile with their learning. The second function is deep learning which is having and encouraging teachers to go beyond the websites that are just filtering information and provide them with sources that help them to make sense of the raw information they find on the internet. Students are able to have higher order thinking with this because they have to navigate, sort, analyze, and much more in order to learn and express their learning. The third is making things visible and discussable which discussed how teachers can make things digital to make it visible or using digital tools, for instance they said “a picture is worth a thousand words” (page 54) which is a common saying but it can create a discussion about many different things which is important to use and to get students to think outside the box and to get them to the higher order thinking. The fourth is expressing ourselves, sharing ideas, building community, which discussed how the world has many ways to express themselves with the most popular being sites like Facebook or Myspace as the book said to twitter but students are gaining the communication and are expressing themselves. Finding ways to express what they are learning is important. The fifth is collaboration-teaching and learning with others which brought up the idea that projects invite and encourage collaboration. I feel that collaboration is very important and using shared applications is a way to combat this. The sixth is research which the 21st century projects use because students can find out more information and learn new things by using research and as stated on page 55, “internet research puts information literacy to the test” and a good example of this is Citation Machine which is a popular tool for students to use. The seventh is project management: planning and organization which “helps students manage time, work, sources, feedback from others, drafts, and products during projects” (page 55). Project management is important part to success and is key to teaching students because it is something the can connect to the real world. The last one is reflection and iteration which is when one examines their ideas and breaks it apart to look at and think about all the possible different sides that could occur from it and looking at it from other points of view. Reflecting on what has been completed is important, I believe at least because it can allow one to see what they could have done differently or a different perspective, ways to do to differently, etc.. Reflection is key to not only the students but to the teachers as well. I can see these concepts being used and relating to my topic/project because we are putting these parts into it and have used the big idea to create the overarching concept for our project and then with reflection and collaboration we have broken it down through research to narrow our topic and focus. This chapter was interesting as it pulled in some concepts I hadn’t thought of before and some that I have learned a lot about, but it was still very interesting to read. -Michelle