"Escape the Classroom" - Project Based Learning

"Escape the Classroom"

Project Based Learning

"The art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery."

Arther Costa and Bena Kallick

So CAASPP started yesterday, and there are still 32 days of school left for me

to have a huge impact on my students. For my 7th grade honors students, I have 8th grade standards to teach. For my Integrated Math I students, I have topics and skills that still need teaching before they enter high school. For my 8th graders, we have completed all the content, and yet I believe I can still better prepare my students for next year with these few remaining days.

 
How about yourself? What are your plans for after CAASPP? Are you finishing standards you have not taught yet? Are you examining standards that students will encounter next year and see how you can take your current standards and further prepare your students for better success next year?

For me, I struggled this year because our team of teachers was not going to do our “Battle of the Bridges” project and so I had to decide what type of project I would do after CAASPP.  I wanted something that would allow students to re-visit skills that they would use again next year - thus giving students a better opportunity to succeed.

“Escape the Classroom” - Final Project of the Year

Have you ever been in one of those escape rooms
where you have different puzzles to solve to get to the next room?

That idea is the model for our final project of the year.  Students are going to take each of the five domains, create questions for each domain and then put the answers into a riddle for other student teams to solve.

    Student teams will create five different themed rooms to go along with the five different domains.  Just as in the real-life ‘escape rooms,’ the degree of difficulty should increase with each new room. Other student teams will then solve these five different puzzles in an attempt to 'Escape the Classroom.'

The purpose for this project is for students to review the key elements of 8th grade, communicate in writing their key learnings, create questions that demonstrate those learnings, and finally challenged to put the answers into a puzzle type format.

    The hope is that this project keeps students engaged in a meaningful and relevant way for those few remaining days after CAASPP.  The benefit is students will have self-created something tangible to take with them to the next grade as a resource. I do not want the project to be a busy time but rather a very productive time because 180 days is never enough time to get everything done that I wanted.

Finally, and this is added at the last moment, Ms. Thune forwarded an article titled "Learning Through Reflection" from the book, Habits of Mind, by A. Costa and B. Kallick. In the article, it talks about different strategies for reflection. Some quotes jumped out at me as I hope that this final project will allow students to reflect on their learnings for the year - "apply their learnings to future settings", "apply their learnings to new and novel situations", and "applications of their learnings." My hope in this final project design of the year is for students to reflect on the skills they learned and to find a new application for its use outside of the ones I have given them.

Make these final days meaningful and relevant for your students as you do your final preparation for the next grade level. What are your plans?

Still teaching and loving it,

Kevin Stott