Making Curriculum Pop

Projecting Change

By the time I was 15, I was working on weekends in a radio station. When my Grade 10 biology teacher, Mrs. Brock, gave us a project to do, I chose to present mine as a radio show about DDT. I wrote a 30-minute script, with excerpts quoted from Rachel Carson’s popular book Silent Spring (1962). I modeled my show on the classic radio shows of the day – an instrumental intro, voiced over for titles and teasers about the contents, and between segments, some sort of a bridge to serve as a link. I did all of the narration but got one of my female radio station colleagues to voice the quotes I used from Carson’s book. I used sound effects recordings to supplement the text and short comedy clips to add to the point I was trying to make. On the date it was due, I handed in my script and a six-inch reel-to-reel tape of the program to Mrs. Brock.

About a week later, and I think it was a Friday, Mrs. Brock wheeled in a tape player, and the class got to hear my “project.” The project was marked out of 20. Mrs. Brock gave me a 30. Later, when I became a teacher, I used the project method, hoping to get students to move from the knowledge and comprehension level, to the synthesis level of Bloom’s Taxonomy. I even used the same approach as Mrs. Brock, giving students with exemplary work a higher mark than the scale.

In the book, from the ivory tower to the schoolhouse: How scholarship becomes common knowledge in ivory tower to schoolhouseeducation, Jack Schneider (2014) discusses the project method, favoured by so many teachers. Schneider’s examination of the project method is illuminating because many teachers do not realize the history behind project-based learning.

Schneider writes, “At first blush, then, this might seem to indicate that the project method has won less of a foothold.....

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