All:

Our middle school recently approved a PBL learning community within our larger middle school.  We’ll basically have a 7th and 8th grade team of core teachers(LA, math, science, social studies) that will team up to teach two interdisciplinary classes(ie-Language Arts/ social studies as one and Math/Science as the other).  Our school has choice at the high school and a New Tech school is one of their options.

Is anyone on the forum a teacher or administrator at a shared campus PBL school like the one described above?  Is there anyone who has led professional development at a school like this? 

We have another school located less than an hour from us that has a similar setup but I’d love to hear from others who are have lived in this type of environment.

Thanks,

Jeff Spencer
Decatur Middle School
Indianapolis, IN

Hi Jeff,

I’ve done many professional development workshops in schools such as yours. Not sure what your question is, but if you’re looking for ways to make the middle school/high school connection seamless for your students, then I have two ideas:

First, the most helpful contribution at the middle school level is to design good prjojects using a solid methodology—so that students can distinguish ‘projects’ from ‘project based learning.’ This means using a driving quesiton, planning backwards, and assessing both content and skills at the end of projects. Resist the middle school urge to make the projects long, unfocused, and too broad; instead, keep projects in the 2 - 4 week range and make sure assessments are tight.

Second, teach middle school students to work in teams. This means going beyond cooperative or group work to teach students how to produce a product that can be presented to an authentic audience. Use peer coolaboraiton or teamwork rubrics; make the team performance part of the project grade. The goal should be to send students into 9th grade knowing how to behave and contribute in a team.

If you can accomplish those two things at the middle school level, then that would really set the stage for high performance in high school, not to mention making your New Tech colleagues eternally grateful.

Thom Markham

Thom,

Thank you for your response.  Those are wonderful pieces of advice.

We’re looking for others who people who would be interested in providing feedback as we go through the process.  I’d love to find some people interested in helping to guide us through the process. 

I’ll continue to post specific questions to the forum but if there are teachers that have made this type of transition, please let me know I’d love to email back and forth about your experience.

Thanks!

Jeff