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Is This on the Test?: Establishing a Real Need to Know
October 5, 2014
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wonder wall

The Need to Know

So far, Eliezer Jones and I have introduced the basic components of PBL and discussed how it includes significant content. This post will explore the Need to Know that is a crucial part of setting up a successful PBL unit. To review, let’s consider the component, described by the Buck Institute of Education (BIE):

Students see the need to gain knowledge, understand concepts, and apply skills in order to understand the Driving Question and create project products, beginning with an Entry Event that generates curiosity and interest.

We’ll explore the Driving Question in greater depth in a later post, but for those who need an explanation of it, it’s the question that drives the learning and that connects it to a real-world problem or application. For a quick peek at Driving Questions, check out this blog post from edutopia, one of our favorite sites for PBL.

Is This Going to Be on the Test?

As educators, we all know that unfortunately often the driving question for students is: Is this going to be on the test? We’re greedy, though. We want students to be curious and engaged, and we don’t want them to just be “doing school”; we want them to love learning and be lifelong learners. This is why the Need to Know is such an important component of PBL: it arranges and arrays the learning in such a way that it becomes vital for the student to know it.

Creating the Need

What, then, creates the Need to Know?

heptagon_red

Looking at the BIE’s image of PBL components, I find it significant that the Need to Know is flanked by the Driving Question and Voice and Choice. A fascinating Driving Question will certainly spark in students a desire to know, but these questions must be appealing to students, not teachers. Teachers may have a Need to Know how force and velocity work, why World War I began, or what Hamlet’s problem really is, but students may not be particularly interested in those ideas. Instead, educators have to think about where students are and bring the Need to Know to their page. I might consider the following Driving Questions:

How might an understanding of force and velocity help me design athletic gear that will improve athlete performance?

How can an understanding of the way countries go to war help me understand how to fight terror today or improve relationships in my life?

Is Hamlet a teenager with a lot of angst or something more? How does understanding Hamlet help me understand myself and the difficult transitions I’m going through as an adolescent?

According to the BIE, once you’ve decided on a Driving Question (DQ) that will engage students, your next step is an exciting Entry Event that introduces the DQ and the project as a whole. More about that below.

I also think, though, that resonant driving questions suppose that students are interested in ideas that relate to them in some way, an assumption that the PBL component of Voice and Choice also makes. In fact, it’s a logical and healthy assumption that not only honors students’ inner lives but also all of our own. Learning takes on an added dimension when a student and teacher feel personally invested in it. Therefore, another way to get students to address a Need to Know is to give them Voice and Choice in class and find out what about the topic interests them.

Wonder Walls

wonder wall

A lot of teachers are creating Wonder Walls in their classrooms, asking students to write down what they want to know — either in general or about a specific topic in a course syllabus. Teachers can decide what they want to do with that information. For example, using Google’s 80/20 model, teachers can devote class time to allowing students to explore a topic of interest on their own. The passion for learning the Google model elicits can spill over into the rest of the course. Or, teachers can use students’ interests as a springboard for the learning in their class, building students’ interests into the course material.

An Example

J hist

It’s up to you as an educator to decide what to do when your students tell you they’re interested in the 80’s (poster on the left) or Elvis in the 60’s (poster on the right)

For example, a Jewish history teacher at Magen David HS, Ms. Frieda Cattan, is covering Classical Judaism this year, and she began the course by asking her students what period of history they’re most interested in. Students then had to use props and other art supplies to bring that time to life on a poster board. Since Ms. Cattan’s Driving Question for the year is How Did We Jews Get Here Today?, she can use the students’ interests in a particular time period to help them wonder how we got from the Classical world to their favored period. Ms. Cattan can also have her students compare their favorite era with the Classical world, and since Ms. Cattan asked students to imagine a role for themselves in their preferred period, she can now also ask them to trace what that role looks like going back in time to the Classical world. In fact, endless opportunities pop up to connect the course syllabus to student interest, now that Ms. Cattan knows what those interests are.

Make the Time

One of the biggest concerns teachers have expressed when given these suggestions is how to make them work in a course where time is never sufficient: a course may have an important standardized test at its culmination or a particularly content-rich syllabus. We believe, though, that learning becomes easier when student passions are engaged, when the classroom is alive with the vitality of those interested in what is going on there. The truth is that the Need to Know has always existed in the classroom, but PBL, with its student-centered focus, places the onus of responsibility on the teacher to discover what might make his/her students not just interested in learning but truly compelled to discover what a course is all about.

Additional Resources

Entry Event into a Unit on the Human Body

An engaging Entry Event, which enables teachers to spark excitement and interest about a learning unit, is a good way to establish a Need to Know. We love this teacher-made video which, as an entry event into a unit on the human body, got kids thinking about why an understanding of the body is vital to their lives. Note how the teachers incorporated their own passions into the entry event video. Passion-based learning always adds a personal dimension to class that everyone — teacher and student — benefits from:

Suzie Boss on Project Launches

Here is PBL guru Suzie Boss on how to do project launches in an exciting manner.

Content is Still King in PBL
September 18, 2014
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Crown

I am often asked when discussing Project-Based Learning (PBL) why I would support a model of education that has no regard for the teaching or mastery of content (click here for an introduction to PBL). Why would I use a model that is solely passion and interest-based with no structure? Isn’t PBL basically what we did in kindergarten when we finger painted and built houses out of popsicle sticks? Where is the content?

These would be great questions if they were based on anything but a lack of understanding of what PBL is. To the uninitiated, PBL is often seen as a model that encourages chaos with no substance. Projects with no purpose. Learning with no….well, learning. All of these things could not be further from the truth and in PBL, content is still king. The only difference between PBL and more traditional methods is that content shares the throne with seven other kings.

Back in 2010, the Buck Institute for Education (BIE) wrote a paper for the September issue of Educational Leadership from ASCD to help educators understand the difference between PBL and just doing projects. They broke PBL down into these eight “essential” elements:

  • Significant content
  • A need to know
  • A driving question
  • Student voice and choice
  • 21st century skills
  • Inquiry and innovation
  • Feedback and revision
  • Publicly presented content

You can read more about each element by clicking here and Tikvah Wiener and I will be exploring these elements on the I.D.E.A. Schools Network blog. However, as you can see, the first element listed is Significant Content. It is the foundation of every PBL project. It is just that where more traditional models start and end with the content, PBL is only getting started. Although, to be accurate, PBL starts with the end in mind by working backwards from driving questions that propel the learning forward. The content exists to support exploration and discovery towards answering the driving question and, in turn, solving a problem or accomplishing a goal put forth by the question. We will be discussing more about driving questions when we write about that essential element. For now, the question is how do we ensure that significant content is part of PBL?

Michael Gorman, on his award winning blog 21st Century Educational Technology and Learning, lists ten ways to answer this important question.

  1. The entry event should show a relationship to the Driving Question promoting a “need to know” of significant content.
  2. The Driving Question should allow students to uncover the curriculum in a student friendly and understandable manner.
  3. The PBL planning sheet for students should line up with significant content in the curricular area being studied and assessed.
  4. The project should be ongoing and made up of activities and lessons that facilitate the learning of significant content.
  5. Formative learning activities and assessments that teach and reinforce the significant cont should occur throughout the timeline of the project.
  6. While innovative and student centered learning is encouraged, scaffolding of the project can still include traditional lecture, tests, and textbook reading. that promote significant content. Yes… rich engaging lectures can be used!
  7. There should be rubrics developed that evaluate student learning outcomes and they should be aligned with significant content.
  8. The final project should not only emphasize the 21st century skills, but should show the learning and understanding of significant content.
  9. Final outcome should include more than learning of significant content, but also application and connections of content to real world.
  10. When planning projects teachers should consider Common Core as part of their significant content.

You can read the entire post by clicking here.

Another example of where the significant content fits in can be seen in this sample Algebra project overview from BIE (click here). This is a great template to start designing your own PBL unit, but I want to point your attention to the “Content and Skills Standards” box. In this unit it is clear that the students will learn significant content and skills in the area of Algebra II/Trigonometry. However, if you read the language carefully you will understand what make this uniquely PBL. The content and skills being taught and learned are not passively transmitted. The goal with the content is that the “student will be able to…..” utilize the content and skills to accomplish something, solve a problem and demonstrate their knowledge. The content serves a purpose and does not exist solely to be understood. It must be applied.

The usual follow up question to this explanation is that while it all sounds nice, does it work? Do the student actually learn the content? The answer is simply, yes. PBL students not only learn content knowledge as well as traditional students, they appear to learn it better (Boaler, 1997; Penuel & Means, 2000; Stepien, et al., 1993). More importantly, they not only demonstrate this knowledge for assessments, but show longer retention and a deeper understanding of the content (Penuel & Means, 2000; Stepien, Gallagher & Workman, 1993). The research also points to that fact that the effectiveness of PBL is not limited to peripheral courses such as electives, but impacts teaching and learning across the curriculum (Beckett & Miller, 2006; Boaler, 2002; Finkelstein et al., 2010; Greier et al., 2008; Mergendoller, Maxwell, & Bellisimo, 2006).

Content is still king in PBL despite it sharing the title with seven other essential elements. In fact, in regard to the understanding and acquisition of the content, it may have dethroned more traditional models of teaching and learning content.


References:

Beckett, G. H., & Chamness Miller, P. (2006). Project-based second language and foreign language education: Past, present, future. Greenwich, Connecticut: Information Age Publishing.

Boaler, J. (1997). Experiencing school mathematics: Teaching styles, sex, and settings. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press.

Finkelstein, N., Hanson, T., Huang, C., Hirschman, B., and Huang, M. (2010). Effects of problem based economics on high school economics instruction. (NCEE 2010-4002). Washington, DC: National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education.

Geier, R., Blumenfeld, P. C., Marx, R. W., Krajcik, J. S., Fishman, B., Soloway, E., & Clay-Chambers, J. (2008). Standardized test outcomes for students engaged in inquiry-based science curricula in the context of urban reform. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 45(8), 922-939.

Mergendoller, J., Maxwell, N., & Bellisimo, Y. (2006). The effectiveness of problem-based instruction: A comparative study of instructional methods and student characteristics. Interdisciplinary Journal of Problem-based Learning, 1(2), 49-69.

Penuel, W. R., & Means, B. (2000). Designing a performance assessment to measure students’ communication skills in multi-media-supported, project-based learning. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, New Orleans.

An Introduction to PBL
September 3, 2014
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heptagon_red

So you want to get started with Project-Based Learning?

We think that’s an awesome idea, and we want to provide a path to success. One of the first things we have to do when discussing PBL is explain why it’s important in today’s world. After all, PBL has been around since the early twentieth century when John Dewey advocated that students needed to learn by having experiences in the real world and not by memorizing packaged content. Go here to learn more about Dewey’s philosophy. The truth is that Dewey’s approach wasn’t really new either. The idea that people learn by doing and that learning should have practical value is obviously at the heart of the apprenticeship system, but in the last couple of centuries, emphasis on academic knowledge sidelined educational opportunities that focused on student-centered, immersive learning experiences. For more on this theme, check out Ken Robinson’s amazing RSA Animate video (Sir Ken’s TED Talk is also pretty paradigm shifting.)

What accounts for the adaptation of Dewey’s pedagogy, almost a century after he lived? Technology, we think, plays a large role. Today, students — anyone — can access information in a way that is unprecedented in human history, and they can also create using digital media in a way that is unique to the world. In fact, it’s often students who know more about technology than their teachers do, so for the first time a younger generation is more knowledgeable about something than their elders. We think that calls for a radical re-shifting of how learning takes place. And we’re not alone. Check out David Thornburg’s take on what school should look like:

Tony Wagner of the Harvard Graduate School of Education is also an education change agent. Here’s what he says in his book Creating Innovators:

“Most of our high schools and colleges are not preparing students to become innovators. To succeed in the 21st-century economy, students must learn to analyze and solve problems, collaborate, persevere, take calculated risks and learn from failure. . . . A handful of high schools, colleges and graduate schools are teaching young people these skills—places like High Tech High in San Diego, the New Tech high schools (a network of 86 schools in 16 states), Olin College in Massachusetts, the Institute of Design (d.school) at Stanford and the MIT Media Lab. The culture of learning in these programs is radically at odds with the culture of schooling in most classrooms.”

So we see that there is a serious need for PBL and the kind of thinking and learning it fosters. We’re ready then to get into some PBL basics. The Buck Institute of Education, dedicated to all things PBL, has a good definition of it, as well as a clear breakdown of its components:

heptagon_red

Project Based Learning is a teaching method in which students gain knowledge and skills by working for an extended period of time to investigate and respond to a complex question, problem, or challenge. Essential Elements of PBL include:

  • Significant Content - At its core, the project is focused on teaching students important knowledge and skills, derived from standards and key concepts at the heart of academic subjects.
  • 21st century competencies - Students build competencies valuable for today’s world, such as problem solving, critical thinking, collaboration, communication, and creativity/innovation, which are explicitly taught and assessed.
  • In-Depth Inquiry - Students are engaged in an extended, rigorous process of asking questions, using resources, and developing answers.
  • Driving Question - Project work is focused by an open-ended question that students understand and find intriguing, which captures their task or frames their exploration.
  • Need to Know - Students see the need to gain knowledge, understand concepts, and apply skills in order to answer the Driving Question and create project products, beginning with an Entry Event that generates interest and curiosity.
  • Voice and Choice - Students are allowed to make some choices about the products to be created, how they work, and how they use their time, guided by the teacher and depending on age level and PBL experience.
  • Critique and Revision - The project includes processes for students to give and receive feedback on the quality of their work, leading them to make revisions or conduct further inquiry.
  • Public Audience - Students present their work to other people, beyond their classmates and teacher.

We also like this brief overview of PBL, again provided by BIE:

You can find all you need for PBL not only on BIE’s site but also through edutopia, which identifies PBL as one of its core strategies.

Another question that often comes up during a discussion of PBL is: what’s the difference between projects and project-based learning? We think this chart provides a good answer:

PBL vs Projects

Take the time to truly examine the chart. You’ll find that PBL has some key features that we think are essential for deep and true learning:

student-centered learning

context for learning

built-in assessment (the project is the learning and doesn’t come after the learning)

emphasis on acquisition of skills as well as content

a public audience (think of how much more meaningful work can be for students when they know it will be seen by the world)

One final resource:

This past July, at the Summer Sandbox, our professional development workshop, educators got to experience PBL and create their own project-based learning units. This short video of the Sandbox can add to your understanding of the pedagogy:

Now that you’ve gotten an introduction of project-based learning, you can start thinking about how you’re going to marry your course content to the pedagogy.

Culture Change at the Sandbox
August 21, 2014
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sandsandbox

sandsandbox

We know you’re busy preparing for the opening of school. One of the topics we discussed at the Sandbox and in conversations with educators in a variety of schools is how to start and sustain culture change. We know change is hard, and it involves the commitment of many, many stakeholders at an institution. One of the things Eliezer and I will be doing in the I.D.E.A. Schools Network is chronicling the process of change in the schools in which we’re based, Eliezer at Valley Torah High School in Los Angeles, CA, and me at Magen David High School in Brooklyn, NY. In the meantime, we’ve had several requests from individuals for Matt Williams’ Culture Change workshops from Day Three of the Sandbox. Here’s the Sandbox video about Day Three:

And here are Matt’s workshops, which were fun, engaging, and thought-provoking. Thanks, Matt, for traveling from Stanford University

Workshop One:

The Ten Billion Dollar Game

The Jewish communal infrastructure is, as the Forward has pointed out, about as large as CBS. The industry of Jewish education alone probably costs in the neighborhood of ten billion dollars annually. Thinking from 30,000 feet and taking seriously the Jewish journeys of all its students, children and adults, how would you allocate these funds? How much would we decide camps should get? Schools? Birthright? Programs for the elderly? How do we even begin to make that decision?

This thought experiment is a sobering process that requires difficult decisions and ruthless analyses. But it is also an empowering opportunity to reconsider your place within the Jewish education eco-system and your capacity to be a value-added change agent in your particular location in the interconnected network.

Below are Sandbox participants describing how they would allocate their hypothetical 10 billion dollars. One fascinating finding from the exercise was how important attendees felt Birthright is for the Jewish ecosystem. There was definite consensus that the program is doing something good and vital for Jewish life today. Another great idea to emerge from the workshop was from Kaylee Frager, an educator from JCDS Northern California: she said Matt’s exercise made her wonder about giving her students the course syllabus and the number of hours they meet over the year and then tasking them with allocating hours to each topic. We love opportunities like that for student voice to be heard.

Rabbi Knapp presents Rabbi Gralla presents

Workshop Two:

How to Build the Perfect School

big picture sample

Sandbox participants imagine their ideal schools

In 17th century Amsterdam, the members of what was known as the Portuguese Nation (Portuguese refugees from the Expulsion) set out to build the perfect Jewish day school. What makes their story so fascinating and so salient is that, for starters, each family controlled a significant amount of the country’s capital. They were a filthy rich community. And I don’t mean Jewish American wealthy, I mean like Russian tycoon wealthy. They even were committed to educating the relatively poor members of their community. Their schools often had leftover scholarship money; think about that for a second… Also, conversely or perhaps relatedly, the system is famous or infamous for producing one of the greatest philosophers of all time, the man considered by many to be the first modern thinkers in history - Benedict Spinoza.

This parable, for all of the reasons implied, serves as a useful platform for a thought experiment. Stepping back, if resources weren’t a problem, what would your school look like? And would you be happy with Spinoza as the outcome?

Aliza's school

Apps for every discipline, a bus that takes students anywhere they want to go, creativity and Fab labs, quiet learning environments, communal learning environments, guest lecturers: the ideal schools participants dreamed up had it all!

Embracing the Shake in All Our Classrooms
July 11, 2014
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Having spent last week at the ISTE2014 conference, I left a more inspired and motivated educator, not the least of which was because of presentations like the one by Phil Hansen who presented as part of the ISTE EdTekTalks.

As I sat and listened to him speak (see his TEDTalk below which is basically what he presented) I could not stop thinking about my 6th grade science project. My topic was “roller coaster physics” and I was comparing elliptical and spherical looped roller coasters and the differences in coaster velocity. While I have no recollection of my hypothesis or the results, I certainly remember being in tears one late evening working on my project. The marble would not go up the moving stairs! It was all over!

To test my theories of velocity, whatever they were, I was using one of those marble roller coasters (see blog image) made out of plastic tubes with an electric staircase that would push the marble step by step from the bottom of the coaster to the top. At the top gravity would take over and the marble would soar down the tube track I had designed. However, for some reason mine was defective and the marble would get stuck on the last step. I was not one to give up quickly, so I started problem solving.

First, I unscrewed the steps to see if there were any issues inside them. Nope. Next, looking closer at the last step, I thought there might have been a little extra plastic getting in the way so I found a nail file and filed away. Well that just made it worse. So, I did the next logical thing and grabbed a match and began to melt the step down. Suffice it to say, that was far from the solution and I had hit my wall. I ran to the couch, began to cry and, while my mother tried to console me, I would not be calmed. My entire science project was over, so I thought.

If you watch Phil’s TEDTalk below you will see that he hit a wall as well. Having focused on his passion for pointillism for years he injured his hand and was unable to create art the way he wanted. This type of art required fine motor skills his hands could no longer deliver. First he also tried to problem solve focusing only on the one way he thought he could create art; pointillism. He held the pen tighter and tighter until he could not longer create the fine points he needed. So, what did he do? He gave up. That was until his neurologist said why don’t you just create art a different way?

The simple fact was that Phil did not lose his creative ability. He had only lost the physical ability to tightly grasp a pen, which only limited his ability to create art one specific way. When he finally accepted that the limitation was only his hands and not his creativity, he was able to realize the limitless creative ability he always and still had. He just had to get unstuck from his focus on why he could not create one specific way and start thinking about how he can create a thousand other ways. Once he realized how he was limited he become limitless.

My 6th grade roller coaster disaster certainly was not the same as Phils struggle, but I did get stuck thinking that the only way for the coaster to work was to use the stairs. However, after some consolation from my mother, she asked me why don’t you just drop the marble from the top yourself and not use the stairs? Um…….yea! Why not? I had been so focused on what was not working and not accepting the limit that I placed on the project, that I was not exploring alternative methods to accomplish the same goal.

It is easy to get hyper focused on what does not work when something does not go the way you had hoped. However, as Phil said at the EdTekTalk, “embracing a limitation can actually drive creativity.”

So, can we apply Phil’s embracing of the shake to our classrooms?

As educators we want our students to have as many options to success as possible. However, for this to be true it first requires more pathways to success integrated into the curriculum and the models of teaching and learning we use. We can’t have only one way to learn or illustrate learning. This is not how it is in the real world and is not the way it should be in our classrooms. Yet in our current system of standardized testing, drill and kill lessons and industrial bell schedules herding our students from class to class embracing a limitation means failure without opportunity for relearning. This is not real world learning. A rigid classroom does not drive creativity, it destroys it.

So, while I loved Phil’s message and see how valuable it is to the classroom, it requires a transformation of teaching and learning. This is certainly possible and is slowly happening in classrooms and schools around the country. However, maybe it could happen faster if our teachers “embrace the shake” and realize the limitations of our current system so that they, like Phil, become limitless.

Oh, if you were wondering, I did very well at the science fair and went to the county science fair taking home the third place ribbon in physics.


 

Cross-posted on EJsCafe.com

Visiting the Mecca of PBL: The High Tech Schools
July 4, 2014
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Eliezer-and-I

The Road Trip

Last week, Eliezer Jones and I [Tikvah Wiener] had the great privilege of visiting the High Tech charter schools in San Diego, CA. Founded by Larry Rosenstock in 2000, these K-12 schools fully employ project-based learning and emphasize beautiful work and deep learning. Larry Rosenstock, who has a background in carpentry, is an advocate of connecting hand and head and has built into his culture a deep respect for building and creating. I’ve been a fan of High Tech High ever since I began my journey into project-based learning (PBL) and have learned a lot about the methodology from watching videos about the school.

Here’s a short video that captures what’s going on at High Tech High:

And here’s a longer video about the school:

It was with great anticipation that, finding myself in LA this summer, I embarked on a road trip to the mecca of PBL with my wonderful colleague Eliezer Jones, a long-time employee of Yeshiva University and now Valley Torah High School’s General Studies principal.
Getting caffeinated at 5:45 AM for the 2 1/2-hour drive from LA to San Diego!

The High Tech schools did not disappoint. From the moment we walked onto the campus and entered one of the buildings on the High Tech complex, we saw in person the beautiful student work that the videos showed.

You could argue that it hardly seems to matter what kind of learning
takes place on a campus this gorgeous in a place that has great weather
all year round; so the fact that the High Tech schools are so good is all the more impressive
Sometimes visiting a hyped-up place in person is disappointing;
not so with High Tech High. Here’s an artwork — not pictured in any
of the videos we had previously seen — that greets you as you enter the high school.

The Tour

Our contact, Laura McBain, who runs High Tech’s professional development programs, took us on a tour of the campus. She explained that Larry had had the ceilings of all the buildings removed, so the students could see the bones of the schools and thereby be encouraged to think and ask, How is this building made? How are things put together?

Here you can see some of the artwork that hangs from one of the school’s ceilings
as well as the exposed beams of the building,
which not only make for an inquiry-driven environment
but also open up the space.
Thoughtful building and classroom design is a key element of the High Tech experience.
Artwork isn’t only beautiful; it also teaches.
Here’s a periodic table.
This culture of inquiry is so important in project-based learning, as can be seen in this video of David Thornburg, another proponent of PBL who runs an inquiry-driven, PBL school in Brazil:

The Bicycle Project

The school is filled with exceptional artwork that also is often
science- or math-based. This work is about force and friction —
and also just looks really cool!

 

One of Eliezer’s goals for the day was to view the bicycle project that’s shown in one of the High Tech High videos. When we saw it, I immediately tried rotating the wheels, but ended up working the machinery incorrectly. A student in one of the school’s many glass-walled classrooms — classrooms have glass walls so students can see each other working and again be encouraged to think and ask questions based on their peers’ activities — rushed up to me, Laura, and Eliezer, and politely correcting me, showed me what to do.

Meeting a HTH Student

Eliezer and I took the opportunity to chat with the High Tech High student. Davianas, a rising senior, was articulate and comfortable around us and showed she was a clear product of the special culture of her school. She told us she was planning to apply to a small college in Los Angeles, one where she knew she could not only study biology, a love of hers, but also continue pursuing the arts. She also mentioned that a small school would provide her with the chance to really get to know her professors, form relationships with them, and be part of a school community. All the parts of what makes the High Tech schools so unique, in my mind, were clearly important to Davianas. With the school’s emphasis on relevant, engaging learning and arts integration, students have learned to recognize their own interests and have the drive to pursue them, all while being part of a tight-knit and close community.
In this assignment, students researched the ideologies of
the “red” and “blue” states and then were asked to reflect on their learning.
Their photos were a gallery of suggestions about how to overcome partisanship.

HTH and College Admissions

Many people wonder if PBL can be as rigorous as traditional learning, and in my last blog post, I began to address that issue. One of the things about High Tech High that had piqued my interest — and spoke to my sense of whimsy -was the fact that it had an Emperor of Rigor (check out the longer video, where the school’s Emperor of Rigor makes an appearance) and that all of its students go on to college. For a public school to have 100% college acceptance is remarkable; furthermore, in the week before my visit, I’d had the chance to spend three days of professional development at Frisch and at Magen David High School, with two instructors from one of High Tech’s middle schools. Azul Terronez, a Litertaure and Humanities teacher, and Marc Shulman, a STEM teacher, team teach a sixth-grade class together. They mentioned that not only do High Tech’s students get into college, but a higher percentage of them as compared with their public school peers have the grit necessary to stay.
No doubt it’s constant positive messages like these that play a part
in High Tech’s students’ developing the confidence to pursue a college degree
A student drew the logos of the colleges HTH’s students will be attending.
Chalkboard paint is a clever way the school converts walls into
spaces that allow for constant exhibition rotation.
Students get accepted into all types of colleges, including Ivy League ones.
HTH educator Marc Shulman pointed out that even MIT and Harvard are now
asking students not about what they know, but about what they’ve done.
In a PBL school — where learning is constantly connected to a real world problem —
students do A LOT.

Marc and Azul’s Classroom

Laura was running a professional development seminar, so she left us after awhile; we then looked around on our own and eventually located Marc Shulman, who was in a middle school building teaching summer school. After having been in Marc’s workshops the week before, I was glad to be able to see him in his own space and introduce him to Eliezer. He showed me and Eliezer the sliding door — that’s covered in whiteboard — that connects his and Azul’s rooms. He told us the door is open most of the time, so that the almost 60 students they share can work together. He loves team teaching, not only because he gets, as he says, “to hang out all the time with my best friend,” but also because when he and Azul interact, it’s a way to model correct adult behavior for the kids. Because PBL also emphasizes collaboration so much, the fact that Azul and Marc collaborate on their projects shows they authentically believe in the process and isn’t just something they’re forcing their students to do.
Azul used Design Thinking to have his students redesign their classroom
in a way that optimized their learning. The result: a project bar.
Marc’s classroom is filled with woodworking tools, since Marc
is passionate about woodworking. The High Tech culture
is big on allowing teachers to bring their passions
into the classroom.
Laura had told me and Eliezer that all the teachers have to do their projects themselves first, in order to really feel what the students will be going through, to face the kinds of problems and obstacles their students will be facing, so they can better address those problems as they arise and be more empathetic as the project unfolds. Modeling the kind of behavior and learning that the adults expect the kids to engage in is another important part of the High Tech culture.

HTH, PBL, and Jewish Education

Being in the High Tech schools, surrounded by incredible artwork that clearly demonstrates not only students’ cognitive connection to learning, but also their social and emotional ties to it, confirmed that PBL has an educational power and punch that are hard to match. What are the implications for Jewish education? I think they are deep.
First, at its core, Jewish education is about having students make social and emotional connections to their learning. Ask a Judaic studies teacher what their most important goals are, and no doubt the answer will be for students to connect with their Judaism, be inspired by it and want to be part of the Jewish people. With PBL, which aims for students to develop rich and meaningful personal connections to learning, those core Jewish educational goals can be realized.
The High Tech schools have also forced me to re-examine the very notion of what class looks like. Azul and Marc told us that for most of their day, about five hours, they spend their time together, having their classes do integrated projects. Sometimes the teachers separate, and Azul teaches LitHum and Marc, math or science, but most of the time the classes aren’t learning English, history, science or math; they’re simply . . . learning. The kids are making Hovercrafts that commemorate an important person in American history; or writing textbooks about the flora and fauna of the Bay Area (with a foreword by Jane Goodall); or discovering ways to organize a local Salvation Army’s goods; or . . . making vending machines that dispense art:
Azul told me at one point during his visit to the East Coast two weeks ago that if he told his students they had to build a plane that carried one person across a specific body of water, they wouldn’t say to him, “No, we can’t do that. That’s too hard.” They’d say: “OK, what materials do you think we’d need to start with?”
So I think the charge for Jewish education interested in PBL is this: how might we de-silo our subjects, so our students aren’t learning English, history, math, science, Tanakh, Talmud, etc., but like in High Tech High, are simply . . . learning. Integrating subjects not only can give rise to the type of deep and fearless learning Azul and Marc describe, but also to the whole-person learning we as Jewish educators aim for.
When Azul and Marc were at The Frisch School two weeks ago, I worked with my colleagues on the following task:
Azul and Marc had all the teachers write down their passions and then circle the one we couldn’t live without. Then we had to connect with other teachers and create a lesson based on our passions. I’m from LA, so mine was going to the beach. I worked with three other teachers, whose passions were hiking in the forest, playing music, and playing football, and we came up with this assignment:
We were going to have our students study the brain at rest and reading, on the beach and then in the forest. [Marc told us we had an unlimited budget, so it'd be no problem to get MRI's onto the sand and up a mountain.] Then we were going to study the brain in both of those locations as our subjects played music and then football. The students would record their findings and move on to study the sociological and cultural habits of societies that form in those geographic locations. They’d then read literature aas well as texts from Tanakh that contain characters from those habitats. After their learning, they’d design a product that benefited people in those locales, using design concepts from the works they had read. They could then market and sell the product.
One of my Frisch colleagues. Rabbi Joshua Wald, turned to Marc at one point while we were working and said, “I usually take what I want to teach and then think about how to make that interesting, but you’re saying I should take what’s interesting and then find a way to plug in what I want to teach.” What a great way to express that!
Furthermore, David Thornburg in the Big Thinkers video above says that now that technology offers us unlimited information, we can have our students ponder engaging questions that have much more resonance than “In what year did Columbus sail to America?” If we employ that methodology across the board — through Judaic and General Studies — we get learners who are caught up in answering tough and thought-provoking questions about the world today, about how it came to be and where we want it to go — and who are accustomed to looking at those problems not only through the lens of secular studies but as whole people, as Jewish people.
Visiting the High Tech schools confirmed for me how much Jewish education has to learn from this model of learning and how much more rich and resonant our schools might be if we employed it. And Eliezer, I know you were scared I was going to get us into an accident, so maybe next time when we visit, you’ll drive!

One last thing . . .

High Tech’s professional development has taken the school’s instructors to many places around the world, including Israel. Check this out:
Cross-posted on YUEducate.com.
Rigor and Creative Learning in an English Class
May 26, 2014
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Rigor in PBL

One thing I [Tikvah Wiener] keep getting asked as I employ project-based learning (PBL) in my classes is this:

But do the students write enough? Are they doing enough essays? Is PBL in general rigorous enough?

I understand where the concern comes from, and believe me, I’m on it. The students in my tenth and eleventh grade English classes have just finished a flurry of writing activity, a lot of it very traditional and as academically rigorous as any you’d expect in any English course.

A Doll’s House

Example: in my tenth grade English class, students just finished revising a short piece analyzing A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen and then comparing it with The Merchant of Venice, which we read earlier this year. Here’s a sample, a particularly good essay that Julia wrote:

A Doll’s House, by Henrik Ibsen, is a play about a woman, Nora, who slowly realizes that her husband, Helmer, doesn’t treat her with respect. In A Doll’s House, several quotes show how a woman is considered lower than a man. In the play, Ibsen is socially critical of this view.
            In Act One, Nora is worried about the dress she is going to buy for a dance. When she tentatively asks Helmer if he would help her pick one out, he says to Nora, “Aha! So my obstinate little woman is obliged to get someone to come to her rescue?” (26). There are a few things about this quote that show how Helmer has no respect for Nora. First, there is the way he addresses her as “my obstinate little woman.” To him, Nora is a little, stubborn pet that belongs to him. There is also the way that he says “Aha,” as if he was expecting that Nora would need something from him eventually. Lastly, there is the overall sentence and the stereotype in which Helmer casts Nora, which is as a damsel in distress. He right away recognizes that Nora needs his help and escalates it to “rescue.” To Helmer, Nora’s requests are childish and small, so his responses back to her are mocking.
            In Act Two, Nora makes a work-related suggestion to Helmer. This time, Helmer is more aggressive in his belittling of Nora. He exclaims, “Is it to get about now that the new manager has changed his mind at his wife’s bidding?” (35). He implies how ridiculous it would be for a simple housewife to give input on a work matter. Helmer is also concerned with what people would think of Nora helping him. This proves that society as a whole viewed the idea of a woman doing more than household jobs as embarrassing and foolish.
            In Act Three, Nora finally rises above what society thinks of her and doesn’t let it define her. She answers Helmer, who told her she didn’t understand the world’s conditions, by saying, “I am going to see if I can make out who is right, the world or I” (69). She understands the way that society perceives women, but she no longer wants to abide by it. Rather than being the perfect wife and mother who would never abandon her family, she walks out the door to become independent. It is possible it will be difficult for her to adjust to her new freedom and that society will look down upon her, but Nora takes a big step by realizing she wanted the freedom in the first place. Though one could view her statement as her being unsure who is right, it could really be viewed as Nora knowing that she is right but wondering if the world can accept it also, or if she must rise above society totally on her own.

            In The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare is also socially critical. Portia, the play’s heroine, must disguise herself as a man in order to become a lawyer, since women couldn’t have such jobs in Elizabethan times. In A Doll’s House, Nora disguises herself the opposite way Portia does. Rather than being her true self, Nora takes on the identity of the perfect woman society wants her to be. On the other hand, Portia pretends to be everything society doesn’t want her to be. At the end of The Merchant of Venice, Portia doesn’t need to disguise herself. She is sly and holds all the power over the men of the play. At the end of A Doll’s House, Nora takes off her mask and joins Portia in going against society’s stereotypes and becoming the independent woman she wants to be.

Sonnet Explication

Also in my sophomore English class, students are in the process of writing a 2-3 page essay on one of Shakespeare’s sonnets. The students must include in their analysis at least two sources of literary criticism, one by Helen Vendler, who is, some would say, the foremost poetry critic in the US today. She teaches at Harvard and has written a comprehensive, Formalist analysis of the Bard’s sonnets. Here is a student work-in-progress. In this version of the paper, Zach has written a short analysis of the sonnet he is studying and has included Vendler’s take on the poem, though he hasn’t cited her work yet. Recently, in edmodo, I posted a link to the OWL Purdue Writing Lab, which explains exactly how to cite according to MLA Standards.

Here is Zach’s work:

The main theme in Sonnet 30 is recollection of the past. Throughout the sonnet, Shakespeare expresses the grief he feels as he “summon[s] up remembrance of things past” (2). One very prominent literary device the sonneteer employs in this sonnet is imagery. Shakespeare uses words such as “sessions” (1), “summon up” (2), “cancelled” (7), “expense” (8), and many others in order to make it seem as if his recollection experience is like a court case, and that he is ‘judging’ his past. Shakespeare divides the time frame of the sonnet into two groups. The first is the present, and the second is the past, which is subdivided into four more parts. While in the present Shakespeare stresses the fact that the grief he feels is new, regardless of the fact that he had already once grieved over the same grievances. He demonstrates this by contrasting old and new, (“with old woes new wail” [4]), as well as switching from locutions in which the second use of a verb or noun positively intensifies the first one (i.e. “grieve at grievances” [9]), to negatively (i.e. “new pay as if not paid” [12]). The four time frames of the past are the original neutral time pre-happiness, the happy time, the times of loss, and the time of stoicism where Shakespeare’s soul hardened, and he did not cry.

The concept that Shakespeare’s thoughts are successive and overlap is also demonstrated through the sonnet itself. The repetition in quatrain 3 of “grieve at grievances foregone” (9), “fore-bemoaned moan” (11), and “new pay as if not paid before” (12), coupled with the multiple phonetic concentrations of “thought-strings” (such as sessions, sweet, silent, summon, sigh, sought, sight, since, and sad) that are dispersed through all the ‘time periods’ of his life, both demonstrate Shakespeare’s constant overlapping thought process. Shakespeare even takes it a step further and portrays an increasing psychological involvement as the quatrains progress. The grievances go from general (“many a thing” [3]), to specific (“precious friends” [6]), to intensified (“grieve-grievances” [9]). These successive phases of feeling overlap because of the similarity in their lexical and syntactic concatenations as if they were all one long process each causing the next. This fluidity among time periods, thought processes, and feelings all relate back to the mentality of man, where Shakespeare is trying to show how man’s thoughts are constantly overlapping and build off of each other.

To illustrate how deep the learning goes — and the material the kids are studying here is pretty traditional fare — I’ll share a conversation another student — Jonah — and I had as we worked on his sonnet together. Jonah is dissecting Sonnet 143, a mock epic which has Shakespeare comparing himself to a baby chasing after his mother who is chasing after a chicken. The farcical situation reflects a love triangle in which the poet finds himself in the “infantile” (get it?) position of not giving up on his crush, even though she clearly doesn’t want him:

Lo, as a careful housewife runs to catch
One of her feather’d creatures broke away,
Sets down her babe, and makes all swift dispatch
In pursuit of the thing she would have stay;
Whilst her neglected child holds her in chase,
Cries to catch her whose busy care is bent
To follow that which flies before her face,
Not prizing her poor infant’s discontent;
So runn’st thou after that which flies from thee,
Whilst I thy babe chase thee afar behind;
But if thou catch thy hope, turn back to me,
And play the mother’s part, kiss me, be kind;
So will I pray that thou mayst have thy ‘Will’,

If thou turn back and my loud crying still.

After Jonah and I had noted Shakespeare’s allusions to epic poetry and Chaucer as well as Vendler’s comments on the repetition of words such as runs, catch, cries, and flies, Jonah remarked, as we dissected the simile, that just as Shakespeare feels excluded by his beloved, so he excludes himself from the sonnet, instead making most of the sonnet about the simile and not about himself. That’s an AWESOME close reading, Jonah! Well done!

But Wait, There’s More . . .

In a PBL class, however, there is more to learning than simply writing essays. Understanding the literature and showing mastery of the material in an essay is simply the first step towards a larger goal: creation of new content. For example, once students are finished writing their essays on A Doll’s House, they have to post it on the Shakespeare website we created earlier in the year. Here is Zach’s page which features his essay comparing how Ibsen and Shakespeare depict wealth and honor in their plays. And here is Sam’s page which discusses law and mercy in A Doll’s House and then compares how the ideas are developed in Ibsen’s play and The Merchant of Venice.

Not only are students in my class motivated to revise their work for a better grade — an opportunity I often offer them — but I correct the essays with a different eye, knowing they can be seen in a visible place. Feel free to explore the bardofparamus website, where my fellow English teacher Rabbi Dan Rosen is also currently having his students post their work on The Merchant of Venice and where another Frisch colleague, Mrs. Meryl Feldblum, also had her students work.

Because the students organize their work around topics — in the case of the Shakespeare website, for example, the topics connected with major themes of the plays and sonnets — they become familiar with those ideas and spiral around them for the rest of the year, drilling deep into them as they see how they apply to all the works they read. Therefore, rigor ensues not only from essay writing but from using digital media to juxtapose works in surprising ways that attract the students’ attention.

Final-ly

Last year, after a year of “un-schooling” my course, I wrote about the Twitter final that was a result of the class’ desire to undertake a non-traditional assessment. This year, a year that was even more PBL-ed than last, my class felt strongly that they wanted to be creators of a final, not simply consumers of one. We’ve been working for the last two weeks on a collaborative project: a script for a video that will be a satirical look at our year in English, satire being a genre we studied repeatedly. We also focused on narrative frames consistently, so the students agreed to create one together and then break off into smaller groups to tackle various concepts we’d studied throughout the year (Take a look here at the syllabus, which did see some changes as the course unfolded organically). Since my daughter is in the class, the narrative frame became this:
My daughter Lila — who is now married to a classmate — and I are heading to a family reunion. We keep having flashbacks to her tenth grade year, with my remembering the serious study we did of texts and genres and her remembering what really went on in class!

The process of deciding what our final would be!
We chose topics and then applied the texts we studied to those concepts

I can’t tell you how excited the students are to work on this project. They feel empowered about being creators and enthusiastic about their learning.

This group is focusing on stock characters and plot devices in works
throughout the year, even including Shakespearean sonnets in their script.
You can see the rubric for the final on the desk. As David said when he
saw the rubric, “The script really has to show learning, then.” Yes, it does!
This group is satirizing the idea of how literature gives voice to the voiceless,
a topic we discussed at length over the course of The Frisch Africa Encounter.
Some ideas bandied about for their satire: Obama and the Nigerian president
call Frisch to thank us for our incredible and revolutionary work!
Also in the works: a song to “Under the Sea” discussing women’s
traditionally having no voice in his-story.

In order to make sure real learning would occur, I created a rubric for the project, which you can view below. I love hearing the different groups discuss how to get their sequence into the 9-10 brackets. #gamifyingclass

I get asked a lot about rigor in PBL: as I said in my Google Hangout with Ken Gordon and Lisa Colton, when we spoke about passion-based learning in education, whoever thinks PBL can’t be rigorous hasn’t found the right resources. My go-to places are edutopia and Buck Institute of Education, and of course I’ve been deeply inspired by High Tech High in San Diego, CA. It’s not a simple or easy thing to transform a course into one that uses PBL, but I guarantee, when you see students discover how deeply they can think about an idea or the power in being creators, that it’s completely worth it.

Rubric for Final

The Power of Questions
April 17, 2014
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Generate questions!

Project-based learning (PBL) and inquiry-based learning (IBL) begin with a driving question, one that hopefully excites students and gets them started on their path to learning. The driving question is the first part of the PBL/IBL process to create important needs: a need to gather information that will answer the question and a need to develop skills necessary to produce a beautiful product that both exhibits that knowledge and has impact in the world.

Passover, which Jews are in the midst of celebrating now, is a holiday in which we highlight questions. The Seder gets a big, inquiry-based start with the four questions, the mah nishtana. The Seder is all about engaging children in the story of the Exodus narrative and getting them to participate in the drama and experience of the departure from Egypt and the redemption of the Israelite people. The Haggadah is set up so that the children’s engagement begins with asking questions.

The Four Questions page from Arthur Syzk’s
famous Haggadah from the early 20th century, Poland

The truth is that throughout history, the Jewish people have understood that asking questions creates curiosity and a desire to learn. Jewish exegetes left no angle of the Biblical texts unquestioned, and the Talmudic approach to learning is to ask questions; often answers aren’t as important as the discussions that questions engender, and a Beit Midrash — a Jewish place of study — is filled with discourse, dissent, and disparate approaches to text and Jewish law. Inquiry leads to vigorous exploration of text and law, true, but also ultimately what it means to be Jewish.

We’ve been thinking more deeply about the role questions play in education because recently — and especially over Passover — , we’ve been reading A More Beautiful Question by Warren Berger. See the book trailer below:

The book shows the power that asking questions can have in changing the status quo and getting us to think differently about . . . well, just about everything.

Before Passover vacation, we had a chance to ask students in a sophomore English class who had read A Doll’s House to look at the play and connect it to another work they’d studied this year. The sophomores then had to ask a big question about their connection. Here are two student responses that made us realize how powerful it can be to get students formulating questions.

We like the way Jonah connected his learning to Passover and the notion of freedom:

In comparison to _Little Bee_, _A Doll’s House_ also has the theme of freedom. Both women, in the novel and play, quest for freedom. Little Bee, of the eponymous novel, left her troubles behind in Nigeria to seek out refuge and freedom in England. Nora, of _A Doll’s House_ , searched for freedom as well. Initially, her freedom was thought to be achieved by paying off her debt. However, after the event of Krogstad’s blackmail, she reconsiderd her personal notion of freedom and happiness in the house of Torvald. In light of the quickly approaching Passover, as well as the two works of literature that we read, what does freedom really mean to you?

Batsheva asks a great question about the sacrifices one might be forced to make in pursuing a grand ideal:

Throughout the year we have discussed giving voice to the voiceless. In Little Bee, Sarah and Little Bee gave a voice to the African children at the price of Little Bee’s life. In the play, A Doll’s House, Nora stands up for herself and all the objectified women of her time at the expense of her children.

At the end of the play, Nora realizes that her husband is a selfish, hypocritical man who has been treating her like a child and a doll, rather than as an equal. “It was tonight, when the miracle didn’t happen. It was then that [she] saw that [he] was not the man [she] thought [he] was” (115). Nora finally stood up for herself and all the objectified women of her time.


Even though Nora is a fictional character, her rebellion taught women of the time to fight for their beliefs. Women would never have been granted the right to vote or to be independent without having to risk everything. Nora gave up her children so she could be independent. To accomplish something worthy, sacrifice and radical transformation is necessary.

Is it worth losing your loved ones to embark on a personal quest?

To use the terminology Warren Berger introduces readers to: how might we make questioning a more important and frequent component of education — and our own lives?

Additional Resources

Want to see how these math, science, and engineering teachers work with a PBL coach to create a driving question on wing efficiency in planes?
My relationship to cardboard will never be the same
March 12, 2014
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The other day I was walking down my street crossing an alley when it began calling to me. In the corner of my eye was the magnetic force compelling me to draw near, something on any other day I would have rightfully ignored. However, today was unlike any other day and the large glimmering cardboard box begging me to give it the attention it deserved was no longer just a cardboard box. It was an endless opportunity. You see, last week I had the privilege of leading a Cardboard Challenge, with my friend and colleague Dina Rabhan, at the 2014 Innovation in Jewish Education conference (iJED) in New York and my relationship with cardboard will never be the same.

“Inspired by the short film, `Caine’s Arcade,’ the Global Cardboard Challenge is a worldwide celebration of child creativity and the role communities and schools can play in fostering it. (Organizer Playbook)”

The event challenges kids to create and build using cardboard, recycled materials and imagination.The first-ever Global Cardboard Challenge had 270+ events in 41 countries and to date there has been over 1 million kids from over 70 countries engaged in this event. It also paved the road for the Imagination Foundation, a non-profit guided by increasing creativity in our schools. Here is the follow up film to Caine’s Arcade where you can see the full impact finding the creativity in one child has had on the world.

However, while the attention has clearly been focused on Caine, the video reminds us that there is a Caine in all of our classrooms and, in my humble opinion, the true hero of this phenomenon is Nirvan.

You see it all started not because Caine was this awesome kid with such creative talents. Caine was awesome way before the first youtube viewer clicked play. It all began because one person, Nirvan Mullick, saw what was unique and special in Caine and took action. There are so many Caines around us, but it takes the adults in their lives to see them for what is unique and special about them, then take action to nurture it, support it and celebrate it. That is what Nirvan did and by doing so showed us not just how creative our students are and can be, but how important a great teacher is who recognizes their talents and does something about it.

At iJED, we were given the wonderful opportunity to view Caines Arcade as a group and be surprised by the appearance of Nirvan himself after the showing. He inspired the crowd of amazing Jewish educators with his first hand telling of meeting Caine and all that followed. He then engaged in a Cardboard Challenge where the educators who participated were tasked with designing an interactive Jewish game out of the materials provided, which included 400 pounds of cardboard, markers, paints, toys, paper, glue and more. What followed was nothing short of breathtaking.

The effort put into these cardboard games and the sheer joy I saw on all the educators in that room was moving. What they created was thoughtful, creative and, frankly, much more than I had expected. Yet, to see the smiles, laughter and excitement was even more telling. Whether we are a young child or older adult, we all have capacity for creativity and it simply makes us happy. Why we don’t celebrate creativity more in our classrooms and encourage it as we get older is beyond me. It is a lifelong skill that is critical to success and one we have been promoting more and more in our schools as of late, but we need to see more of it. We are doing a disservice to our students and ourselves if we don’t value individual creativity. The educators at iJED modeled it so well and are primed to bring it back to their schools. Based on what I saw the future for Jewish education is bright as more students and staff will be given opportunities to create and be celebrated for their unique talents. Thank you Nirvan and thank you to all the Jewish educators who attended iJED and showed us that our students are in good hands.

You can check out the awesome games they created below:

iJED 2014 Cardboard Challenge from JFilms on Vimeo.

And if you are interested in running your own cardboard challenge in your school you can get everything you need right here: https://cardboardchallenge.com/ . It is pretty simple to put together and will:

  • engages student and/or educators in creative play

  • fosters creativity, ingenuity, resourcefulness, perseverance and teamwork

  • gives our student and/or educators an opportunity to explore their interests and passions, and make things that have an impact on others

  • provides an experience and model a method for schools to actively foster and celebrate child creativity which increases global happiness and makes for a happier, more playful world.

  • just be plain FUN! (from the Organizer Playbook)

Originally posted at www.ejscafe.com

Maker Resources
February 19, 2014
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Sometimes I go to a session and feel lucky if I get at least one new resource for my time there. However, as I wrote about a few weeks ago, I attended the Meet the Makers: Making a Case for Making in the Classroom workshop and not only did I learn a lot from the presenters and activities, but they also shared a list of wonderful resources. Below is the list of websites, videos and resources they shared with us. You can also go to Invent To Learn to learn more about the book of the same name by one of the days presenters Sylvia Martinez as well as additional resources. Enjoy!

Maker Resources (in order sent and not in any order of importance):

Belkin Lego iPad/iPhone Case Video

Caine’s Arcade Video #1

Caine’s Arcade Video #2

Imagination Foundation Video

Makey Makey Video

LittleBits

LittleBits Video

Zome Tool

Wowee

Wowee Video

If You Can

Make Magazine

Make Education

BIE

BIE Partners

Duck Duck Go

Barney Saltzberg

Barney Saltzberg Video

LeapFrog Tablets

Originally posted at www.EJsCafe.com