Project Summary: This project focuses on employability skills. First educating students on exactly what employability skills are, but then focusing on specific skills that are most important for career success in addition to a few that are lesser known or have multiple meanings. On top of a basic project guiding PowerPoint there is a group discussion element, handout and a game of bingo to bring a little fun to the activity. Overall my goal is to get new students into the "workplace" feel of the PBL building, remind veteran students about the importance of employability skills and (hopefully) model a complete and successful PBL project for students to use as a reference for their own future projects.
What I learned: Being a business teacher I focus a lot on employability skills and this is a topic I'm known for covering in my traditional classroom so if I'm honest, I didn't learn much content-wise (other than a few random facts and figures). However, the biggest thing I learned came from going through the required steps of a PBL project. I now understand why a lot of students get mid-project and lose steam or momentum. I was "all about" doing this project and was excited to model to new students what a project looks like. However, then the end of the semester happened and I had to stop working on this project because of student presentations and finalizing grades. When I picked it back up, I was spending my own time on Christmas break to finish. Suddenly, my ideas didn't seem as creative and I started second guessing the project I had proposed. I knew I'd be able to show students how to go about hitting standards and equally could model the 7 steps of a projct, but I worry that it won't be as good as I had initially thought it could be. I now better understand the mindset a lot of you go through and I think this is invaluable to be as an educator.
Employability Skills Demonstrated: SEE...We really do focus on these in every project!!
Initiative: I didn't have to do this project. As teachers, we considered just doing the same beginning of the year activity for the new second semester students and involving the veterans somehow. However, I decided to take the initiative to put this project together in hopes that students could learn something new either about employability skills or the PBL project process. Additionally, it took initiative to pick this project back up over Christmas break. (FYI: My daughter is being adorable over in the corner and wants her Mom to sit and play "tea party" with her).
Flexibility: Originally, I didn't plan on making the handout. I had started covering the employability skills one-by-one on the PowerPoint I had created. However, after completing about 3 or 4 skills I realized it would be PAINFUL to force you to all sit through 10+ slides of definitions and words in sentence context. I changed my plain mid-project and added the handout element and used the powerpoint to simply guide us through it.
Ethical: I used a lot of sources and it was beginning to be a pain in the butt citing them all. I'm not proud to say that I ever-so-briefly considered cheating on my works cited. There were a few sources I BARELY used that I knew Mrs. Nash probably wouldn't catch when she was fact checking but the big one was going through and manually citing all sources. I mostly used websites (in addition to a few videos and an personal email) but I think easy bib only correctly auto-cited ONE of them. So I had to go through and manually cite them all. However, I knew that would be wrong so I went ahead and took the time to do my project right. Plagiarism would be unethical and sources are extremely important in PBL so I wanted Mrs. Nash and all of you to see exactly where my facts and information came from.
Weaknesses: Positive Attitude. For those of you who know me, I'm a fairly happy and optimistic person but like I said in my "what I learned section"I lost momentum in this project and started feeling fairly negative about what I was doing. I was always a straight 'A', overachieving student so to think that I might not execute this project the way I originally intended was really frustrating and I found myself finding this to be a bit of a burden instead of seeing the positives of what modeling a project could do for new students. Strengths: Resilience. This strength makes sense in relation to the weakness I just described. Whereas I got down for a bit, ultimately I didn't throw in the towel and tell Mrs. Nash that I wanted to go back to the original plan and do last semester's activity. I pumped myself up, worked over Christmas break and on my teacher plan day and finished this thing up. I'm happy and proud of myself for doing so.
Proposed English 11 Standards for this project: RI7:
Integrate and evaluate multiple sources of information presented in different media or formats to address a question or solve a problem.
I used 16 difference sources; 2 videos, 1 email conversation, 2 online tools (name selector and bingo card maker) and 11 online websites to tie this project together.
SL1:
Initiate and participate effectively in a range of collaborative discussions. a) Come to discussions prepared, having read and researched material under study. b) Work with peers to promote civil, democratic discussions and decision-making. c) Propel conversations by posing and responding to questions that probe reasoning and evidence. d) Respond thoughtfully to diverse perspectives
In this project I attempted to initiate a discussion on employability skills to my best ability. (a) I came to the discussion prepared and had questions prepped for you all to answer. (b) I attempted to get a bit of a discussion going but ultimately had us make a "decision" on our class skill. (c&d) I attempted to propel conversations and respond thoughtfully to everyone's ideas.
SL5:
Make strategic use of digital media
Some of the strategic digital media I attempted to use to add interest:
Soft skills video embedded in my Powerpoint
Eye of the Tiger Song
Online "Wheel" to select bingo terms
Weebly
L4:
Determine or clarify the meaning of unknown and multiple-meaning words and phrases based on reading and content. a) Use context (e.g., the overall meaning of a sentence, paragraph, or text; a word’s position or function in a sentence) as a clue to the meaning of a word or phrase.
I specifically used the words, flexibility and reflective because they were multiple-meaning words. Additionally I put each word in the context of a sentence to help aide in understanding should the definition not be enough.