Project Summary: I wanted to create a sample PBL-style presentation to share with the students enrolled at the Technical Academy. At a Wednesday staff meeting, it was discussed that students would find value in seeing me present so they knew exactly what the other PBL teachers and I are looking for when grading. I wanted to choose a topic that both my audience and I would find interesting so I chose to present over the topic of ‘public speaking tips that can be learned from comedians’. I thought my audience could relate to, and learn from, this topic because I’ve been noticing the inability to keep my students’ attention at our staff meetings. Students can hardly stay awake for longer than 5 minutes when we are up talking about PBL, however, these same students could sit a listen to a comedian talk for an hour without yawning once. I thought there might be something to learn, along with showing how to approach a project properly.
What I Learned: I was surprised by some of the public speaking tips I picked up from my research. I plan on using and being aware of most of these tips when approaching an audience in the future. Additionally, it was a great experience for me to approach a project like a student. We have high expectations of our students at the Technical Academy but I realized that some of our requirements are more time consuming that I thought while on the flip side, students might be being lazy or taking TOO MUCH TIME on other parts. I put this project together in a day and a half which was approximately 10 class periods, or 2 weeks for a student if I had PBL 1-hour a day. I think the average student would have spent 3+ weeks on this project.
Employability Skills: ·Time Management ·Multi-Task ·Resourceful As referenced in my “what I learned” section, I got this project finished in less than 2 days. That goes to show what excellent time-management I had. I had a deadline and I was going to finish on time. I knew I wanted to present my sample project by the next staff meeting so I used whatever time I had in-between student projects and questions to work on this project. This bouncing between my daily teaching duties and working on my project shows off my impressive multi-tasking skills. I was going from researching online to answering questions, back to my project, then into the conference room to grade a student project. I didn’t let this get me off task, I simply tried to balance all my duties and still get them done. I was diligent and resourceful in my search for video examples to show during my presentation. Strengths I believe I showed several strengths throughout this project. I utilized my skills to find resources and condense, paraphrase and summarize sources. I was lucky this is a topic I am familiar with and enjoy, which made it easier to compile all the information together. I did not have to rely on resources as much and was able to actually use some of my opinions and personal experience that I have, which in turn was a strength as well.
Weakness My weakness for this project was trying to come up with a topic that all of my students would be interested in and benefit from. Since I have students in English, government, psychology, and even business courses I wanted to find something that everyone could utilize after the project was finished. However, finding something that would interest students and be relevant to them wasn't as easy as I thought it would be. I thought I could find some awesome videos of stand up comedians, however I struggled to find anything that was appropriate enough for school. Also, what I consider to be funny is not necessarily seen as funny in the eyes of a high schooler. I can relate more to stand up comedians because I've had more life experience than my students.