Student Recommendations

“Provide  more structure and more set in stone deadlines”

“Meet the groups for a full class period; this will allow them time to work with the teacher and talk to the other groups in the class.”

“Dedicating one class at the very beginning of the process to having a blog workshop so that they can get started right away. Along with this having a workshop for making videos would also be quite helpful for those who do not have much knowledge on how the technology works.” 

“A lot of students lost track of what needed to be done so having more structure and timelines would be helpful”

“If a certain amount of work had to be showed weekly this would ensure that the entire process takes less time. “

 

“Doing more research and having specific research goals in the beginning would also allow students to have more information for their final product. My advise for future students would be to stay focused and interested in your challenge and the solution will come by itself.”

 

“It’s very important to have a very clear outline at the beginning of the year!!!”

 

“I feel as though while we learnt so many new things and did grow as students we did not cover the entire years worth of geography 12. Maybe an essential question that deals with a geographic issue and then having to cover things like “transportation, communication, population control, future planning, and refugees etc etc…” in every two weeks of the program or something to that effect.”

  

“During the initial big ideas stage, start thinking about solutions so that during your research you can investigate them and discover how they won’t work; then you can determine why and work towards something different. In the process you can see the change”

Teacher Recommendations

The ideal timing for the CBL experience for senior students is one term with possibility of an additional 2 weeks on the back end

 

The initial 2 weeks should include basic tech peer training for blogging, video production and graphic editing

 

The ideal team size is 3-4. The teams of 5 struggled to make regular contact with each other

 

Do the program with everyone (rather than make it optional) to provide the flexibility for group and individual meetings in class time

 

Adopt a professional approach to deadlines and product expectations. Any extensions must be applied for well in advance and include an itemized rationale

 

Institute an activity log: students will be responsible for providing evidence and documentation for all individual and group activities

 

Schedule regular sessions where teams share information and troubleshoot problems

 

Assessment and the authentic audience must be determined early in the process

 

The guiding research and activities phase is where content is primarily learned and should involve a rigorous and structured product approach (i.e. formal research paper, interviews, surveys etc.)

 

Connections between stages must be reinforced (i.e. guiding questions should inform research and activities, which should further inform solutions)