Good to hear from you and I hope the team at Deakin are travelling well.
In terms of the project my class has completed a unit of work which I called ‘Life Learning’. I set up a classportals page to run my year 9 “Life Learning” unit from. The unit ran from the last four weeks of term 2 until week 4 of term 3.
- It was designed to be relatively unstructured to enable students to be more self-directed.
- I generally acted as a facilitator during the unit as all students were engaged in different topics. It didn’t happen all the time and not all students experienced it but I do feel that many experienced Csikszentmihalyi’s “Flow” at times which was fantastic.
- Students presented their learning this term and I was very happy with the results. On several occasions during the students final presentations I learnt things from the students that I didn’t know before - clearly I hadn’t told them - so that was great.
- I do feel that students were still extrinsically motivated by marks, however, there was also some intrinsic “need to know” going on too.
- I feel that I never achieved 100% learning purely and simply for the sake of learning. The problem probably lies in the fact that assessment and reporting are such a big focus at schools. So in an attempt to help my students love learning and want to learn I set up another site (http://mrbarlow.wordpress.com/) which is my blog of interesting things going on around the world. I have given the site to the 80 kids I teach this year and in eight weeks this term since it’s introduction it has got about 1500 hits. So I feel it is somewhat successful at helping kids want to learn and as such I plan on keeping it going.

Overall I feel that ‘Life Learning’ was a really successful unit, the students approached it with a great attitude and really extended themselves.

- In terms of higher-order thinking the projects the students created were certainly at the top end of Bloom’s revised taxonomy. ie. Analysing, Evaluating and Creating. So it was terrific in this regard.
- The metacognitive side of the unit was probably a bit weak although the students did complete some fairly basic self and peer assesment at the end.
- I really tried to encourage teamwork and collaboration via groupwork (which worked well) and student posts on the classportals site (which didn’t work as well).
- In terms of the students attitudes to school and ownership of learning I feel my class was really positive. I really tried to push the Choice aspect of CEQALL (as I believe it ties it all together) and I really think this had a positive influence on the students experience.

Finally as a science teacher I think that improving student’s thinking skills is a really important part of my job. As such I try to implement a variety of structured thinking tasks in my classes regulary. As such I have used some of the thinking routines listed above and found them to be great

Cheers,
Tim

I commented on this a while ago and it appears as though my comment may be awaiting moderation (it had a few hyperlinks in it). Do you want to check that out.

Cheers,
Tim