Week of March 7-11, 2016

Each Friday we post a list of our favorite articles, blog posts, and other resources we’ve run across that relate to Project Based Learning.

Here’s what we liked this week:

Testing for Joy and Grit? Schools Nationwide Push to Measure Students’ Emotional Skills
New York Times
Schools in nine California districts are exploring testing students on how well they demonstrate qualities like self-management and perseverance – which is not without controversy, including criticism from Angela Duckworth, author of a forthcoming book on grit. We’ve written about the connection between PBL and grit.

Here’s How You Teach Innovative Thinking
ISTE
An excerpt from Innovation Age Learning: Empowering Students by Empowering Teachers by Sharon Sakai-Miller, who explains how schools can prepare students to thrive in today’s complex, high-tech global economy by teaching them to be makers, coders, inventors, entrepreneurs, and authors.

Celebrities Mobilize to Launch #BestSchoolDay Campaign to Support Classroom Projects
Education Week Teacher
Announcement by DonorsChoose.org of a $14+ million pledge by a group of celebrities (including Stephen Colbert), athletes, and more to "flash fund" public school classroom projects in communities across the U.S. Let’s hope they’re main course PBL, not dessert projects!

Building School Communities One Brick at a Time
ASCD
A report on Oakland Elementary School in Spartanburg School District Two in South Carolina, which has embraced PBL as their primary instructional practice to prepare students for the standards-based performance tasks recently introduced into the curriculum.

Tech Meets Art in Middle School
The Atlantic
Another one from South Carolina, about Fisher Middle School in Greenville, which has a PBL-infused STEAM curriculum, with active involvement from the local business community – and a cool new building.

Motivating Successful Teamwork with Games
Edutopia
Teacher and blogger Laura Davis explains how she overcomes mid-year project fatigue in her students by engaging them in physical games that teach lessons about creativity, create an environment that rewards risk-taking, and remind them of the importance of listening.

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