Category: In the classroom

Busily preparing

I am finishing up my spring break from teaching and I was very busy with a great deal of doctoral work during this time off. I worked on a lot of this website and edited some papers. Currently, I am preparing my presentation for a conference this coming Friday in Cambridge – it will be my first presentation of the research I did last fall on discourse in the PBL classroom. Those who read my proposal commented that they found it interesting, so I am hopeful that it will be well-received. I am looking forward to attending this conference simply to experience a research conference and prepare myself for perhaps a professional conference in the near future.

I had a wonderful conversation this week via Skype with a school in California that has implemented Phillips Exeter’s PBL curriculum this year. It was fun to discuss with their department some of the ups and downs of this year. Interestingly, many of the common obstacles that other schools have faced were what this school brought to the table in that conversation. Hopefully, they have found their stride and will continue their great work into the coming year.

I have got my forums up and running (well, my husband has) and hopefully we will begin some great conversations soon. I look forward to hearing from all of those who have been in contact with me about PBL in the past years and how they are all doing.

Winter into spring

Hello reader – hopefully you have found this site easily. I am writing here at the beginning of March, as I sit down to fulfill about 6 goals written down on purple post-its stuck to my computer. I have many issues that I would like to address here in my first blog entry, but not knowing the issues that are on the readers minds is of concern to me. I would love to hear from people that I haven’t heard from in a long time – those from my summer courses, or those I have seen in workshops, etc. If you have thoughts, please let me know.

I will be creating forums based on topics that people inquire about or have interest in. My goal is to have this site become a resource for teachers who are interested in PBL or transitioning their school to PBL curriculum.

So for now, I am looking forward to seeing how my school will do this spring with the advent of our new Algebra II/Trig PBL curriculum. This will be the first semester that we utilize the trigonometry portion that we wrote last summer and it will be interesting to see how it goes. The students with which we will be using this curriculum did go through our geometry curriculum, so they do know what they are getting into. I wonder how they will react.

Hopefully, with spring will come new life, goals fulfilled (including my paper getting out to a journal), and new challenges faced as well. If you have a new challenge that you are facing in the utilization of PBL curriculum or movement towards it, please let me know!