{"id":680,"date":"2014-01-01T17:29:55","date_gmt":"2014-01-01T17:29:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.carmelschettino.com\/wp\/?p=680"},"modified":"2014-01-01T18:11:15","modified_gmt":"2014-01-01T18:11:15","slug":"top-5-recommended-readings-for-pbl-teachers-of-2013-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.carmelschettino.com\/dev0418\/2014\/01\/01\/top-5-recommended-readings-for-pbl-teachers-of-2013-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Top 5 Recommended Readings for PBL Teachers of 2013 Part 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

Happy New Year! \u00a0It’s been a busy end of 2013 for me. \u00a0I’ve been doing a lot of reading and catching up with some writing. \u00a0So, the New York Times came out with their top 75 Best-Selling Education Books of 2013<\/a> and some of them are really great reads and some are just books that are commercially hyped education jargon.\u00a0 I\u2019ll let you read it for yourself and see which you think are which.\u00a0 But this inspired me to think about what I would recommend as great reading for PBL teachers in terms of mathematics.\u00a0 It\u2019s not always easy to get inspired to continue with PBL so I am always on the look-out for good reads and things that might help me to find ways to motivate students in the classroom.\u00a0 I also hate those lists from articles that seem to have all the answers but then when you read them nothing is ever really black and white like \u201cTo Flip or Not to Flip: that is the Question\u201d or \u201c5 Resolutions to Modernize Your Teaching For 2014\u201d or \u201cTop 100 Tools for Learning in 2014\u201d \u2013 geez, does anyone just write about one thing anymore?\u00a0 Or even give critical analysis of why these are the reasons to flip, or an argument as to the top 100 tools \u2013 anyone can make a list.<\/p>\n

Including me!\u00a0 So here goes nothing \u2013 well, I mean something.\u00a0 I tried to put together some good reading that emphasizes the skills that are needed for working with students in a problem-based classroom.\u00a0 One of the things I hear most from teachers is not necessarily how to work with the curriculum, but how to get students working with each other and how to foster the type of classroom community (curiosity, openness and risk-taking) that is needed in order for students to want to be engaged.<\/p>\n

5. The Mistake Manifesto: How Making Mistakes Can Make Us Better<\/a> by Alina Tugend, 2011.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I first came across Tugend\u2019s writing when I read her Op-Ed piece in the NY Times while ago, but this essay on making mistakes says so much about Tugend\u2019s great attitude towards how mistakes are not only helpful, but are a wiser and more powerful way of learning.\u00a0 She says that \u201cwe do single-loop learning when we need to do double-loop learning.\u201d\u00a0 I love that and I believe that PBL\u2019s\u00a0 method of returning to ideas in its scaffolded and multi-topic approach often allows students to revisit ideas multiple times.\u00a0 Tugend talks about how most of our society creates a fear of making mistakes because we have this idea that we aren\u2019t supposed to make mistakes.\u00a0 This is in turn makes us all risk-averse unfortunately and only allows the most unstructured students and learners to be creative innovators.\u00a0 This is what we have to turn around.\u00a0 Her manifesto doesn\u2019t necessarily tell us how to do this, but it\u2019s a wonderful argument for why we should.<\/p>\n

4. Flow, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, 1990<\/strong><\/p>\n

This book\u2019s original intent was to investigate the psychological experience of happiness, however this past year it became connected for me to the process of problem-based learning.\u00a0 OK, so this book is not from 2013 \u2013 or even from the past few years, but what happened in 2013, is that I read an article that sent me to this book.\u00a0 The article was called \u201cThe Problem-Based Learning Process as finding and being in Flow\u201d by Terry Barrett and it discussed the concept of \u2018flow\u2019 (from Csikszentmihalyi\u2019s book) and compared the PBL process (the discourse that occurs, the exchange of ideas and that learning process itself) to the optimization of creativity that occurs in the \u2018flow\u2019 process.\u00a0 In this book, Csikszentmihalyi defines \u2018flow\u2019 as \u201cthe state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter.\u00a0 The experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.\u201d(Csikszentmihalyi, p.4).\u00a0 Wouldn\u2019t that be great if that\u2019s the way students viewed learning?\u00a0 One way to see it is like this:<\/p>\n

\u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

(Barrett, 2013)<\/p>\n

The idea being that the state of flow in learning comes when the optimal problem or activity is presented to students such that the difficulty and time or skills given keeps their interest long enough to minimize anxiety and maximize love of learning and the return on their learning (reinforcement of confidence, efficacy, enjoyment, agency, etc.).\u00a0\u00a0 A lot of the book is based on the idea of the state of flow helping to create the optimal state of happiness so it might not relate directly to teaching, but I highly recommend the last two chapters which are entitled \u201cCreating Chaos\u201d and \u201cThe Making of Meaning\u201d which can be directly translated to the PBL classroom and are highly useful for the PBL teacher looking to see how you can create the state of flow for your students.<\/p>\n

Tomorrow I will catch up with numbers two and three! (hopefully get you #1 as well)<\/p>\n\n

Tweet<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Happy New Year! \u00a0It’s been a busy end of 2013 for me. \u00a0I’ve been doing a lot of reading and catching up with some writing. \u00a0So, the New York Times came out with their top 75 Best-Selling Education Books of 2013 and some of them are really great reads and some are just books that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,11,35,17],"tags":[20,53,21],"class_list":["post-680","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-in-the-classroom","category-innovation","category-other-resources","tag-pbl","tag-reading","tag-teaching"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.carmelschettino.com\/dev0418\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/680","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.carmelschettino.com\/dev0418\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.carmelschettino.com\/dev0418\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.carmelschettino.com\/dev0418\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.carmelschettino.com\/dev0418\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=680"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.carmelschettino.com\/dev0418\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/680\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":684,"href":"https:\/\/www.carmelschettino.com\/dev0418\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/680\/revisions\/684"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.carmelschettino.com\/dev0418\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=680"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.carmelschettino.com\/dev0418\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=680"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.carmelschettino.com\/dev0418\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=680"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}