Zach Ronneberg
KSTF Teaching Portfolio
2006-2007
Submitted: April 30, 2007
Goal:
CSTP (California Standards for Teacher Preparation)
Standards addressed:
3 – Understanding and organizing subject matter for student learning
3.5 – Uses materials, resources, and technologies to make subject matter
accessible to students.
Evidence
All evidence pieces are hyperlinked to this document
Rationale for choosing this goal:
The way I have decided to persue the above goal for this past year has been through revamping my curriculum to include more project based learning (PBL). It is my opinion that PBL makes the subject more real and accessible to students by making learning more relevant and surrounded in an authentic context. This increases student motivation, buy-in and ownership of learning, provides for learning at a deep and meaningful level, teaches thinking skills, habits of mind, and practical building skills, and allows each student's particular talents to shine at different times. Research has also shown that PBL is especially effective in reaching those students who have become disenchanted or feel alienated by more traditional didactic teaching methods. I also feel that including project based learning in my curriculum will ultimately be one of the things that keeps me interested and engaged in teaching for the long haul. I have found that I become a more enthusiastic and energetic teacher when planning and conducting PBL type curriculum and I think that using it extensively will prevent me from becomeing burned out, as so many teachers do. In addition, my goal was also a standard to be fulfilled as part of my BTSA portfolio this year, so it made sense to kill two birds with one stone.
It is important that I persue this goal now because I would like to get my curriculum
honed early in my career so that I don't get used to teaching in a more didactic
way and get stuck in that "rut". This is not to say that I am unhappy
with my current curriculum, I just think that it can be improved by giving it
a heavy transfusion of PBL.
Rationale for including each piece of evidence:
1. Artifact: Year-long curriculum with with all planned projects included
I chose PBL as a method of making physics content accessible to
students at all levels. This piece of evidence shows that I have made a concerted
effort, and spent considerable time before the school year started as well as
during the course of the year, to include project based learning throughout
the curriculum.I collaborated with another KSTF fellow, Bradford Hill, to create
this syllabus as well as create many of the projects listed. Goals for each
unit are listed in green, projects are listed in red, labs in blue. I have tried
to annotate the syllabus (grey italicized text) as the year has progressed so
that I can remember next year how things went and what changes/improvements
need to be made.
2. Artifact: Handout of guidelines and grading
rubric for the “Extreme Home Makeover: Electricity Edition” project
This shows that I have spent time developing and refining individual projects which make innovative use of everyday materials and learning tasks applicable to real-life situations to make the content accessible and help bolster student-engagement. This also shows that I have spent time gathering the necessary materials and , gathering the materials and refining them (not just thrown together)
3. Reproduction: Video of students building pan-pipes
This video shows the end products of artifacts 1 and 2. Students are clearly engaged. They are all involved in different steps of the project, yet all students are engaged in their work. Furthermore, those many steps helps ensure that all students have a place where their talents can shine. Students may find that they become a local expert in translating sheet music, doing calculations, building, computer-testing, tuning, or playing their pipes. Even if team members are not all at the same stage of the process they are still working together, and in some cases consulting with other teams to access the expertise of the students on that team.
*note: I will try to add some video of the students actually playing their pipes if I can. All students successfully played a song (ranging from "Mary Had a Little Lamb" to classic rock, to Beethoven) and it was evident that they were proud of their accomplishment).
Reflection
Looking over the evidence I have compiled here, as well as everything else I have done this past year, I have mixed feelings on my "success". I put that in quotes because I don't know if I really think there is such a thing as definable success in teaching, there is just different types of instruction with different outcomes. In terms of putting more project based content into my curriculum, I feel as though I have made some serious efforts and made good progress toward making my curriculum more project-based (as shown by the first piece of evidence). In addition, I feel like I have made good progress toward structuring the projects in terms of expectations for the products students will produce and how those products will be evaluated (as shown by the second piece of evidence). There are still some projects where this needs work, but I am getting there. In addition, I think students are interested in and enjoying the projects, which increases student buy-in and motivation (as shown in the third peice of evidence). What I am lacking, is a real concrete sense of what the students are actually getting out of each project, what the actual outcomes are. I have a strong sense that the projects are worth-while, and that they improve my class in many ways, but I don't know to what extent students are actually learning content through the projects. I feel as though my next step in this realm would be to create some definite learning outcome expectations for each project and find a way to assess whether these expectations are being met (maybe a pre-post test). In addition, after our spring meeting I am also very motivated to shift the focus of projects from an interesting application, to more of a vehicle for actually learning the material. This means that the project would introduced at the beginning of a unit (rather than more towards the middle or end) and would be the driving motivation for learning all the content within the unit (rather than learning it in a traditional form and then having the "fun application"). I took away some very good ideas from our PBL workshop this spring for how to accomplish this. I hope to create entry events, and some sort of map or outline which shows when the content will appear within each project. While there is still much for me to do in reaching my goal of organizing PBL to optimize it for student learning, I believe the evidence I have compiled here shows that I am making significant progress in that direction.