PBL Gemara Day 1

A great start! I greet the students as they enter. I walk to the front of the room and I say “I have no intention of giving any exams this year, you don’t want to take them and I don’t want to grade them.” Gemara Honors erupts in applause. I explain we’re going all in PBL, group projects and presentations with content, collaboration, and presentation rubrics (will post all soon). The class is all on board and we are only five minutes in.

First groupings are based on student seating (I have 15 students and my classroom has four round tables in it, no desks, I will post a picture. So the tables the students sat at when they walked in are the groups they are stuck in for unit one, until I get a better handle on who is who in the class. For the non math teachers out there, I have 3 groups of 4 and one group of 3.)

Admin Team has decided that I am to start from 72a, Mishna of Ha’Ba B’Machteres, so I put this on the board: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Ac8ZgXf14TzCzwRmCQhqNyBywiILAp_dzkLG56fhNRs/edit?pli=1

I have a student read it aloud, no questions allowed. Next, five minutes to talk it over in the groups, again no questions allowed. Next I take all the questions about the project. I remind students that I want assigned roles of research tomorrow, and we still have 20 minutes or so left, so we start the learning in their groups. Some of the students break to beis medrash to get chumashim, some use their laptops. I circulate listening to students decode pesukim, a mishna, and start the gemara. (FYI the list of sources on the Doc is not complete, I will be continuously adding to it until the end of the unit.)

So Day 1 is in the books. No frontal teaching, an excited group of students, and a PBL Gemara class off to a great start.