Update: first hiccup and first expert visit

Sorry this is a long post, two issues together.

First, thank you to everyone who commented here and in personal communications about my first hiccup. I went with the advice from the Boca Boys and gave them more research time. Rabbi Perl’s suggestion seems to be by the PBL books, but I just can’t see the students returning after Sukkos and being excited about finishing a project they almost finished before break. Yehuda’s anecdotal pushed me over the cliff, and I taught Yad Rama and the differences between his opinion and Ran’s as a frontal lesson. I know, I am sad about it too, it’s only three weeks into school and I taught a frontal lesson, I am sorry I let y’all down.  On the bright side we are on to Zarcha HaShemesh.

Second, we had our first expert visit today. Part of PBL is to expose the students to experts in the field who can give expertise the educator doesn’t have, and demonstrate real life applications of the issues being taught. I reached out to an attorney in our community, Josh Kahane, and asked him if he had any attorneys in his office who would be willing to help us. He sent me to Robert Hutton, a criminal attorney at Glankler Brown, who was happy to help. We traveled to their offices and Mr. Hutton presented to the students on the different types of homicide and the justification of self defense in the common law, penal code, and TN law. It was a wonderful trip. We met in their main conference room, which impressed the students, and the aforementioned Josh Kahane brought some kosher snacks. Mr. Hutton’s presentation was wonderfully interactive. The students asked a lot of questions, and presented Mr. Hutton with hypothetical cases to test the boundaries of law he set out. Mr. Hutton was very candid about what the law says and about what he feels are deficiencies and overreaches of the TN code. This will no doubt help the students when they draft their own codes. I hope Mr. Hutton will help grade my students’ codes, but I’ll get to that in a later post. If you can find one as knowledgeable and generous with their time as Robert Hutton, I strongly recommend trips to visit experts.

The First Hiccup

I think I have hit the first road block, and I am not sure how I will manage it just yet. I realized today that if I want the students to do a good job with the United States and Israeli Law, I am going to have to give them more time in class to do it. My original design was to split my 70 minute period roughly 50/20 Gemara/everything else, but while the students are learning the Gemara and the Rishonim nicely they are not moving fast enough on the other side to produce quality work in the time frame I want to spend on this unit. In fact, when I switch to the 20, I have some groups who ask if they can review the Gemara to make sure they can read it properly.

(Don’t think they are abnormal for opting to do Gemara review instead of individual research. I have each student create an MP3 recording of themselves reading the Gemara, which I grade for reading/translation/comprehension. To make sure they aren’t reading Artscroll on the recording I require a signed note from a parent or another student in my class that they witnessed the recording from a clean Gemara. I do this because my first rule of PBL was no examinations, but I need to assess skills somehow.)

The way I see it I have three options: First, allow lesser quality work than I initially hoped to receive. I really don’t like this option but it might be the easiest. Second, take more time from Gemara learning for the State law research. I am torn about this option: on the one hand it is very hard for me to give more time from learning Torah to study general studies, but on the other hand this research should cause them to enjoy the and remember the Torah learning more. Third, spend longer on this sugya than I originally planned. This option gets more complicated with the Yomim Noraim break that I don’t want interrupting a sugya.

I have not figured it out yet, but this is the first hiccup. Any thoughts out there?

PBL Gemara Days 2/3

Here is the class picture, taken from my Windows Phone (yes, that is really what I use) while the students learn in their groups.

I have received from all of the kids their individual assignment responsibilities. I will break our class time into sections when we will focus on the Gemara and Rishonim, and when the students will work on their individual projects and group law drafting. Today I shared this worksheet to help the students through the early Torah sources. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-fYoEPtXIkkFrjbO4yUgceWogbTswHqkezATjKCfeuo/edit The students are reading the sources in their groups and my worksheet is hopefully guiding them in the direction I want. I move through the room to listen and ask questions, I try very hard not to give too many answers. I do some help with words so that groups don’t get too slow. I have been very pleased that the students are working fairly diligently. I have three groups that are through the Gemara and Rashi now starting Ran, and one group that has made it through Ran, and is starting Yad Rama (all source references are on the document I posted on Day 1).

Today I sectioned 45 minutes for only Gemara study and allowed 35 minutes for individual work. Three of the groups broke off to do individual work and one stayed together to finish the questions on the worksheet about Rashi’s understanding of the chain of events. No one is ready for group law drafting yet, they are just starting to learn state laws. To help learn state and federal laws, I have made an appointment for my class with Mr. Robert Hutton Esq., a partner at Glankler Brown who practices criminal law. We will travel next week to their offices and he will present to my class in their conference room about the Tennessee and Federal statutes, including the American legal theory and some applications in different cases. Mr. Brown is volunteering his time, sounds happy and excited to be able to teach, and seems to be very curious himself about the comparison between Biblical/Talmudic Law and that of the United States. I had a very nice, fairly long conversation with Mr. Brown working out the details of our visit and picking each other’s brains about Law and Talmud. I hope my students are behaved, ask good questions, and gain information they can use in addition to having a positive learning experience.

3 days in, still no frontal teaching, and still an excited and positive learning environment. Mr. Noam Davidowitz, our school’s technology guru, stopped in yesterday and remarked that we had a wonderful sound of learning in the classroom. The small compliments make you feel good.

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.

A PBL Tefilas Ha'Derech

Our school (MHAFYOS) is making a shift to project based learning in an attempt to focus on 21^st century skills. I have found that the videos of projects you see at school meetings are lovely, but incomplete in two ways. First, they fail to demonstrate how the learning happens, meaning they show a culminating project, but leave out the part where the students learn the skills needed to create that project. Second, they are almost never about a text based course, and I teach Gemara. So, I am teaching the eighth perek of Sanhedrin this year and I will try to have a project based classroom.  I will be using this blog to explain what I am doing, and reflect on how it went. I will post the projects and scaffolding I give the students in an attempt to demonstrate how the learning happens through the project.  As I begin the journey a Tefilas Haderech is most certainly in order: “May it be the will of Hashem that no mistake come from my hand, that I not falter in a matter of law, and that my colleagues be pleased with my work. May Hashem make the words of Torah sweet in our mouths so that we and our students continuously enjoy studying His Word.” My thanks to Rabbi Noam Stein who is my teammate on the journey.

A year of EdTech

I am still not great with technology and I still wish I could trade in my Windows Phone for an older flip phone without text or email. After spending the past year researching and experimenting with different technologies and their application to education I still believe that the teacher is the most important resource a classroom can have. The lesson will only be as good as the teacher who has prepared and gives it, with or without technology. That being said, the world has changed and is still changing in terms of the way information is taught and learned. There is more information available to today’s students in seconds than was available to past generations in days. Students use more technology, they are communicating in different media than generations past and we have to adjust our teaching to allow students to maximize their potential and prepare them with the skills necessary for future success in the world. Technology is helpful, but the more important factor is to update our lessons to incorporate Twenty First Century Skills.

Webspiration

I like to use Prezi more than PowerPoint to make presentations because I think in flow charts and Prezi is more intuitive for me. I have been playing around with Webspiration, and I think it could be a good planning tool for students who think in flows. From my early trials Webspiration is pretty much a mind mapping tool. What is nice about it is tat it allos you to share your map with others and work collaboratively on it, thus allowing a group of students to chart a project before embarking on it. It should also serve as a good template from which to start putting data into a Prezi, giving you a picture of the whole before starting to create a Prezi. Try Webspiration, http://www.mywebspiration.com/,  and see if you think I am right about using it before Prezi. Also see the sugya I started to chart on Webspiration http://www.webspirationclassroom.com/launch.php.