Blogs on Middle (6-8)

I learned that you can lie and people will believe you. -- Greg, an eleventh grade student.

This statement would shock most people but his teachers were proud. Greg, a student at Metropolitan Arts and Technology High School in San Francisco (an Envision School), and his classmates had just finished presenting their California Proposition Campaign Ads. Greg’s reflection met one of many outcomes: that by producing media, students will become better consumers of media -- especially election campaign advertising.

In recent years, most students in my project-based AP Government classes have indicated, in both class discussions and anonymously on surveys, that they prefer project-based learning to a more traditional classroom experience. They find PBL more fun and believe that it leads to deeper learning. However, two types of students often resist this model. Students of the first type generally do not enjoy school at all, and are looking for the path of least resistance. Because a PBL classroom is student-centered and calls on students to produce, less-motivated students will find it more difficult to "hide" and be left alone. The second type of student has already been very successful in traditional classrooms and is deterred by the challenges of this new model. These students are often highly motivated by grades, and worry that the project cycles will detract from direct content delivery.

When six middle-school girls from Bowling Green, Kentucky, got the wild idea to launch a camera into space, they knew there would be big challenges ahead. They would have to learn about everything from weather balloons to high-definition cameras, raise thousands of dollars to buy the gear they needed, and work together (with help from a few trusty adults) to address a host of technical challenges.

With the presidential election dominating the news between now and November, there's no shortage of timely material to bring into classroom discussions. If used as the starting point for project-based learning, the 2012 election can engage students in thinking critically about everything from media messages to voter rights to public opinion polls.