Blogs on Project-Based Learning

Even those of us who teach Shakespeare may never take the time to appreciate the dedication that he had to craft. He's such a fixture of Western sensibility that he's easy to take for granted; we might begin to assume that writing came easily to him, but wouldn't that diminish his hard work? According to the Folger Shakespeare Library, his complete works consist of 118,406 lines of verse. A solid majority of those verses are in rigid iambic pentameter or trochaic tetrameter or some other icky meter that most of us modern poets don't touch with a ten-foot quill. I personally lean towards haiku, as do most of my students.

It's never too late to address this subject. Yes, many of us are gearing down from the epic standardized testing season, enjoying the freedom, released from the many pressures that come with the tests. However, these tests will keep happening. Whether a yearly course assessment, a six-week benchmark exam or a state-level competency test, teachers and students are inundated with testing. Because of the way that testing permeates education culture, I often hear some "pushback" from teachers and their implementation of project-based learning. Here are some tips and responses to that tension between PBL and standardized tests.

As another school year comes to a close, you might be asking yourself these questions:

How in the world did I get here?

Or

I can't believe it's almost over -- is it really?

Or even

How soon till my vacation?

Technology executive Blake Lewin could be sending his sons to a high school within walking distance of their home in Gwinnett County, Georgia. Instead, they're up at 5:30 each morning -- without complaining -- for the 20-mile commute to the Center for Design and Technology.