This year, I have gone fully Project-Based-Learning.  

I know lots of people see PBL as a list of rules and guidelines for how to create the PERFECT project, but that's not really how we roll.  Instead, we've taken the general structure (do a project about something) and mixed it with some #flipclass pedagogy, and then made a lot of stuff up as we went along.  

The result is something that I know doesn't tick all the boxes on many "Are you doing PBL right?" lists.  And I'm okay with that.

I was going to write this post about the unit we just finished, but that's too easy.  Instead, I'm throwing caution to the wind (that's a really weird phrase, now that I think about it) and talking about the PBL work we're starting in my 6th grade Humanities class: China.

I know almost nothing about China.  I may have a history degree, but the total amount of time I spent on China in my three years in college was about four hours.  Yeah.

Here are the blogs for this week (9 February 2015) about how we deal with the pull between covering all of the things, or covering some things well but leaving other things out.  

Cheryl Morris - What I Choose Not to Teach
Andrew Thomasson - Staring Down the Content Monster
Katie Lanier - How Deep? How Wide?
Shai McGowan - What I Heard In My Classroom On a Monday
Danielle Gibbs - #flipclass Flash Blog
Mickie Gibbs - Deciding What to Teach
Gary Strickland - Separating the Wheat from the Chaff
Delia Bush - Trying the Make It Fit (the Neverending Battle)
David Fouch - I Teach in Fake Life!!
Mrs. Stephenson - What to Teach?
Carla Jefferson - Fitting It All In

Remember, if you didn't get to participate, join us asynchronously in blogging and leave your post as a comment to this one!

Or join us next Monday for more #FlashBlogFun!

It's easy to talk about what happens in my classroom and the things I choose as worthy to spend our communal time learning together.  But what doesn't get discussed much is what I choose NOT to teach.

In every curricular choice a teacher makes, there are fifteen un-choices of things to leave out.  I mean, in 6th grade History, we're supposed to cover the emergence of human beings from hominids through until the fall of Rome.  And in English we're supposed to teach research techniques and writing, narrative writing, literary analysis, argumentation, logical fallacies, and a more sophisticated writing style than in K-5.

In a year.

The way I decide what gets dropped is often based primarily on my own background knowledge.  

I posted earlier this week about The Suck - that time between when a project is assigned and when it's due when students lose interest and motivation.  And it was timely for my classroom - we just started a new project, and I was determined to beat The Suck this time.

Over the past few years, I've led my students through dozens of projects.  This year, those projects tend to take the form of an original play, performed by puppets.  And all have had periods of The Suck.

We've done Origin Stories from various cultures.  We've done Battle of the Hominids, where students made plays based on the research they did on one particular Hominid.  They've made videos for their Museum Project where they researched one of six cultures we didn't get to study this year.  They've also made dozens of individual puppet videos to teach vocabulary, grammar, and even historical content.

Those projects were all fine.  The videos were cute, the scripts were collaboratively written, and the puppets (mostly) stayed on screen.

But on this project, about daily life in Ancient Egypt, I wanted to do a whole lot of things better.  I wanted to beat The Suck.

Here are the blogs for this week (1 February 2015) about time management in projects:
Cheryl Morris - Defeating The Suck
Andrew Thomasson - Is Procrastination a Good Thing?
Katie Lanier - Slogging Through The Mud in PBL
Shai McGowan - On Getting Kids Over The Suck
Lindsay Cole - Avoiding the Suck
Kristen Cotner - Avoiding Procrastination
Danielle Gibbs - #flipclass Flash Blog
Karl Lindgren-Streicher - The Suck and 20% Time 
Lee Graves - Ways to Avoid Procrastination
Wendy Markert - Avoiding Procrastination on Big Projects
Gary Strickland - Time Management, The Suck and Procrastination
B. Goza - #flipclas flash blog

And here are last week's (26 January 2015) blogs about late work:
Cheryl Morris - All of the Late Work
Andrew Thomasson - Late Work Flash Flash Blog
Tamara Samaripa - About Time to Learn
Desmond Hasty - What's Your Late Policy? Why?
Carla Jefferson - What's my Policy?
Jennifer Gwilt - Homework Grading a New Way
Kate Baker - Late Work Policies
Ken Bauer - Flash Blog Part 3
Kristen Cotner - Late Assignment Policy
Shai McGowan - How Do I Handle Late Work?
Robin Nehila - Late Work Policy

Andrew and I are the worst when it comes to procrastination.

But I swear we've tried to fix the problem.

We start projects really early.  Sometimes ridiculously early.  Then we keep having little ideas that push us in a slightly new direction.  That continues for several weeks or months, until the deadline starts looming.

Then we have an "OMG THIS IS ACTUALLY HAPPENING AND IT'S DUE IN A FEW DAYS AND WE HAVE NOTHING" moment.  

And from that place of panic, one of us has The Idea that makes everything fit together, or more often, the idea that requires us to throw everything out and start again.

But we always finish on time.  And this process works for us.