PBL Planning Part 1

1/28/2020

kinder_pbl_planning_template_2019.pdf
File Size:	138 kb
File Type:	pdf

Today Ms. Shannon and Ms. Miranda met with Principal Terry Schmalz, the campus PBL Learning Coach Aubrey Hoffman and district PBL Resources planning member Alisha Etcheverry. We spent three hours honing our kindness problem statement that we had written during a fabulous week-long D51 District PBL training last June with MindSpark Learning out of Denver.

We've attached a PDF copy of our PBL Planning Template that we used last summer with MindSpark and again during our Jan. 28th planning session.

The biggest issues for us this time were:
1. Solidifying the Problem Statement that the learners would address We didn't want it to vague or too specific.
2. What kind of field experience would we try to do to kick off the unit -- something suggested that we do in our MindSpark Training? and
3. What LENSES would we use to organize our kinder teams for their presentations?

1.After about an hour of revisiting it, the Problem Statement ended up being: New Emerson learners need to know how kindness affects them mentally, physically, and socially so that they can better impact the world around them. We were very comfortable with this, and ended up using the three ways kindness affects us to drive what kinds of speakers and research the kids would do.

2. A recurrent theme was that things were going to look different in Kindergarten. Going to visit a homeless shelter to witness the kindness being demonstrated by the shelter's workers was thrown out, as was going to the Senior Center. But we were also concerned that this might confuse the kids -- that it would be hard for them to connect what they were going to learn from this field experience, and that a better idea might be to have them go AFTER they had done research on the effects of kindness. And so, we decided to kick off the event by having our principal, Ms. Terry, come speak to the kids about recent campus-wide Panoramic data that showed only 46 percent of our school's K-3 learners felt that students were respectful (Kind) to teachers and others.

3. Lastly, when we left that meeting, we thought that a good way to let them do their presentations would be in the lenses of kindness on the PLAYGROUND, in the CAFETERIA, HALLWAY and CLASSROOM.