PBL in action!!

This weekend I developed 2 pbl's! One for this class! And another for my class at Roosevelt. Today was our first day of the pbl and I'm super excited to see where it goes. I get the feeling my kids are excited as well! Very cool.

We are studying the Reconstruction period after the Civil War. The problem I presented to the class was the same problem the United States faced in the aftermath of the Civil War--how do we reconstruct the South and bring the Southern states back into the Union? I gave students very little information to start and am hoping they use the entire Reconstruction chapter in our textbook to research the possible solutions. It worked out very nicely that we just started the Reconstruction period after I became familiar with how to do a pbl. This model fits very nicely to studying the many difficulties facing the Union during this period.

My only concern is giving students so much "power to learn." I do not want to see them use this power for evil! Meaning, instead of actually driving the lesson in the direction it needs to go, they will drive us into a ditch. It is a major concern of mine. Today things went pretty well but I spent over half the class lecturing before dividing the class into groups. I'm not really sure how they will use the next two days I have set aside to work on this project. We have done in class projects before with a pretty good amount of success but it did take a lot of work on my part to keep students on task. I guess we will have to wait and see where they take this!