I’ve been itching to get into PBT for a couple years now. I’m about a quarter of the way through my second book on the vary large subject. Though I would have preferred to have a really good grasp of what it is before beginning, Summer is here! We don’t want a summer filled with work books to assuage summer regression. We want immersion! We want to grow and come to next school year with some seriously kick-butt tools for making our classroom world class and a ‘place’ we look forward to being.

Thus, we are diving in, one flipper on, one in hand. I’ll be reading and learning as we go and there is so much to learn that I expect it’s really best to just jump in anyway.

Our first Project:

Challenge: We are sad, bored and lonely, we need something to look forward to.

We suddenly started our journey in PBL (project based learning) because I had a table surrounded by long faces. They weren’t group mourning in hopes of getting anything, they were all individually bummed. So I poked and prodded and finally got them examining their feelings. We pulled out a pad of sticky notes and made a problem board on the dining room mirror. After we had really wrung all of the feels out of the issue we started brainstorming solutions.

We had just introduced our classroom culture standards so we referred back to these pretty often during this meeting. That process in a nutshell found the children deciding how they should treat me and each other and how they wanted me to treat them. The only rule that I put on their list was that they must have a growth mindset. We now have posted rules of conduct that reflect what the children find to be important. They were the authors and this has made referring back to these standards of conduct to be very easy and the rules have a lot of support from the children.

So not only my 10 and 9 year old but my 4 year old too, put ideas up to be considered. We left the board alone for several days. It was there, always in the background during meals and other school subjects.

I’ll talk about what happened at our next meeting in my next PBT post!