21st Century Skills Culture Video Lecture | What is Project Based Learning (PBL)? - Professional Skills

our goal when we started the school
essentially was to try to create a place
where when you walk into it you couldn't
tell whether it was a technical school
or a college prep school there are three
axioms of public education in this
country particularly in high schools and
they are that you've separate students
from each other based on their perceived
academic ability you separate your hands
from minds and you separate the school
for the world beyond we try to integrate
those three through the integrate
students we integrate the subjects
particularly technical and academic
pursuits and we try to integrate with
the world beyond school as well we don't
just build the robot we also compete as
far as competition goes everything that
we do we put it all into the document
and we stand in from the judges and say
look at us this is what we do you this
is you know these are our achievements
and we kind of like to try and say you
know like we're the best and this is we
want you to recognize that
it's a really enjoyable thing and it's
definitely great because it involves us
in the community as well use
twenty-first century skills these kind
of employability skills were really
college prep skills as well if we were
able to pull together a program where we
were asking kids to work in teams ask
good questions to consider multiple
perspectives in the work that they're
doing ask how things are connected
take big picture views and so forth that
that we would be preparing them both for
college and for careers if you want it
wider you like ooh that's perfect Tom
this image so then I kind of broke it
down into all possible math which I
pretty much like just isolated parabolas
and cylinders so that I wrote like a
page of notes about it and then put it
on and made two different and like
compositions of my notes and then so I'm
trying to
I think the culture of high tech high in
general not just out of school but the
whole village is a very hands-on
approach collaboration is a big key
element to a successful project in my
opinion I think they're gonna get a
deeper more meaningful like
understanding of the subject as a whole
as opposed to we know one tiny piece of
it and so it's really neat that I can go
to any of these kids and talk about
ancient Egyptian engineering I could
talk to them about their daily life I
can talk to them about the architecture
of pyramids and obelisks and talk about
volume and surface area and talk about
gods and goddesses and every single one
of them would know all about it my first
year here I should say was like my first
year teaching all over again and it was
a big learning experience very big I
needed a lot of support a lot of help as
do pretty much every new new teacher
here but through the years you just kind
of get used to how to structure projects
how to give clear cut expectations to
the kids to get the best outcome yeah a
lot of it's about building a common
culture of learning and questioning and
feeling comfortable kind of articulating
your observations we can always cut away
okay six it is okay to create a toy
we're going to donate them to an
orphanage down in Mexico we started out
with like a blueprint and it has to have
one input and for our group five outlets
so some of those things are the ladder
and movement up and down we have the
fireman he's going to be like hanging
off the side I think it's it's always a
critical thinking exercise when you have
to start from scratch when your build
something from nothing create your ideas
and then see the flaws of those ideas
refine them and develop them out just
like you would do in the real world so
there's a lot of troubleshooting and
questions that you have to ask like
what's causing this to fail or why isn't
this fitting together writer how come
these didn't work the way I thought they
would work and so that really forces you
into that critical thinking mindset we
definitely work in teams work in teams
of two each student is responsible for
creating similar things so one student
doesn't do all the work
they both have to do sketches they both
have to have individual parts that
they're responsible for
so we try and create a collaborative
environment by doing that at the end we
have a reflection and a share out so
everybody can kind of say what you know
what they've learned and where they've
grown and what they didn't know before
everyday to see the kinds of
interactions that you see between adults
and kids here you see very little
behavior management going on in the part
of the thoughts it's all conversation
about what happened last week or about
this assignment about the project we're
doing that's what's really distinctive
about the place as far as I'm concerned
it's the quality of relationships it's
really all about relationships and the
kind of interaction that you see amongst
adults and kids here