>>Teacher: Can I get your eyes over here and have you help me read it, please? One, two, three. >>Students: What causes my toy to start moving?
>>Deborah: Feeling like you should question things and wonder about things and investigate things for yourself is so important today. Good project-based learning units start with a driving question, something that would be interesting to students that's authentic. Something that will inspire wonderment in students and make them want to learn more about it, and ask their own questions.
We saw, just in the classroom, kids getting excited about reading, because they were excited about the topic, because it was something that was related to what they were trying to figure out. And they had this sense of curiosity. They really wanted to know more about it.
We also had some anecdotal evidence from teachers that their reading data showed that the kids were really improving in their reading ability from doing this, because the kids were reading more. They're asking the teacher for resources, and for books that they can read, because they were more excited about just trying to find out more information about them. The teachers did feel like it was really helping their kids in reading, as well as in science.
Rather than have people feed information to them, it allows students to take ownership in their own learning. It builds up their sense of being able to accomplish things on their own, and their ownership of the work for themselves. So I think if we can develop that in kids, we're going to make them citizens that are going to be just amazing as they go on in the rest of their lives.
