"Students are hungry for learning that matters. Project based learning has students involved in explaining their answers to real-life questions or challenges. A project's driving question or challenge is so deep that it requires students to create an end product and share their conclusions with others. Instead of traditional projects that come at the end of a unit of study, project-based learning has the project introduced at the beginning of the unit. The project gives students a reason for learning the content and a venue for practicing 21st century skills."
Via Beth Dichter
How can we get our students more engaged in the classroom? Teaching them to investigate authentic problems provides them with opportunities to ask questions that will lead to solutions (and failures) but that will also engage them. In this post Tony Vincent shares steps in how to have your students engage in investigating authentic questions.
Vincent starts with a section called Driven to Investigate. In this section he discusses driving questions and references a previous article, Crafting Questions that Drive Projects.
Additional sections (and there are a total of thirteen) include:
* Thinking is Critical
* Stick Together or Divide and Conquer
* Provide Focus
* Provide Staring Points
* Can You Believe It?
* Experiments, Trial and Error, Data Collection
* You Know Better Than Anyone
Each section is chock full of resources. This is a great resource to help you launch students into investigating authentic problems. He also notes that he will publish Part 3, Creating Products to Show and Share in the future. I will be looking forward to reading (and in all likelihood sharing) that post once it is published.