Design 2015

Here's a great lesson I just experienced as part of our Design 2015 program:

Dr. Moran stopped by for a visit a couple of weeks ago to check out some of the great work that is taking place through our Design 2015 project. One of the lessons that I wanted to showcase for her was the work that Andrea Burton and Melanie Dusci did with their seventh grade math students. The students had just completed a task in which they had to use video to explain the world of rational and irrational numbers. Students were given a wide range of options to choose from to do this—movie trailers, metaphors, tv commercials—and they did some incredible work under Melanie and Andrea’s leadership. What showed me the true power of this learning, though, was that Melanie and Andrea pulled a few groups for me the day of the superintendent’s visit and asked them to showcase and discuss their work without any type of advance notice. The kids came up to the conference room and we played each of their group’s video. They spoke eloquently about how they created the project, what they learned from it, and the bumps in the road that they hit along the way. Each one of them did a great job of explaining the number system as well. The kids were providing us great feedback about why this project was so engaging to them—they had some choice, the got to work as a team, they had a product they could be proud of at the end of the assignment. It took a tremendous amount of work for Melanie and Andrea to put this together. It would have been much easier to have a more traditional lesson about the number system, but there is no way that the kids would have learned as much. If you get a chance, head over to Andrea’s web page and check out the links to some of the projects. You won’t be disappointed with what you see.