Content area
Full Text
If someone walked into my sophomore English classroom the week before spring break, they might have questioned my classroom management. They would have seen students sitting in groups, talking and gesticulating wildly, coming and going with little more than a word to myself or another student and using their cell phones with little regard for any of the other classroom activity.
Within this seeming chaos, there was order and productive work happening. After writing found poetry using Elie Wiesel's Holocaust memoir Night, I told my students their work was so good they needed to share it and suggested the class make an ebook or website. They wanted to do both.
I organized teams based on students' talents and interests, and the work began. Some are writing and editing content, others are creating art content using Photoshop, some are responsible for recording audio and video performances of the poems, while another group is uploading and managing web content. The group with their cell phones is documenting the process as the initial stages of their publicity campaign.
This is project-based learning.
Edutopia, a leading education blog, describes projectbased learning, or PBL, as "a dynamic approach to teach- ing in which students explore real-world problems and...