PIP Reflection

My PIP was on Project Based Learning and Assessment. I created a variety of

projects for my classes: roughly 40 for Humanities, 25 for Foods, and 1
summative project for Dance Choreography. The projects I crated are online
shared with my colleagues in a google drive, and are also posted online on
Google Classroom. I also created hardcopy booklets that contain all projects
and rubrics.
Assessment Tool Reflection:
Rubrics: There were separate rubrics for each category (Reading & Writing,
Listening & Speaking, Viewing & Representing) as well as for Novel Study
Social Studies, and Renaissance Social Studies. The rubrics were helpful to
mark because they assessed a variety of outcomes for both ELA and SS, and
also gave the students a clear visual with where they were at. I would
change all of the rubrics in the future to better align them with what I see as
I mark. I would omit two categories from the R&W ELA rubric and instead
include a category for outcome 4.2 attend to conventions that would be
weighted twice as much to better assess the students writing skills and use
of proper grammar and spelling.
Anecdotal notes (and conferencing): I created a chart with each students
name in it that I would use every Wednesday for our weekly conference. In
this assessment I would check for how their project is going, what they have
completed/have left to do, any concerns, and I would usually leave a * if I
need to conference with them again the next day for any reason (i.e. lack of
work, behind, confusion, etc). These also proved very successful when
informing parents of their childs behaviour and progress in class. Google
Classroom also allowed me to view student work in real time whenever
necessary to check for ongoing work and formative assessment.
Google Classroom Doc Comments: I highlighted every assignment on Google
Doc for spelling mistakes, grammar errors (if assessing for R&W), as well as
for general comments and questions, or to prompt for deeper thinking. I
would leave a paragraph comment in purple at the bottom of every Google
assignment to provide students with a comprehensive comment on their
assignment, suggestions to edit or fix, and I would always leave at least 1
positive comment about their project or assignment.
Student Project Reflection: I handed out a reflection questionnaire on project
for students to fill out to provide me with information about how they liked
PBL and what their overall thoughts were. I asked students to reflect on the
different categories and where they felt their strengths were, on how working
with groups was versus working independently, whether they looked at my
teacher comments and resubmitted or not, what project they were proudest
of and why, overall thoughts on using Google Classroom, as well as to set 1
goal moving forward for the rest of the year. These reflections provided me
with feedback on how students interacted with Google Classroom, as well as

with PBL. If I were to continue teaching, I would change my next unit by

every student self assess their first project and to make a checklist of their
goals for a project. I would also ensure that every student work in a group (I
tried to with this class but 2 students worked alone on every project, which
was a good choice for them at the beginning of the year).
If I were to teach these units again with PBL, I would NOT mark the first
project and would instead use it to workshop PBL and have students observe
their classmates in a gallery walk and leave two stars and a wish. I would
also have student self assess their own project on a rubric so they can
understand both their learning process and the summative assessment tool
at the beginning of the year and with the first project so they had a solid
understanding of what was required before doing more projects.
I presented my PIP at the PSIII Symposium and talked greatly about the main
observations I observed: high motivation and engagement with the students,
the benefits of student choice in relation to motivation and engagement, how
projects worked well for my students with ISPs and the life skills students
learned and gained experience with (problem solving, collaboration, decision
making, time management, etc).