Forming Groups Through Resumes and Bidding Process

Students were chosen as group leaders by their peers.  The six highest scoring students on their peer evaluations from our last project became new leaders.  They had a tough job as we explored a new technique for choosing team members.  Every student wrote their own resume detailing their strengths and work experience with collaboration and technology.  They shared their Google Doc with me and I removed their names and assigned them each a secret number.  Team leaders met with  me during lunch to bid on their team.  They were given $200,000 to spend on their team's salaries.  

I was impressed with the students' ability to create well rounded groups and look for essential qualities in team members.  Groups were announced later that afternoon and students reflected on what a large responsibility is was to choose their members anonymously!

Students met after groups were announced to share their Learn/Wonder charts and begin drafting their driving question for research week!

Project Based Learning Spilling into Book Clubs!

One group is reading The Boy on the Wood Box and were fascinated with the main character Leon Leyson who wrote this book about his life.  After their book club meeting with written conversation and sharing their sticky notes with text evidence, they wanted to know more. The grabbed their devices and laptops and began researching about his life and family.  The uncovered he died last year and were disappointed as they wanted to make contact with him.  However, they found out about his wife and how many books she purchased when they were published by doing some math to figure out how the money she spent converted into number of books purchased.  This group was completely self led and had to be forced to take a break from their uncovering to go to lunch!  This a great example of the benefits of project based learning in order to promote lifelong learners!