Teaching for meaning calls for creativity. These sites point to engaging materials, training opportunities, and ways to connect with others working toward authentic learning.
Creating Authentic Experience
The Web site of the Association for Experiential Education (www.aee.org) provides an abundance of resources to make direct, hands-on experience central in teaching. Besides offering resource lists, the lowdown on research, and descriptions of successful programs, the site links to many other groups, programs, and research on related topics ranging from risk management to environmental education (www.aee.org/resources/eeguide).
You can access lesson plans to foster student-constructed knowledge in science and math through Classroom Compass, a publication of the Eisenhower Southwest Consortium for the Improvement of Mathematics and Science Teaching (www.sedl.org/scimath/compass/v01n03/1.html). This issue includes a trove of resources for applying constructivist theory in math and science.
Edutopia Online (www.glef.org/php/keyword.php?id=037), a Web site created by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, is packed with information and resources for implementing project-based learning. Besides reference and resource lists, the site links to an online professional development course module. Lively descriptions (accompanied by online videos) show how student projects across the United States are successfully deepening student learning and connecting kids to real-world situations.
Connecting Learning to the World
How can students connect learning to their role as active citizens? The Center for Civic Education (www.civiced.org) injects the study of citizen participation and democracy into schools. Its site links to curriculum resources that bring the U.S. Constitution to life, compare political systems, and simulate Congressional hearings, among other activities—as well as to summer institutes that can raise teachers' competence in civics education.
Educators for Social Responsibility's site (www.esrnational.org) provides tools for sparking student projects on conflict resolution and understanding world cultures. And the online exchange group International Education and Resource Network (iEARN) has funds available for U.S. educators to develop online exchanges with students and schools in 14 Muslim-populated countries, including Iraq. Go tohttp://thebridgeproject.org for details.
Meaningful Measurement
For thoughtful guidance on measuring the depth and breadth of student understanding, read the article on alternative assessment in the Pathways area of the North Central Regional Educational Laboratory's Web site (www.ncrel.org/sdrs/areas/issues/methods/assment/as8lk30.htm). Defining alternative assessment as “assessment in which students create a response to a question or task,” the site gives tips, criteria, and examples for performance assessments, exhibitions, and portfolios. You'll find a list of Web links and references following each assessment method.
The Discovery Channel's Web site (http://discoveryschool.com/schrockguide/assess.html) links to dozens of sample rubrics that can be used to evaluate project-based learning. For example, a rubric at this site details criteria for judging student performance on tasks necessary for creating a Web site (such as in networking, using HTML, writing, and laying out the site).
Tapping Into Technology
Teaching for Understanding is a curriculum design framework based on five core principles for teaching for meaning. At http://learnweb.harvard.edu/ent, you can log onto Education with New Technologies, a networked community created by the Harvard Graduate School of Education to help educators merge new technologies into lesson planning and teaching—particularly through the Teaching for Understanding approach.
A partner Web site, Active Learning Practices for Schools (http://learnweb.harvard.edu/alps/tfu), features a collaborative curriculum design tool that facilitates planning units and integrating technology. Users can search by keyword for curriculums that other educators have developed in various content areas. A search for chemistry on this site yielded, for example, lesson plans that call for students to use the Internet to research the chemical composition of everyday objects.
A book published by the Southwest Educational Development Laboratory on using technology in lessons within the framework of constructivism (Connecting Student Learning and Technology) is also available online atwww.sedl.org/pubs/tec26.
