Plan out your calendar
One of the more difficult things to gauge is how long a project should last. A long project is 6 weeks, and I have heard from experienced teachers that a 6 week project is the longest they will make. According to them, it is difficult to keep the attention of students longer than that. Most projects should last between 2-4 weeks, so when creating a calendar and you aren’t sure how long the project will take, it can be helpful if you knew either a starting date or ending date.
Look over the need-to-know list and ask yourself how many days it will take to cover all the material. Many items take a full day, but some can be coupled with other questions because they only take 10 minutes to complete in class. For example, I typically will spend 5 minutes on the driving question and 25 minutes on the need-to-know list. If my entry document is 15-20 minutes long, then I would allocate one class period for all three. Once you begin to plan, it might be easier to start with the date of completion of the project and work backwards. I like to have my final presentations on a Thursday, with Friday as the day to reflect, assess, and talk about the project. This allows me to begin the next project on the following Monday. Certain days go in every PBL such as the entry event, driving question, need-to-know, critical friends or some sort of peer review, presentation date , and reflection.
Look over the need-to-know list and ask yourself how many days it will take to cover all the material. Many items take a full day, but some can be coupled with other questions because they only take 10 minutes to complete in class. For example, I typically will spend 5 minutes on the driving question and 25 minutes on the need-to-know list. If my entry document is 15-20 minutes long, then I would allocate one class period for all three. Once you begin to plan, it might be easier to start with the date of completion of the project and work backwards. I like to have my final presentations on a Thursday, with Friday as the day to reflect, assess, and talk about the project. This allows me to begin the next project on the following Monday. Certain days go in every PBL such as the entry event, driving question, need-to-know, critical friends or some sort of peer review, presentation date , and reflection.
I have found that inserting them into my iCal allows me to easily change the dates of events as I prepare my project. Some other benefits to planning out your calendar digitally are that many times they can be synced to your phone calendar and you have plenty of room to type things, so you can be more detailed in your descriptions. Another huge advantage to a digital calendar versus a desk calendar is that you can share your calendar with others easily using the share feature. This is handy for teachers collaborating with each other as well as when you ask another teacher to critique your project.
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Sharing with another teacher is a great advantage of using iCal/Google calendar.