Problem Based Learning Project

This Project addresses conservation efforts in the school. Please see below for our driving question, grabber, and activity as well as any attachments for our rubrics and work examples.

Kristen, Amy, Meghan

1) Driving Question

The students will be asked how they can conserve energy in school. It is important for students to learn about conservation efforts as this is a standard, and it will affect their day-to-day lives as well. If students are careless with their resources, it will affect the environment and they will run out of the resources they need.

Driving Question: How can you personally, as well as your school as a whole work together to conserve resources to become a more eco-friendly environment?

This driving question forces the students to think deeper about ways to conserve energy and resources in their school. The students will have to discover ways that the school uses energy and how that affects the environment. This topic is relevant to the students as they are faced with conservation opportunities in their everyday lives such as turning off the lights when they leave the room, or to turn off the computers at the end of the day. Because this topic has to do with their lives, the students will be more interested and invested in this project. By having them think and learn about this in school, it will in turn reflect back on their everyday lives. There are many plausible solutions to conserving energy, and many different ways to actually use these solutions as well - students can mention turning off the lights when they leave a room, turning off computers at the end of the day, not using excessive amounts of paper, etc. All of these ideas and many more are solutions to conserving energy within the school. The DQ provides opportunities for students to evaluate, analyze, present, and defend their solutions because they will have to come up with their own solution on what they think needs to be conserved, how to actually do it, and will present their ideas to the class and listen to other student’s ideas as well.

2) Grabber

The principal will come in and announce to our classroom that we have used up our resources for the month. In order to continue to be an eco friendly community, this classroom’s resources will be shut off for the remainder of the month in order to achieve our monthly conservation goal. This conservation goal has been developed to try and help safeguard our resources for the future and create a more positive atmosphere when it comes to reducing our school’s carbon footprint. This means anything that uses electricity or other sustainable resources can no longer be used, this includes the lights, computers, drinking fountains, bathrooms, etc. Please continue on with class as usual. *Principal leaves*

Teacher: Please bring flashlights for tomorrow's spelling test so you can see.

After a few minutes without using resources and sitting in the dark, announce our project on how to better conserve the school’s resources next month so that they do not have to be put in the same situation as they are currently.

This grabber would capture the students attention as they begin to think about everything that they cannot use for the rest of the month, this will put the students in a frustrating and unusual situation that can capitalize on their high emotion. It will make them begin to think about the school's resources and how they can be conserved so that this outage doesn’t happen again. Students should also begin to consider why conservation is relevant to their community and classroom and how making these changes towards a more sustainable environment can positively or negatively affect their lives. The authenticity of the simulated resource-free classroom will allow the students to have first hand experience of what will happen if they do not properly conserve - just in a more temporary manner. The direct effect of the lack of resources due to lack of conservation will present a correlation between the two aspects and will exhibit how lack of resources will dramatically change their classroom and therefore presents direct relevance.  After we have given them time to think about life without these resources, we will introduce our conservation project.

3) Culminating Activity

For our activity, we will give them an article to read about previous conservation efforts in another school, as well as having them do research on other types of conservation ideas. Additionally, students will go around the school and ask other students/teachers on their opinions on how they can better conserve energy in the school. All of this information will be used when they create their actual presentation.  We are going to have the students break into groups of 5-7 kids and come up with ways to conserve energy in the school so the school does not have to go back to being a resource free classroom.The groups will have to go around the school and take notes on things that can/should be conserved. After this each group will pick 4 main things that they believe will have the biggest impact on conservation in the school and go more in depth with those 4 selected things. The groups will have to consider how often the resource is needed to be in use in the school, how to conserve these 4 specific resources, and finally their overall plan for the school so as to conserve its resources as a whole. After they finish their plan, the groups will also have to create a poster that can be put up around the school to encourage a specific mode of conservation which they focused on in their plan.  After they finish putting together their information found around the school, each group will present their ideas for conservation to the class. After each group presents, we will have the class decide which group has the best plan for conservation of resources in the school, and that group will get to present their ideas to the principal. After the principal hears the final groups presentation, they will implement the plan from the students in the actual school for the rest of the year so as to truly encourage conservation for the students, and hopefully help the students to bring conservation efforts into their own home as well.

This activity is authentic because there is an actual conservation problem going on currently in our world, and it will affect them and their lives in the future. It will help them to think how their day to day actions at home and at school can affect resources. Conservation and “being green” is a large debate today, and this project will help open students’ eyes to the importance of conserving energy.This activity provides students with the opportunity to present and defend their problem solutions because each group will be presenting their ideas to the classroom, and then their ideas will be voted on to see which group is best and which will present their ideas to the principal. This will allow students to defend their ideas as to why their conservation method is the best, and will also give them the opportunity to present not only once, but possibly 2 times. This activity requires collaboration because the conservation solution projects will be done in a group working towards presenting the best idea to the principal. The group will work together to come up with the best ideas possible to create a more sustainable environment at the school, as well as work as a group to defend just why their idea will provide the more impactful solution to be presented to the principal. The students teamwork will result in potentially effective solutions to the problem as well as a strong platform in which to defend their ideas as the best option to be presented and applied to the school’s policies.

(Please See additional attachment for a rubric for our project