In the chic suburb where I teach, students pride themselves on their health and fitness. Most play several sports (or one sport on several teams), fit easily into their Lululemon leggings, eat from Whole Foods, and consider themselves to be in tiptop shape. Ask them how much sleep they got last night, though, and things start to look a tad worrisome. Maybe even shocking. Many get about as much sleep as I did when I returned to work from maternity leave. Not a pretty sight. "Comment dit-on tired?" is one of their first questions in the fall. I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that our student body shares the high rates of anxiety and depression that plague many high-performing suburban schools across the US. What to do? Our district partnered with Challenge Success at Stanford to promote student wellbeing and redefine success beyond test scores across the community. Part of the process involved surveying students and parents on topics such as screen time, family dinners, and hours spent sleeping. Our principal shared the data with staff, and as soon as I saw it, I knew that it would have a place in my current unit on la qualité de vie. Take this tidbit: Bref, this is a relevant topic of personal concern. Studying the relationship between screen time and sleep provided students with new information that they did not have in L1, and challenged their rosy self-assessments in a productive manner. Although I’d explored this topic with students in the past, I was ready to rewrite it as a PBL unit this year thanks to inspiration from Laura Sexton’s PBL on self-improvement, and in-district support from PBL Works trainer Eric White. Many authentic resources for this 10 day mini-unit are pinned here. Since PBL advocates opening the unit with an "entry event" meant to get students asking questions about the topic, I collected and shared a bank of curated data and infographics on the topic for this purpose. I was relieved to learn that an entry event doesn't have to be a red-carpet event with an outside guest speaker - a printed set or Padlet of interesting data will do just fine! Although I already had access to school data thanks to Challenge Success, I also had my students and their ePals take a survey that my students wrote so that we could compare ourselves to ePals in France. I can’t say enough about the data tables and charts spit out by Google Forms. They allow students to compare themselves as individuals to their peers, themselves to their ePals, and their US peers to those in France. Students dug into the data and completed a "see, think, wonder" activity about it (see page 1). This thinking routine is appropriate for Novice High/Intermediate Low language learners and honors the question-asking focus of PBL while keeping students in the target language. From here, students completed a rather detailed writing task where they examined different parts of the data and wrote observations using scaffolds that I provided (see pages 2 & 3). I also had students do a gallery walk among various infographics that I’d curated for the course. They worked in groups to identify surprises, key terms, and questions. Posting infographics in plastic sleeves and giving students dry erase markers allowed for some movement and level-appropriate reading. While we were diving into the topic, I scaffolded students’ language skills by providing activities like a card-sorting task where students tried to show causality among various factors by connecting terms with arrows. Thanks to Lisa Shepard for teaching me about this activity! Here are a few examples: Students also completed a crossword puzzle game with relevant terms that plays a bit like Taboo, which I learned from Lisa Shepard (see her helpful explanation here). I gave students scaffolded practice asking and answering questions about this topic by having them play “ask, ask, switch” with teacher-written questions about screen time and sleep. Eventually these built toward an interpersonal assessment with some role-playing using the TALK rubric. See here for more on how I assess students' interpersonal speaking in small groups at one station where I sit, listen in, and provide feedback. Having established various sleep and screen time problems, students were ready to start looking for solutions. They used the existing bank of authentic resources to identify possible solutions to their identified problems (see page 4), and spent nearly a week testing out various strategies at home for homework. Students were thrilled to have assignments of their choosing such as: take a 20 minute nap, take a hot bath, or go for a walk after school. Each day in class, they shared what they’d tried in pairs and then journaled on its results using a scaffolded formula that I provided (see page 5). This gave them more opportunities to narrate in the past, a fairly new skill, while creating valuable findings to incorporate into their projects: Once students had tried several strategies, they began to create their toolkits for their ePals. Since time was short, I only provided a few options for the format: letter, video, slideshow, or infographic. I made extensive use of station work to get students writing drafts and then self- and peer-assessing those draft efforts, thanks to inspiration from Megan Budke. Here is a sample project (also a slideshow sample here) and the rubric that I used to score projects (see pages 7-8): Students’ reflections on this project indicated their interest in the topic and moreover, their appreciation for a teacher showing her investment in students’ wellbeing. Et voilà...my second PBL is a wrap. Read about the first one, on tiny houses, here. As always, I welcome your questions, suggestions, and shared resources that will support my continued growth!
11 Comments
Elodie
10/19/2019 09:05:09 pm
Thank you very much for sharing. I will be adapting this unit for my class. Do you have your Card Sorting Task cards linked somewhere? Merci
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Hillary
6/1/2020 10:21:31 am
Bonjour,
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6/1/2020 02:45:13 pm
Bonjour Hillary! Thanks for reaching out. I teach this unit to French 8 students with an Intermediate Low target. Depending on your performance target, you could adapt this unit up or down. Bon courage!
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12/19/2022 01:15:32 pm
İnstagram takipçi satın almak istiyorsan tıkla.
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1/4/2023 04:05:14 pm
100 tl deneme bonusu veren siteleri öğrenmek istiyorsan tıkla.
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Kerri Simeone
4/10/2023 04:01:25 pm
Hi Rebecca!
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Who's that dame?Middle school French teacher obsessed with building students' proficiency via thematic units & authentic materials. |