Chapter 2 Reading Reflection

The entire theme of chapter two emphasized the importance of "working together." This is something that I truly struggle with. I really dislike doing group projects-it isn't the people that I work with, but at this stage in our college lives, everyone has something else going on and finding meeting times outside of class is difficult. In high school, there was the problem of getting paired with others outside of my social class that might not have liked me or vise versa. However, I think that working with groups like how the book talks about will be much easier because everyone has similar schedules as far as work goes. I think that working together collaboratively has some obvious benefits that the book points out.

Something that I think this book talks about that I disagree with is that doing project based learning within the classroom is ineffective unless the entire faculty is in on it as well. I think that there are so many ways in which to involve PBL within the classroom. At first, one might have to be creative in order to get the desired results, but I don't think that it is nearly as difficult as the book outlines it to be.

There are also a few wording things that I really dislike in this book. I feel like this chapter framed students as commodities instead of human beings. On two pages, the authors talked about how to "capitalize on the wisdom of the group." I feel like a much better word could have been used. Capitalizing on children's wisdom sounds sinister. I would have instead phrased it as: "Integrating children's wisdom to make the project more productive and rewarding." There were quite a few other things that I think could have been phrased differently. I think that this chapter is all about the projects and not about the children, which I hope will change as the chapters go on. We aren't teaching subject matter or projects or whatever it may be. We are teaching CHILDREN and I think the further we stray from that, the worse off we will be.

I really did enjoy the last part of this chapter, though. The book provides some really good websites and great ideas for which to utilize project based learning within the classroom. What I would personally like to see is more examples of how this works in the classroom instead of just explaining why. It has become quite obvious that PBL is beneficial to children, but with just the framework for being able to explain why it is effective, we are ill-equipped with good ideas from which to base our PBL adventures on. I like the "beg, borrow, steal" theory that a lot of teachers use. I think that we need to be studying more examples of how teachers have used this in their classroom.

Bye.