{"id":12093,"date":"2017-03-20T10:30:47","date_gmt":"2017-03-20T14:30:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/?p=12093"},"modified":"2022-04-13T15:22:06","modified_gmt":"2022-04-13T19:22:06","slug":"what-could-possibly-go-wrong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/what-could-possibly-go-wrong\/","title":{"rendered":"Adventures in #realworldPBL: The Field Trip"},"content":{"rendered":"

What could possibly go wrong?<\/h1>\n

\"what Remember when teaching was simply planning a lecture, shutting the door, and delivering it to students? This may have been easy for the teacher, but it certainly didn\u2019t make for deep and relevant learning for the students. The work of developing project-based, engaging, and personalized learning is much more complex.<\/p>\n

It’s also\u00a0full of uncertainty.\u00a0Let me tell you about a recent field trip I took with students.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

How I thought it would go<\/h2>\n

This field trip was an entry event for an integrated project-based learning unit based on our local museum.<\/p>\n

\"what<\/p>\n

For over 100 years, Proctor was home to the Vermont Marble Company<\/a>.\u00a0At the turn of the 20th century, the Vermont Marble Company\u00a0was the largest corporation in the United States. They produced such buildings and monuments as\u00a0the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, the Jefferson Memorial, and the United States Supreme Court. In my PBL unit, students learn\u00a0how extensive an impact the Vermont Marble Company had on their hometown as well as the surrounding areas.<\/p>\n

Best of all, as part of their PBL, my 8th grade students are\u00a0building exhibits for the museum. So it made sense for them to go take a look at the location. Plus I’d planned a scavenger hunt!<\/p>\n

How it actually went<\/h2>\n

I drove over to the museum ahead of the bus,\u00a0talked to the museum manager and brought my scavenger hunt materials in. After struggling with some logistics, I was ready for the students to arrive.<\/p>\n

After several minutes went by, I wondered: where are the students?<\/p>\n

I went outside expecting to see the bus, but there was no bus in sight. A few minutes later, a second chaperone pulled up and let me know they were getting a late start. As she was leaving, they were just wrapping up taking attendance. We stood and talked in the parking lot for a few minutes. Then a few minutes more. \u00a0Then we began to wonder why the bus was taking so long.<\/p>\n

We waited another five minutes. Then she headed back to school to see what was wrong.<\/p>\n

A few minutes later she came back and said,<\/p>\n

“You’re not going to believe this…”<\/h2>\n

The bus had broken down in the driveway of the school. The kids were walking to the museum.<\/p>\n

Ten minutes later the kids began appearing,\u00a0a few hundred feet down the road from the museum.<\/p>\n

A little background on the Vermont Marble Museum: it’s right next to a set of train tracks. Sometimes trains, meant to be passing the museum, idle in place out front …for up to an hour.<\/p>\n

And yes, just as\u00a0my students\u00a0approached\u00a0the parking lot, the railroad-crossing bell began to ring. I held my breath.<\/p>\n

\"what
Entrance to the Vermont Marble Museum, sans idling train.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A train appeared, lumbering down the tracks towards the museum, and squealing to a halt out front. I stared.<\/p>\n

However, after a few minutes, the train backed up just enough to stop the bell and my students and I\u00a0sprinted across the tracks.<\/p>\n

(What happened to our\u00a0bus is still a mystery. It apparently got fixed while we were still at the museum but never came to pick us up. The ultimate result? Students walking back to school, getting safely inside\u00a0within seconds of a huge downpour.)<\/p>\n

Now for the awesome part.<\/h2>\n

Once we got the kids in, I reminded them to be SUPER careful because some of the sculptures in the building have six-figure price tags.<\/p>\n

I\u00a0unveiled my\u00a0scavenger hunt, and let students know that\u00a0the first, second, and third place teams would win Curtis Cash.<\/p>\n

Let me explain: in my classroom, we have a mock economy where students have classroom management jobs and get paid in Curtis Cash. They can use their Curtis Cash for classroom luxuries (healthy snacks, or renting the use of a beanbag chair for a week) or to pay fines (for being tardy or unprepared).<\/p>\n

That was all students\u00a0needed to hear! They were off and running.<\/p>\n

Now for the official launch<\/h3>\n

After the scavenger hunt,\u00a0I brought students back\u00a0to the area where they would be setting up their exhibits. I asked them for a drum-roll (they obliged — as they always do — by drumming on their legs) and told that our Marble Museum PBL was officially kicking off. I asked them if they thought this was a pretty neat place, and I got the most enthusiastic 8th grade “Yes!” I’ve gotten so far this year.<\/p>\n

Then I asked them if they wanted to learn more about all of this and got an even more enthusiastic “Yes”!<\/p>\n

I showed them where their projects were going to be, told them to start thinking about what they saw today and that we’d be starting the PBL in a couple of weeks. And then we headed back to school, but not before almost all of them asked if they could wander around for another few minutes!<\/p>\n

What we learned<\/h2>\n

Yes, it was a lot of work. And yes, some things went wrong. Yes, it took me out of the comfortable predictability of my classroom.<\/p>\n

And YES, it was absolutely worth it!<\/p>\n

What’s the most extraordinary thing that’s happened to you with a field trip?<\/h2>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Standard 3-part story-driven post: 1) what it is, 2) what it looks like in a school, 3) how to do it in your school<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[505],"tags":[634],"class_list":["post-12093","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-project-based-learning","tag-proctor-high-school"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12093","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12093"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12093\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31247,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12093\/revisions\/31247"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12093"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12093"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12093"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}