Alright! The new school year begins next month and I’m totally prepped for the group term project assignment for the second semester.
What, second semester? Yes, I said second semester. I’m teaching at a private high school in Beijing, China. I will have three 12th grade classes with students who flunked out of the school’s other high school sections (Australian curriculum, American curriculum, British curriculum, and a couple of others). The idea is to get them prepared for a foundation year at a university overseas. Part of the curriculum I’ve designed for this year is a group term project each term. At the end of last semester, all of us teachers had to write a “preview document” for the upcoming semester. I went above and beyond and did one for the whole year. (That’s because I was already writing one for the year when officialdom decided to require it.) Let me show you the preview I gave the students for the second semester. (I’m using the multi-quote function because I can’t manage to get tabbing to work in Discourse.)
Group Project: This project is divided into two parts: Creation and Experience.
Creation. Each class will make an Escape Room. You will choose the theme as a class. To make it more interesting, you should make the challenges or puzzles using skills learned from all of your classes this semester. Every member of the class must have a task assigned by the class leader. The required assignments are: class leader, recorder, testing team (2 or 3 people), citation coordinator (1 or 2 people), reporting team (at least 3 but no more than 5 students). The other assignments are as decided by your class and leader. Some students, depending on the size of the class, may have more than one assignment.
Experience . Your class will choose one of the other two classes’ escape rooms to challenge. Each person must contribute to the class’s endeavour to escape quickly. You will have a small number of lifelines (clues) to help you if you need it. The reporting team will give a report on your class’s creation and experience. The format of this report is up to your class, but must include citations of information you converted into a challenge, and the appropriate vocabulary and register for your audience. Your reporting team should also discuss which of the 21st Century skills your class used in each part of the project.
Marking . Each part of this project is marked separately. Each student’s overall mark for each part includes the group mark and also a peer evaluation (done as an on-line survey) of the student’s contribution.
Purpose . This project is to help you work together as a group and allow each of you to use your innate skills and talents to assist your group in meeting an objective in a specified time. When you are at university and also in whatever job you have after you finish university, you will find yourself working in groups. Collaboration is one of the key 21st Century skills.
That’s for the second semester project. For the first semester’s group project, this is what I have thus far.
Then we have a group project. Each of the classes in G12 this semester is going to work as an entire group: G12-1 is one group, G12-2 is another group, and G12-3 is the final group. Again, this will be a contest. Sadly, I cannot give automatic 100% to the top three classes. The project will be graded on a curve, which means the best class project gets 100% and the other two classes’ scores are adjusted accordingly. I will give you a broad subject, and you will then, as a class, choose something that is really representative of that subject, a narrower focus. How you present the information is up to the class. You will be conducting research, reporting your findings (“telling a story”), and showing your references/citations.
The reason I mentioned contest is because the individual term project is creating an infographic and the top three infographics as judged by the other teachers automatically get 100%. Also, the first semester’s theme is I have a story to tell. (The second semester’s them is Disability Awareness.)
The first semester’s group project is not divided into two parts like the second semester’s. What required jobs would you suggest for the first semester’s project other than class leader, recorder, research team, citation coordinators, and reporting team?
Another thing I’m looking for is mighty good and free Gantt chart software. This has to have multi-language function since all of my students are Chinese.
I hope I’m clear here on what I’m looking for. And thanks in advance to anyone who makes any suggestions.
