This lesson is for : Grade 7:
Summary
To motivate middle school students to make better choices, a shift in mindset must occur. In this lesson, students focus on ways to create this mindset change within their school community and begin by reaching out to their peers about the expectations at school. With the desire to change the culture or the expectations within their learning environment, students design Vine-like videos to reinforce school-wide rules, expectations, procedures, and the PBIS initiatives. By infusing the skill author’s purpose with behavior expectations, each group of students make three videos; one for each type of author’s purpose: to persuade, to inform, and to entertain. While exploring their rights and responsibilities as students, the aim is that these clever, technologically-savvy student-created videos will be a catalyst for positive behavior for the second semester. The students house the videos on a website, mirroring the social media site Vine. Students announce a video contest in which the entire school views and polls videos based on the following categories: Best Message, Funniest, Most Purposeful, Most Persuasive, Most Informative, and Most Entertaining. These videos are shared throughout the entire school, while their teacher and ITRT tweet the videos to PBIS Chat in hopes to get responses, resources, or feedback. Students use Padlet to collaborate about ways to further reach out and to support the PBIS initiative.
TIPC Ratings
Research & Information Fluency
Rating: Not Observed – Explanation: Even though traditional research was not the focus of this lesson, students needed to use previously learned skills about ethical use of the internet and copyright materials when choosing images and music to use in their lesson.
Communication & Collaboration
Rating: Approaching – Explanation: Students had to communicate and collaborate together effectively to analyze problem areas within the school and community or aspects of the school and community, decide how they were going to reach others, and collaborated closely to design video scripts, film, act, and edit these videos. Within their partnerships they created tasks and defined their roles.
Critical Thinking & Problem Solving
Rating: Approaching – Explanation: This project required students to think critically about which concepts and behaviors were essential to changing the behavioral culture within the school. Not only did the project center on teaching others positive behaviors and attitudes, but it also supported the school-wide positive behavior supports initiative at the school level. Even though students did not use critical thinking technologies throughout the project, they did use their reflective skills to think deeply about what they were learning. This type of thinking deepened the ownership of the project and the connection that existed between learning, themselves and their work.
Creativity & Innovation
Rating: Ideal – Explanation: Students decided nearly all aspects of this assignment. It was a student-led and student-centered project, which required students to create video scripts and uniquely develop, edit, and add images, sound effects, visual effects, and music to the videos. This project presented an authentic task for the students, as they had to model a problem within their school community and provide a solution they felt would work for their peers. Not only was this project a creative outlet for students, but it provided a buy-in for student expectations and behavior goals.
Student Artifact
Lesson Materials
