Synergy2Learn, #EduCon 2.4, #Synergy8 – Questions are the way points on the path of wisdom

How are you engaging learners in community-issues problem solving? Is your school contemplating and implementing more project-based learning? Do you find it challenging to dig into high-quality PBL? Do you wish you could share stories (like around a campfire) about how to utilize real-world issues to guide instruction, curriculum, pedagogy, and learning? Wish you were [...]

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“This is so next level!” Video Team-Teaching in #Synergy

Twenty-four, eighth-grade synergists are working in six discreet groups – their projects originated from the data-mining of over 300 observation-journal blog posts that they collected. The projects are: Graffiti (is it art, vandalism, both? how can we use it for good?) Nancy Creek (what can we know and understand about the creek that runs through [...]

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Connecting Ideas – Action, Traction, Reaction

In Synergy, a non-departmentalized, non-graded, transdisciplinary, community-issues-problem-solving course, we use blogging as a means to communicate and collaborate on ideas as well as to reflect and to revise thinking. Currently we offer our learners an Action-Traction-Reaction prompt to spur their thinking, reflection, and writing. One of our learners offers this reflection that connects his thinking about [...]

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If not now, then when? If not me, then who? Inspired by Mick Ebeling and #Synergy

Brief context: I co-facilitate a course for eighth graders; the course is called “Synergy.” Synergy is a non-departmentalized, non-graded, transdisciplinary, community-issues-problem-solving course. My teaching and learning partner Jill Gough (@jgough; Experiments in Learning by Doing) and I co-created the course and we are the two adult-learners among twenty-four student-learners. [If you want to know more [...]

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Synergy: Selecting next projects

Our team has over 300 observation journal entries from which to brainstorm questions and projects. See Synergy: Complexity~Simplicity, Collaboration & Brainstorming for the beginning of this work. After Monday’s work in class, our learners were prompted to use a quick-write to reflect on the process of narrowing the project ideas using the idea wall as [...]

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