This week my partner and I formalized our driving question and created a graphic organizer for our project. I really like the way things are coming together for our project. I'm positive that I would be floundering and creating an inferior project if I were working on my own. The ability to collaborate and bounce ideas off one another is fantastic. The fact that we can do this when we are on opposite sides of the country is even cooler.
My partner and I spent our last two weeks working on our assessments for our project and figuring out just how we wanted to assess our student's learning during the project. I worked really hard to put together a general plan for assessment and asked my partner to look at it and make any changes he felt necessary. What happened next shows the importance and benefits of working with a partner or small group. My partner realized that our professor had suggested we use a matrix tool that I had totally forgotten about. He took my initial work and put it into the matrix and made the tweaks he thought were needed. Then I applied the standards we had selected to our assessments in the matrix. What we ended up with was far superior to what I would have turned in if I had been working on my own. We got really good feedback from our professor and are well prepared to move on to the next steps in the design of our project.
My partner and I spent the last two weeks working on managing the process. We had to start creating some of the tools that students will use during the completion of their project. My partner created our products and performances page which detailed all the tasks students would have to complete and provided links to the resources they will need to do so. I worked on the documents students will need to fill out to reflect on their own learning as well as assessing their own group members. I also created the forms that would be used to provide feedback between groups throughout the process of completing the project. Once again working with a partner was extremely helpful. By splitting up the tasks we were able to accomplish more in a shorter amount of time, but we could also give each other feedback on what we were creating. I planned on creating a bulleted list with links to the reflection documents I had created, but pointed out that an example given by our instructor was a table that also listed the audience. I consistently feel like we create a much higher quality project working together than we would on our own.