to develop a learning Experience.
| Intending: | Indicate the focus of the project and the educational objectives to be attained. |
| Defining: | Identify the informational, material and human resources that will be involved. |
| Exploring: | Describe the main ideas and approach that will shape the experience. |
| Suggesting: | Indicate how the situation, information and approach will be presented to the students and what they will present in response. |
| Innovating: | Schedule the process of what you and the students will actually do. |
| Goalgetting: | Decide how the students will assess their efforts and be evaluated. |
| Knowing: | Describe how the experience will be documented, improved and shared witrh others. |
Something very much like a traditional lesson plan will result.
General Principles for Developing a Learning Experience
Educational content in all activities, sessions and projects should be structured to maximize
natural learning.
| The following guidelines are helpful: | |
| 1. | Motivating Situation: Every project should begin from a context interesting to the children to whom it is addressed, one they would like to understand, know about or participate in. |
| 2. | Clear goals for the child: There should always be clear and worthwhile goals, preferably of the child's own choosing, to motivate and energize their effort. |
| 3. | Opportunities to fail: Goal oriented activities should be structured to allow the child to make mistakes or to do something that has a bad consequence in ways that they can learn from. |
| 4. | Consequences of failure: The consequences of a mistake or bad choice should be illustrated, quantified or dramatized when they occur and an explanation should be provded regarding why they are wrong and how they could be corrected. |
| 5. | Corrective options:The child should have choices of what to do to address their mistake:
 Try it over again to better understand their options and what they could do.
Get more information or ask questions to learn more about the situation.
Get advice, coaching or help to learn why they are wrong and how to fix it.
Learn what others did to see what mistakes are common and like their own. |
| 6. | Reinforcement: To reinforce learning and recall, both success and failure should be acknowledged by images and information that are both memorable and meaningful to the child. Where possible images and symbols should be used during evaluation, reflection and related future activities to strenghten recall. |
| 7. | Challenges: To reward success and encourage further learning, higher challenges that enable the child to apply what they have learned should be provided at a level appropriate to the child's achievement (based on automated evaluation of success and error rates.) |
At appropriate moments additional information should be introduced into the learning experience using instructional strategies such as scaffolding, referencing, comparing, presenting, demonstrating, incidental learning, and reminding to expand the child's knowledge of the experience
Pratical Actions During Project Development
Outline your project.
Develop a detailed script or storyboard for each situation and activity that should occur.
Check your script is to see if it really will cover the information and behavior you want.
Develop, organize and refine the materials and process involved.
Plan how you will introduce and conduct the actual learning experience.
Test your material and approach with children, parents and teachers.
Consider how you will evaluate the learning experience.
Consider how you will document and report what was accomplished.