1. Doing Business in Birmingham Virtual Classroom Tour – VCT
Text
Global Forum 2012
Prague November 28 – December 1

2. Doing Business in Birmingham
Educator(s)
Pauline Roberts and Rick Joseph
School
Birmingham Covington School (BCS) is a 3-8 School offering a choice in educational structure and philosophy for Birmingham Public Schools residents seeking a rigorous academic challenge. It's science and technology emphasis is based in Science for All Americans: Project 2061.
School Website
Content/Subject Areas
Language Arts, Science, Social Studies, Digital and Media Literacy,
Environmental Science, 21st Century Skills, Technology and ICT
Age/Grade level
5/6
Project Objectives
Students will learn:
about sustainable practices and how to effect change within their community
how technology tools can enable them to make authentic connections beyond the classroom
to synthesize their learning and generate creative solutions to real world problems

3. Design of the Learning Environment
Project Description
Design of the Learning Environment
Doing Business in Birmingham is a Sciracy project. Sciracy aims to promote scientific literacy, or the knowledge and understanding of scientific concepts and processes required for personal decision making, participation in civic and cultural affairs, and economic productivity. Students learn to ask, find, or determine answers to questions derived from curiosity about everyday experiences, and to describe, explain, and articulate their thoughts about the world around them. We want students to synthesize their learning and challenge them to generate creative solutions to real world problems. After learning about sustainability in business, our students took to the streets of downtown Birmingham, armed with informational flyers and brochures they had created, to interview and educate local business owners about sustainability. They have visited over ninety establishments to date.
The primary purpose of Doing Business in Birmingham was to create opportunities for interdisciplinary learning to take place, specifically in science and literacy. We team taught 54 students and much of the content was driven by student interest and curiosity in sustainability and what that looked like in a real world context. We promoted student initiative, autonomy and creativity while facilitating critical thinking, questioning, interaction and collaboration. Our plan was very loose as the students became more involved in the design process. Students continuously reflected upon and synthesized their learning and evaluated each other’s work critically to provide constructive feedback. Students become motivated to build knowledge by becoming involved in the design of process, content, tasks, products, rubrics and assessments.
“The thing I enjoyed most about this project is how much freedom we have. I like how we have to set up our own field trips; and how we do all of the work, not the teachers, but all of us as students.” Mae Kennedy, 6th Grade Student.
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4. Evidence of Learning
“I think we have changed business owners' perspective about sustainability by helping them understand the meaning and concepts of sustainability.”
Zoha Siddiqui, 6th Grade Student.
To document and evidence their learning with the community our students created a wiki:
The Business Flyer was designed and created by the students to promote their project. They posted these in store windows, on community bulletin boards and all over the local community. The students used Mobitags deliberately because they are more colorful, eye-catching and original, increasing their chances to connect and communicate with the community.
The sustainability brochure is an informational pamphlet the students created collaboratively to share with local businesses. It provides information about how businesses can become more sustainable by making small changes in operations, transportation, purchasing etc.. Creating flyers and brochures enabled students to make authentic connections beyond the classroom and forced them to demonstrate their learning in a succinct and meaningful way.
Students chose to make Cliplets to capture the most significant moment from their trip to Birmingham. Each group selected a moment where business owners engaged them in conversation or accepted a flyer. This was a truly unique way for the students to identify and evaluate their own success at communicating their knowledge and understanding.
The students wanted to include a Photosynth to give visitors to their site a feel for the local community. Making a Photosynth required the students to stop and take stock of a place they visit every day. The Photosynth opened their eyes to the scope of the problem they were trying to solve as they had never previously noticed how many businesses there were. It enhanced their understanding of the need for sustainability. This link includes an example of both a Photosynth and a Cliplet.
Students were involved in the creation of team and wiki rubrics which they used to assess their own and each others work.
At the end of the project students also wrote detailed reflections about what they had learned.

5. Knowledge Building & Critical Thinking
Extended Learning Beyond the Classroom
Our students learned about sustainability in business by conducting first hand research, organizing their own field trips to large businesses like football stadiums, theaters and hotels in Detroit. They evaluated their findings and as a group conjectured that smaller businesses may not be as sustainable as larger ones. They decided to educate smaller business owners in their local community about sustainable practices. This required them to apply the knowledge they had learned in Detroit and construct a whole new procedure to build a campaign to change the culture and climate of a community. Connecting their knowledge of sustainability and their knowledge of persuasive and informational writing skills they collaborated to develop a wiki, brochures, and flyers as a means to promote their project and to communicate their new found knowledge about sustainability to others in a way that would encourage them to adopt sustainable practices.
Students have learned that in order to be effective agents of change within their community they require key skills: the ability to identify problems, generate creative solutions, to collaborate productively, the ability to reflect and evaluate and communicate articulately. They have learned about how to be successful leaders and innovators in the 21st century.
The students chose to study local businesses to determine their ability to provide for the needs and wants of future generations because sustainability is a real world issue. The entire project was envisioned, designed and created by them. They organized their own mini field trips to businesses and interviewed business owners. Problem solving activities included how to identify and contact businesses, how to communicate with them effectively, how to assess sustainability and how to promote the idea of sustainability .For each problem the students generated solutions, created products and engineered the bridge between their knowledge and goals and the local community. They currently have 20 businesses on their honor roll and continue to reach out to local business owners. Businesses continue to add to their repertoire of sustainable practices in order to gain more stars, and now businesses are approaching us to be included on the honor roll. The students included the ICT resources they created on their wikipage and invite other students to replicate the project in their own communities.

6. Collaboration
Cutting Edge Use of Technology for Learning
Students were required to collaborate to make substantive decisions together about the nature, purpose and direction of this project. Students were the architects, resolving important issues regarding the process of their campaign, the content of the wiki, flyers and brochures, and the quality, design and impact of their final products. Much time was spent teaching students how to be politely critical and how to reach consensus.
Students were organized into groups and given descriptions of specific roles: Project Manager, Communications Manager, Materials Manager, Lead Photographer and Lead Videographer. They were required to collaborate within their groups to brainstorm, design and make decisions about their part of the project. They were also required to collaborate with other students with the same role from other groups to support each other, make decisions and help each other with technology. Their collaboration was interdependent and they have learned much about themselves and how their personal choices and actions impact the success of the whole.
Throughout the project students were called upon to reflect and evaluate their own and each other’s performance as team members and they were involved in the design of rubrics to measure their success, both individually and as teams.
Digital literacy is a valuable component of Sciracy and this project incorporated a focus upon enhancing student technology skills. Technology was used to research, to communicate and share learning, to create products, to solve problems, to encourage risk taking, to enhance knowledge and understanding and to connect with a specific audience in an authentic way. Students were exposed to new technologies and were required to work through challenges, and then evaluate and reflect upon their usefulness. We aim to keep adding tools to our students tool belts so that they can make educated choices about which tool is most appropriate for any given task.
After much discussion and debate, the students decided on all of the technology tools used in this project themselves. Their decisions were based upon tools that would have the most impact for a given purpose. The ICT products they designed and created supported their own knowledge construction. They could not have connected and communicated with the community on the level that they did without the technology tools.

7. Educator as Innovator and Change Agent
Rick Joseph and Pauline Roberts have been teaching partners for five years and have worked hard to find ways to collaborate and educate and engage students in authentic and meaningful ways. Sciracy is a product of their unique collaboration and has been adopted as a 5/6 Grade core class at Birmingham Covington School.
This project has encouraged other teachers to take risks and several colleagues will be working on Project Based Learning this year. The project not only changed the climate and culture in their school, it also impacted the wider community.
They are members of both the school and district leadership teams and this year they are proud to be developing and hosting Professional Development sessions that utilize ITL research and help teachers develop lessons and units of study that integrate technology and 21st Century Skills. They have presented their projects at The World Future Society Conference,2011 and Learn Now Conference,2012 and National Character Conference,2012. They are currently being requested to meet with curriculum administrators from other districts to help design and implement 21st Century teaching and learning.
Pauline Roberts was named Birmingham Teacher of the Year 2011 and writes a Blog inspired by her experiences with the Global Forum in
She is also a Microsoft Innovative Educator Trainer and hosts training sessions to educators about how to integrate Microsoft Technologies into the curriculum. .Her students have been recognized for their projects that demonstrate their ability to be agents of change in the Siemens We Can Change the World Challenge.
Rick Joseph is a National Board Certified teacher and is currently on the steering of the committee of the Network of Michigan Educators. He has presented to the State Board of Education and members of the Michigan Senate and House Committee about innovative project based learning. He has also presented about how to bring the Common Core State Standards alive in Reading Work shop at the NCTE conference 2011 and 2012.