OVERVIEW

FOOD: "JUST GROW IT" includes a supplementary compendium of teaching-learning activities that are designed to enhance students' thinking and reasoning skills. The desired outcome of the compendium is for students to make sound decisions and choices in their adult lives that will lead to healthy individuals, communities, and environments. The contexts of the activities are relevant to the real world concern for sustainable production of food.

Teachers from various disciplines are invited to use the activities in an integrated manner with their content and/or to join other teachers in presenting the activities or their extensions as part of team or thematic teaching.

GOALS

The overall goal as stated earlier is for students to make sound decisions and choices in their adult lives that lead to healthy individuals, communities, and environments. This goal is directly related to the skills of "communicating, reasoning, and investigating which characterize a health-literate person." (Health Content Standards, Department of Education, State of Hawaii. August 1999, p.1)

In support of the overall goal, the activities were designed to address the four General Learner Outcomes of the Department of Education:

· The ability to be responsible for one's own learning.
· The understanding that it is essential for human beings to work together.
· The ability to be involved in complex thinking and problem solving.
· The ability to recognize and produce quality performance and quality products.

CONTENT STANDARDS

The activities address the content standards from Health Education, which are listed below. (See Appendix A for the Benchmarks.)

· Students comprehend concepts related to health promotion and disease prevention.
· Students access valid health information and health-promoting products and services.
· Students practice health-enhancing behaviors and reduce health risks.
· Students analyze the influences of media, culture, technology, and other factors to enhance health.
· Students use interpersonal communication skills to enhance health.
· Students use goal-setting and decision-making skills to enhance health.
· Students advocate for personal, family, and community health.

In each activity, relevant content standards from different subject areas are identified, together with the specific benchmarks. Asterisks indicate that the benchmarks were taken from a grade group below the 9 - 12 group.

LIFE SKILLS

THEMES/FOCI

The instructional activities are grouped around universal themes/concepts, applied to the context of food and sustainability. These themes are:

· Interdependence
· Unity and Diversity
· Wellness - Nutrition
· Wellness - Mental Health
· Safety
· Service and Stewardship
· Sustainability

The activities provide hands-on, authentic experiences for the students. The experiences are, in most cases, applications within a microcosm or subsystem readily recognized by the students. Teachers are encouraged to have students pursue their interest in the themes more in-depth or in other context where they can extrapolate what they have learned. For example, one of the activities has students identify "-cides" in their immediate environment. More in-depth learning can be facilitated in a biological science or chemistry class. Similarly, interested students may want to conduct research on the worldwide use of "-cides" and the current/future impact on the environment.

METHODOLOGY

The instructional activities have been developed based on the assumptions that:

· the learner generally goes through three phases in the learning cycle - Exploring, Processing, and Applying;
· the teacher conducts on-going assessment of the learner's knowledge, skills, and interests.

Therefore, the teacher will determine if an activity will be appropriate as an exploratory activity, one that introduces students to a full-blown lesson on a discipline-specific set of concepts. For example, the activity that has students "create" soil may be an exploratory activity that leads into students doing more extensive soil analysis. On the other hand, the teacher may determine that an activity may be an application of a major lesson taught in his/her class. An example in a science class is the activity on identifying "pests or partners", which may serve as an application of the recently learned scientific classification system, where students are able to understand why certain insects share parts of their scientific names.

The activities vary in difficulty or intensity, but they all reflect the project-based learning model that focuses on a central concept or principle, involves students in problem-solving or other meaningful tasks, allows students to work autonomously to construct their own learning, and culminates in realistic, student-generated products. The materials do not constitute a "curriculum;" they are not designed to be used in a set sequence nor do they constitute a "recipe book" for the teacher.
In designing the activities, we attempted to:

· Make project work central to the instruction, rather than peripheral;
· Hold students accountable to themselves and their peers;
· Incorporate authentic tasks related to the world outside the classroom, which result in valuable products;
· Respond to issues or questions that relate to important topics in today's community and tomorrow's world;
· Provide students with opportunities to learn from experience as they complete presentations, exhibits, and peer assessments;
· Make some impact on life skills and process skills such as self-management, self-assessment, group-process, and problem-solving skills.

FORMAT

Based on trying to design project-based learning experiences, the activities were developed according to the format suggested in Project Based Learning: A Handbook for Middle and High School Teachers, Buck Institute for Education, 1999. Each learning activity is organized around: Content, Driving Questions, Components, Strategies, and Assessment. Teachers may choose to add or delete tasks, depending on their students.

Content: Activities and the projects focus on ideas that are central to concepts within or across subject-matter areas. The activities are constructed to incorporate the Hawaii Content and Performance Standards and related life skills.

Driving Questions: These questions focus student efforts on investigations and other critical learning experiences. The students are challenged to gather information, investigate, or solve a situation. Many of the driving questions have pre-questions that students need to answer (or learn about) before they can get to the main question.

Components: Each activity attempts to have at least three parts. One is the inclusion of generative, constructive tasks. That is, the students need to focus on transforming, creating, and constructing ideas and information. They gather information, solve problems, overcome obstacles, look for resources, and make decisions.

Second, the activity is seldom straight forward. They may take a lot of time, and almost always has many phases and a variety of activities.

Thirdly, the activity tries to involve an authentic task that is modeled after the work of professionals, or business or community organizations. Teachers can enhance the activity by adding to any of these parts.

Supportive Strategies: The activity may describe a variety of learning arrangements. That is, students may work alone, on their own time, or may work in a group. It is hoped that use of the activities will stimulate students working independently, as well as interacting with other students in order to carry out their projects.

Most instruction is not planned as "lectures," but rather occurs as support in the context of other activities. For example, teachers may support student learning by conducting on-the-job training, providing written handouts to accompany a task, and organizing consultations with or talks by experts.

Feedback is an important supportive strategy. The activities provide students the opportunities to learn by doing, but they benefit most by receiving feedback about their accomplishments from both peers and members of the community.

Assessment: Assessment is integral to each activity and emphasizes realistic products. The outcomes are valuable and often reflected in professional activities related to the topic. There are multiple outcomes, including knowledge and skills central to the problem or situation, as well as skills and habits that are essential for success in the world.

Assessment is built in, together with the opportunity to be engaged, to produce meaningful products, and to be successful. Students are made responsible for their own assessments; as such, they are encouraged to coach each other and provide feedback.

Traditional assessment modes are not included since they are common-place in classrooms. What are included are sample rubrics (descriptions of three levels of performance for a given standard) that support the performance tasks in the activities and parallel the Marzano's Dimensions of Learning Model. The rubrics are based on recommendations in Assessing Student Outcomes by Robert J. Marzano, Debra Pickering, and Jay McTighe, 1993.

Project and Concept Evaluation

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FJGI Project Logic Model

Assessment Matrixes:

1. Rot For Your Plot
2. Know Your Pests
3. Five A Day
4. Sense of Caring
5. It's the Dirt
6. Why Organic Growing?
7. Keep It Clean

TEAM Logic Model Framework

Blank Project Logic Model Framework

CheckList

FJGI Compendium

Download the Food: Just Grow It! Compendium [4 MB; 505 pages]

FJGI Project Poster

Download the Food: Just Grow It! Project Poster [84 KB]

Contact Information

For more information, please contact us at: new@ctahr.hawaii.edu.