An integral part of young children’s lives, and that being able to play, both alone and with others, is a hallmark of children’s healthy development. Play enhances children’s physical, social/emotional, and creative growth, and we daily assess this growth by observing children at play.
 Play Description:
  1.  Pleasurable Play: An enjoyable and pleasurable activity. Play sometimes includes frustrations, challenges, and fears; however enjoyment is a key feature.
  2. Symbolic Play: The play has meaning to the player that is often not evident to the educator.
  3. Active Play: Requires action, either physical, verbal or mental engagement with materials, people, ideas or the environment.
  4. Voluntary Play: Freely chosen, however, players can also be invited or prompted to play.
  5. Process Oriented Play: A means unto itself and players may not have an end or goal in sight.
  6. Self-Motivating Play: Its own reward to the player.
 Play Based Learning Process: 
  1. A daily schedule that included active indoor and outdoor physical play
  2. Integration of music, movement, and creative expression
  3. Adult-child interactions that modeled moderate to high levels of physical activity
 Play Environment Planning:
  1. Physical Environment: Consider how you will construct and present activities and materials so they are arranged in provoking and inviting ways to encourage exploration, learning and inquiry.
  2. Social and Emotional Environment: Children need secure, warm and trusting relationships so they are confidently supported in their explorations and risk taking.
  3. Intellectual Environment: There are times to leave children to play freely and times for intentional conversation, a well-placed question or query that will extend children’s learning.
  4. Temporal Environment: Children need large blocks of time to develop play themes and ideas.
 PROBLEM-BASED LEARNING: 
A student-centered pedagogy in which students learn about a subject through the experience of solving an open-ended problem. Students learn both thinking strategies and domain knowledge. 
Problem-Based Learning Objectives: 
  1. Skill Development: To help students develop flexible knowledge, effective problem-solving skills, self-directed learning, effective collaboration skills and intrinsic motivation.
  2. Active Learning: Problem-based learning is a style of active learning.
  3. Working in Groups: Through this students identify what they already know, what they need to know, and how and where to access new information that may lead to the resolution of the problem.
  4. Independent Learning: The role of the instructor (known as the tutor in PBL) is to facilitate learning by supporting, guiding, and monitoring the learning process. 
 Problem-Based Learning Models: 
  1. Student-Centered Learning
  2. Learning is done in Small Student Groups, ideally 6-10 people
  3. Facilitators or Tutors guide the students rather than teach
  4. A Problem forms the basis for the organized focus of the group and stimulates learning
  5. The problem is a vehicle for the development of problem-solving skills. It stimulates the cognitive process.
  6. New knowledge is obtained through Self-Directed Learning (SDL).
 Problem-Based Learning Benefits: 
  1. Addresses the need to promote lifelong learning through the process of inquiry and constructivist learning.
  2. Learners are presented with a problem and through discussion within their group, activate their prior knowledge.
  3. Within their group, they develop possible theories or hypotheses to explain the problem. Together they identify learning issues to be researched. They construct a shared primary model to explain the problem at hand. Facilitators provide a scaffold, which is a framework on which students can construct knowledge relating to the problem.
  4. After the initial teamwork, students work independently in a self-directed study to research the identified issues.
  5. The students re-group to discuss their findings and refine their initial explanations based on what they learned.
 PROJECT-BASED LEARNING: 
A teaching method in which students gain knowledge and skills by working for an extended period of time to investigate and respond to an engaging and complex question, problem, or challenge.
 Project Based Learning Elements: 
  1. Key Knowledge, Understanding, and Success Skills - The project is focused on student learning goals, including standards-based content and skills such as critical thinking/problem solving, collaboration, and self-management. 
  2. Challenging Problem or Question - The project is framed by a meaningful problem to solve or a question to answer, at the appropriate level of challenge.
  3. Sustained Inquiry - Students engage in a rigorous, extended process of asking questions, finding resources, and applying information.
  4. Authenticity - The project features real-world context, tasks, and tools, quality standards, or impact – or speaks to students’ personal concerns, interests, and issues in their lives.
  5. Student Voice & Choice - Students make some decisions about the project, including how they work and what they create.
  6. Reflection - Students and teachers reflect on learning, the effectiveness of their inquiry and project activities, the quality of student work, obstacles and how to overcome them.
  7. Critique & Revision - Students give, receive, and use feedback to improve their process and products.
  8. Public Product - Students make their project work public by explaining, displaying and/or presenting it to people beyond the classroom. 
PLACE-BASED LEARNING: 
Place-Based Learning immerses students in local heritage, cultures, landscapes, opportunities, and experiences, using these as a foundation for the study of language arts, mathematics, social studies, science and other subjects across the curriculum. It emphasizes learning through participation in service projects for the local school and/or community. 
Place-Based Learning Objectives: 
  1. Seeks to help communities through employing students and school staff in solving community problems.
  2. Differs from a conventional text and classroom-based education in that it understands students' local community as one of the primary resources for learning.
  3. Promotes learning that is rooted in what is local—the unique history, environment, culture, economy, literature, and art of a particular place--that is, in students’ own “place” or immediate schoolyard, neighborhood, town or community. 
Place-Based Learning Goals:
  1. Student Achievement: It boosts students' engagement, academic achievement, and sense of personal efficacy as stewards of their local environment and community. It also can re-energize teachers.
  2. Community Social and Economic Vitality: It forges strong ties between local social and environmental organizations and their constituencies in the schools and community, which helps to improve a quality of life and economic vitality.
  3. Ecological Integrity: Through project-based learning, students make tangible contributions to resolving local environmental issues and conserving local environmental quality. 
Place-Based Learning Principles: 
  1. Learning takes place on-site in the schoolyard, and in the local community and environment.
  2. Learning focuses on local themes, systems, and content.
  3. Learning is personally relevant to the learner.
  4. Learning experiences contribute to the community’s vitality and environmental quality and support the community’s role in fostering global environmental quality.
  5. Learning is supported by strong and varied partnerships with local organizations, agencies, businesses, and government.
  6. Learning is interdisciplinary.
  7. Learning experiences are tailored to the local audience.
  8. Learning is grounded in and supports the development of a love for one’s place.
  9. Local learning serves as the foundation for understanding and participating appropriately in regional and global issues.
  10. Place-based education programs are integral to achieving other institutional goals. 
Place-Based Learning Characteristics: 
  1. Learning takes students out of the classroom and into the community and natural environment.
  2. Projects have consequences; students' contributions make a difference to the environmental quality and to the well-being of communities.
  3. Place-based projects are integrated back into classroom lessons.
  4. Students want to learn in order to apply their knowledge to solving real problems.
  5. Students play an active role in defining and shaping projects.
  6. Students collaborate with local citizens, organizations, agencies, businesses, and government. Working alongside community members, students help make plans that shape the future of their social, physical, and economic environments.
  7. Students are encouraged to view their community as an ecosystem and to understand the relationships and processes necessary to support healthy living.
  8. By mapping their school and its surrounding community, students create visual representations of the systems nested within larger systems that constitute their local place in its wholeness. 
PROFICIENCY-BASED LEARNING: 
Proficiency-based learning refers to systems of instruction, assessment, grading, and academic reporting that are based on students demonstrating that they have learned the knowledge and skills they are expected to learn as they progress through their education. 
Proficiency-Based Learning Objectives: 
  1. To ensure that more students learn what they are expected to learn.
  2. To provide educators with more detailed or fine-grained information about student learning progress, which can help them more precisely identify academic strengths and weakness, as well as the specific concepts and skills students have not yet mastered.
  3. For educators and parents to know more precisely what specific knowledge and skills students have acquired or may be struggling with.
  4. To entail significant changes in how a school operates and teaches students, affecting everything from the school’s educational philosophy and culture to its methods of instruction, testing, grading, reporting, promotion, and graduation.
  5. To determine whether students have achieved proficiency, including strategies such as demonstrations of learning, learning pathways, personal learning plans, portfolios, rubrics, and capstone projects, to name just a few. 
How Proficiency-Based Learning Works: 
  1. All students must demonstrate what they have learned before moving on.
  2. Teachers are very clear about what students need to learn.
  3. Common, consistent methods are used to evaluate student learning.
  4. While learning expectations are fixed, teachers and students have more flexibility. 
Proficiency-Based Learning Principles: 
  1. All learning expectations are clearly and consistently communicated to students and families.
  2. Student achievement is evaluated against common learning standards and performance expectations that are consistently applied to all students, regardless of whether they are enrolled in traditional courses, pursuing alternative learning pathways or receiving academic support.
  3. All forms of assessment are standards-based and criterion-referenced, and success is defined by the achievement of expected standards, not relative measures of performance or student-to-student comparisons.
  4. Formative assessments evaluate learning progress during the instructional process and are not graded; formative assessment information is used to inform instructional adjustments, practices, and support.
  5. Summative assessments evaluate learning achievement and are graded; summative assessment scores record a student’s level of proficiency at a specific point in time.
  6. Grades are used to communicate learning progress and achievement to students and families; grades are not used as forms of punishment or control.
  7. Academic progress and achievement are monitored and reported separately from work habits, character traits, and behaviors such as attendance and class participation.
  8. Students are given multiple opportunities to retake assessments or improve their work when they fail to meet expected standards.
  9. Students can demonstrate learning progress and achievement in multiple ways through differentiated assessments, personalized learning options, or alternative learning pathways.
  10. Students are given opportunities to make important decisions about their learning, which includes contributing to the design of learning experiences and personalized learning pathways. 
PBL Resources: 
  1. Edmodo: https://spotlight.edmodo.com/product/based-learning-16-pbl-play-problem-project-place-proficiency-based-learning--384817/
  2. Problem-Based Learning: https://spotlight.edmodo.com/product/pbl-problem-based-learning--384801/
  3. Project-Based Learning: http://www.edutopia.org/project-based-learning
  4. Place-Based Learning: http://www.edutopia.org/blogs/tag/place-based-learning
  5. Better List of Ideas for PBL: https://spotlight.edmodo.com/product/better-list-of-ideas-for-pbl--384905/
  6. Social Media PBL Ideas for Collaboration and Social Skills:https://spotlight.edmodo.com/product/social-media-pbl-ideas-for-collaboration-and-social-skills--388533/
  7. Creative Problem Solving: https://spotlight.edmodo.com/product/creative-problem-solving--351913/
  8. Guide to Project-Based Learning:https://spotlight.edmodo.com/product/guide-to-project-based-learning--382969/
  9. BIE-Project-Based Learning: https://spotlight.edmodo.com/product/bie-project-based-learning--383805/
  10. Tools & Apps for Engaging Students in Creative Drawing Projects:https://spotlight.edmodo.com/product/tools-apps-for-engaging-students-in-creative-drawing-projects--384253/
  11. Blended Learning Ideas: 8 Strategies and 3 Cool Projects:https://spotlight.edmodo.com/product/blended-learning-ideas-8-strategies-and-3-cool-projects--385129/
  12. Playing Creative Problem Solving:https://spotlight.edmodo.com/product/playing-creative-problem-solving--380913/
  13. Playing - Caption This: https://spotlight.edmodo.com/product/playing-caption-this--380917/
  14. PBL Planning: http://www.edutopia.org/blogs/tag/pbl-planning
  15. PBL Assessment: http://www.edutopia.org/blogs/tag/pbl-assessment
  16. Proficiency-Based Learning:https://spotlight.edmodo.com/product/proficiency-based-learning--390937/
  17. YouTube Video - Proficiency-Based Learning:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFD10rFAjdA
  18. Prezi Presentation – Proficiency-Based Learning: https://prezi.com/-dbwf_ibrncj/proficiency-based-instruction-and-assessment-key-instructional-strategies/