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**Wilkes University ** **21st Century Teaching and Learning ** **Capstone Course ** **Capstone Project ** **This wikispace contains the components of my capstone project for our course. You can navigate through the components of my project on the sidebar to the left. This page obviously just contains the introductory material. The page titled "Capstone Summary" has my original capstone project proposal plus an updated version based on what has occurred... and what i expect to occur. The page titled "Documents and Assignments" contains the central product to my project, the performance assignment we developed earlier in the course. In addition, it contains other assignments from this course that applied specifically to this project and documents used specifically with my students. The final page contains a link to a survey I have created for my students to complete at the end of the course.** **As a brief reminder, my project is a unit on trigonometry that I hoped would motivated students to see the application and (gasp!) theoretical beauty of trigonometry. It focused on two key things: a performance based assessment given at the beginning of the unit that would drive the instruction throughout, and a serious look at re-sketching the entire unit in order to make some distinct and deep connections for the students. I was thankfully able to do the latter (and actually the former) with one of my colleagues who was open to making some changes in this unit.** **One of my reservations in picking this unit is its magnitude. That slight worry has come to fruition somewhat, as I find myself just passing the midway point in the unit as we our ending our course here at Wilkes. Because of that, I don't have the sense of closure or feedback from the students and their work, but I can say that the grades and anecdotal evidence so far lead me to believe that the unit has been a success so far. Although we aren't doing the same thing from day to day, my colleague seemed equally as excited as me to teach the unit, the students' grades are as good or better than any I've had, and most importantly, I am not hearing the typical verbal expression of aversion to trigonometry! Of course some serious action research would be needed to back up those statements... Either way, I am glad I did not take the easy way out by picking one of the sub-units of trigonometry to focus upon; I have instead had a big-picture focus which has shaped the entire unit.** **I hope you enjoy perusing the rest of my project...!**
 * Christopher P. Rachor **

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