Things I’ve Learned about PBL

Last year at this time, our middle school science specialist sat down with me and said, “I’d like to try something.”  She had just come back from a tour of a New Tech high, and wanted to pilot a Project Based Learning system in a couple of schools as something to do with the 8^th graders after the TAKS test.  As I’m always looking for things to keep the 8^th grade out of trouble those few weeks between the test and the end of the year, I was happy to be a guinea pig.

Although it was a week before the TAKS test, we worked to pull something together as fast as possible, using the New Tech High model.  We finally settled on a space travel project that would integrate TEKS from all three grade levels with a trip to Titan as our goal.  Our entry event took advantage of the students’ obsession with the 2012 end-of-the-world scenario.

I consider that month to be the watershed event in my teaching career.  It opened my eyes to what even the lowest performing student can accomplish when they are motivated by an intriguing problem and given the freedom to explore that problem in their own way.  Since then, I have implemented several PBL units in both of my class levels.

1.     Driving Question – Writing a driving question is probably the hardest thing about PBL.  The question is critical because, as the name implies, it ‘drives’ the whole lesson.  A driving question that doesn’t engage interest or produce an enthusiastic response will derail the whole project.  The problem with designing these questions is something that may appeal to me may not be something that interests the students.  For instance, I had a driving question relating to dissecting the physics of video games that I thought they would love, however everyone was pretty indifferent.  On the other hand, a driving question about redesigning the periodic table was met with a high level of interest.  My next step is to let the students design their own question.  I plan to give them the Tubric 2.0 from BIE.org.

2.     Summits – I love summits.  There’s no better way to assess where my students are right at that moment.  I like sitting down with the kids in a small group and letting them tell me their ideas.  It’s a great chance to address misconceptions (on both sides, frankly) and to direct them in their next step.  I’m amazed at the creative ideas that come out during summits.

3.     Daily Learning Log – Students do not know how to record authentic learning when they are first introduced to PBL.  At first, their daily learning logs tend to be a list of things they did.  Instead, we have many talks about how that is different from things that they’ve learned.  The other thing they tend to do is to write, “I learned this,” without saying what they learned about it.  A correctly done daily learning log is a valuable reflection piece that they can reference when they sit down for a summit.

4.     Pushback – PBL is hard.  The nature of the work requires students to analyze, evaluate, and create.  They use their mental muscles in new ways that can be uncomfortable at first.  While ‘sit and get’ is incredibly boring, it also doesn’t require a whole lot of thinking on their part.  PBL completely reverses that.  At this point in the year, my students are tired of doing all the thinking and they definitely have lost a lot of their enthusiasm for the process.  Next year, I plan to make greater use of peer evaluations/critical friends, and get peer pressure working in my favor.  Also, with the district making a push for learner centered classrooms, I anticipate that more students will come to my class with experience in these critical thinking skills.

5.     Prep Time – I’m not going to lie.  PBL is hard.  It requires a lot of time on the front end – unpacking your standards, designing an entry event, plotting out where you want the whole thing to go, and collecting resources.  I tend to use the lesson plan template that comes with Microsoft Word to map out an overview of what I want to happen, including differentiation, assessments, and activities.  I pair that with a calendar that I give out to the students, so there are no surprises about when things are due.  Another great way to plan is the project overview document available from BIE.org.

6.     Presenting – No matter what their academic level, 8^th graders have no idea how to do a group presentation.  A few groups will have specific things each member is supposed to say and some sort of rudimentary script.  However, they won’t actually practice their presentations unless I make them do it.  Another thing I’m working on for next year is getting a better audience than their classmates.  For our final project of the year, we will be having a gallery walk presentation style instead of speeches.

7.     Learning – They don’t always take away what I expect them to during the course of the unit.  The Titan project was meant to be two parts – space travel and colonizing the moon.  I won’t claim that my students gained much understanding about the physics of space flight, but I daresay they will never forget how ecological succession works.  After the Newton’s Law project, they all vowed that they would be diligent about buckling their seatbelts.  In the Periodic Table unit, they figured out how to find valence electrons in a way that I had never thought of, but it worked for them.  Some of the groups have gone on to extend the units in ways I didn’t anticipate, but evidenced a very high level of thinking and analysis.

8.     Project vs. Problem – What is the ‘P’ in PBL?  I’ve found that focusing on the ‘project’ doesn’t work out very well.  For whatever reason, most of the time ‘projects’ have fallen flat and have not resulted in products that show a depth of learning or an engagement in the topic.  The only exception is the Rube Goldberg project, but that one gives my students a chance for nearly unlimited creativity.  The only limits were the laws of physics, so the project was a great way for the students to explore the practical application of those laws.  In contrast to projects, ‘problems’ seem to bring out much more enthusiasm from my students, particularly if the problem is one that might concern them or is one to which they can easily relate.  In the Titan project, the problem became how to terra-form an alien world.  In the periodic table unit, the problem was how to re-design the periodic table to make it more user-friendly. 

9.     ‘I can’ Checklist – In the past, my practice has been to make a list of TEKS-based objectives that I want the students to learn during the course of the unit.  As I said in my previous post, I am rethinking the whole checklist idea.  What I’ve found is that the students get hung up on the checklist, spending hours researching those items instead of focusing on the broader problem.  Some groups learn to delegate and assign each member a part of the checklist.  Does this mean that each group member masters all the objectives?  I think probably not.  My current plan is for each group to develop their own list of objectives for their learning in the unit.

10. Standardized Testing – There’s the rub, right?  The big, looming cloud of doom the hovers over our year.  I haven’t seen any test results, so I can’t say what PBL does for my test scores.  The mantra on the Twitter chats for PBL is, “Trust the process.”  From what I have observed in summits, my students have an in-depth grasp of some of the concepts.  Others . . . not so much.  But that is not a reflection on either the process or on them.  That is down to my planning and my design for the units.  At this point in the year, all I can say about standardized testing is I don’t know how it will work with the PBL. 

11. Observations – This year, my evaluator was our new assistant principal.  Early on, we had a chat about my intent to implement PBL throughout the course of the year, and he asked if he could do my observation during a PBL unit.  I gulped, remembered to trust the process, and agreed.  It worked out better than I could have hoped for.  While I sat down with one group or another conducting summits, the rest of the class was engaged in the process, directing their own learning, and managing their own behavior.  PBL is learner-centered, it involves the 21^st century skills that the students need, and summits give an incredible opportunity for feedback from me to the students, and from the students back to me.  Don’t fear that your evaluator will fail to see all of that.

12. Controlled Chaos – Following up on the last section, your evaluator won’t see an organized and structured classroom.  PBL is undoubtedly messy, sometimes literally so.  It’s also pretty noisy.  I’ve found that I can judge the level of engagement in the project by how much my students have rearranged my classroom.  The more interested they are in what they are doing, the more comfortable they get physically.  They push the tables around, arrange the chairs into groups, or hold discussions while they’re draped all over the floor.  Considering that I have a science classroom with a tiled floor, I’m amused by how much they like to sit on the floor.

13. Technology – PBL is absolutely possible without technology, although having it in the classroom does make it easier.   I’ve included books from the library, manipulatives, cutouts, as well as traditional lab equipment to enhance the PBL lesson.  Having many pathways for their learning gives students options to choose the way they feel most comfortable.

14. Support – For the past year, I may have been the only person in my school doing PBL regularly, and only one of a few secondary teachers in the district implementing it, but I never felt any lack of support.  The science coordinator and the science specialist are both totally on board with the process and have given me all kinds of help, from pulling together entry events to coming up with formative assessments.  The web is another endless source of ideas, or commiseration, or actual documents to use in class.  Twitter has regularly scheduled chats; there are groups on Edmodo or Edutopia that support PBL.

Like any new process, the learning curve for PBL is steep for both students and teachers.  I don’t think I’m anywhere near the apex of that curve, even after a year of working with the process.  To this day, some of the units soar higher than I thought possible, but some of them land with a dull thud.  But the ultimate reward for such a difficult journey is a class full of curious, talkative, and interested students who will throw all of their effort into solving the problem put before them.  With the move towards learner-centered platforms in nearly every district, PBL offers an outstanding way to change the classroom dynamic without marginalizing teachers.

Lab Rats and Inquiry Lessons

This started out as a tweet, but got too long and I had too many thoughts on it.

I have three children, the oldest of whom is about to graduate high school, so I've had the chance to observe their school progress for many years.  Their experiences have informed many of my classroom practices, from homework assignments to lab experiences.  I've seen what things fire their imaginations and what things don't. They are the perfect lab rats for what is inquiry-based learning and what is not.

For instance, on a recent project, the assignment was, "Remix a scene from Romeo and Juliet in a different setting. Make a video of your new scene."  This would seem to be straightforward assignment without room for much creativity. However, to do the assignment successfully, they had to have a thorough understanding of the scene in Shakespeare's language, translate it into modern diction, and then into the vernacular of whatever time period they chose. That required them to really dig into the scene and analyze not only the surface of the story, but the emotional content.  Then they had to actually talk through what the scene was about and how the events would be analogous to events in a different time period.  They had to research slang, customs, dress, and behavior from their chosen era. From what my daughter said, every group picked some time period other than the modern one.  

(All of which makes me long for sci-fi Shakespeare or some sort of Quest for Fire type thing with grunts and body language).

She and the rest of her group spent hours on this project and poured their hearts into it.  The project required all four of the C’s – collaboration, critical thinking, creativity, and communication.  In addition for a deep and enduring understanding of their chosen scene, the number of things that they learned included how to cut scenes together using iMovie, that conveying emotion isn't all about the words on the page, and that while slang may not translate from era to era, Shakespeare's themes are universal.

On the other hand, a current project she is doing would seem to be very similar on the surface. "Pick one of the following movies and analyze this aspect of it for accuracy.  You can present in any media you like." However, the assignment also said, "Here's a checklist of things to include."  My daughter's take on it?  "This is busy work. The only thing it's testing is my ability to Google pictures."  If you give a child a checklist, by golly, that's what they're going to do - check things off it. And that's all they're going to do.  Granted, in this assignment, she’s had to look a few things up, mainly words she wasn’t sure about, so she has been learning a little about the subject of the project.

The very worst assignment of all was one that could have been wildly creative, but instead it had step-by-step instructions as to what they should do and a checklist.  Not only that, each item on the checklist had a certain number of points attached to it.  My child went through each item and said, “Do I have that?  Yep.  Moving on.”  She thought it was great because she already knew what her grade would be.  However, when she lost one point out of a hundred, she had no idea how it happened because she had completed the checklist as required.  Most importantly, she learned nothing about the subject of the lesson.

 
One obvious difference between the three projects is the group collaboration in the first that was missing in the other two.  While I definitely think that inquiry learning can happen individually, it works so much better when students can bounce ideas off each other, negotiate what they are going to do with the project, and learn how to divide tasks successfully. 

In any case, if I use my own children as a benchmark, hopefully I can avoid doing such things to my students.  Writing this essay has made me re-think how I just checklists in PBL units.  Usually, I give them a series of ‘I can’ statements that are objectives relating to the TEKS for the unit.  Next time, I think I’ll let them decide what their objectives should be and help them write a plan for their learning.

Someday, I may tell my children that they were part of the on-going science experiment that is my evolving teaching practice.  For now, I’ll appreciate the perspective they give me on things that go on in the classroom.

Things I’ve Learned about iPads in the Classroom

As a part of my district’s 21^st Century learning initiative, I have a set of iPads to use in my classes, one per student.  It isn’t 1:1 because they don’t get to take them home, but while students are in my room, they have an assigned iPad that is ‘theirs.’  We’ve had them since the first week after winter break.

1.     Logistics – keeping all of the iPads updated and synced is pretty easy if you go through the steps found at Three Teachers Talk.  They seem to need charging after about two days of use throughout all six classes.  I appoint students to pass them out and take them up to prevent crowds at the charging table.

2.     Customs and Norms – When dealing with 13- to 14-year-olds, the thing to remember is that they don’t have any experience with ‘business.’  They have to be shown how to title an email, how to express their opinion politely on-line, and how to save a file to make it easy to find again.  This last is especially important since they are sharing iPads with three other people who have the same assignments that they do.

3.     Dropbox – I thought I would be using Dropbox to have my students submit work, but it hasn’t worked out that way.  Separating each class into folders and then inviting everyone to participate was cumbersome.  The other problem is if two students choose the same name for their file, then the latest one is the only one that will show up.

4.     Show Me Your Work – Instead of Drobox, this is the usual way that I grade things that are on the iPads instead of having the students send me their products.  This method has the added advantage that I can stop and talk to the student while I’m grading.  We can discuss issues and misconceptions, or we can talk about what they learned.

5.     Test the App First – I have downloaded and then deleted more apps than I can count.  I make sure that it does what I want it to do for my lessons before I push it out to all the student iPads.  For this reason, and because the cloud is great most of the time, but sometimes it does things you’d rather it didn’t, I have separate iTunes accounts for my teacher iPad and for the student iPads.  The other thing I have to check is to make sure they are accurate and convey the concept at the level appropriate for my middle school students.

6.     Default Apps – the ones that come with every mobile product from Apple, and include Youtube, Google maps, iTunes, and the like.  If they disappear from the iPad, the only way to fix it is to plug it in to iTunes on a Mac and restore it from backup.  None of the default apps are available at the app store.  No, I don’t know how they get deleted.  All I know is that it happens.

7.     Ear Buds – required student supply. 

8.     Video Notes – I’ve found that everyone is much happier if I videotape my notes and put them on Youtube.  I still set aside class time for note taking, but everyone has their own personal teacher that they can control.  I’m there to answer questions if something isn’t clear or to help students take something further.  My students think it’s great because they can rewind me as many times as they need for understanding.  If they want to review, they can access the videos from home.

9.     Search Terms and Keywords – all my students walk in to my class and the first thing they do when asked to search for something is type the actual question into Google.  Hopefully, that won’t get them anywhere, and if it does, then I wrote a bad question.  We’ve had to have several discussions about pulling the keywords out of a question.  And we’re still talking about it.

10. Technology – keep up with changes, issues, and tricks.  Twitter is invaluable for app suggestions, website information, and chats with other teachers that are in my shoes.  Also, students teach me new stuff about the iPads all the time.

In general, this has been a remarkable experience that has put the whole world at my students’ fingertips.  Their enthusiasm and engagement every day is something amazing.  While some students make bad choices with the iPads, most of them understand what an opportunity they have and act accordingly.