Grouping

Project Based Learning depends on the group performance.  The process is very difficult for these students because it requires so much creativity, critical thinking, research, and then at the end, they have to pull all of that into some sort of a product.  The group composition is critical to the success of the project.

For every PBL project, the best number of students per group is four.  If you have less people, then some of the jobs get combined and overlooked.  If you have more students, then two of them will be sitting around and not contributing.  However, I inevitably don’t have class rosters that are divisible by four.  In that case, I’ve found that it is better to have smaller groups than bigger groups.  Also, sometimes I get students who come to me and say that they’d rather do it by themselves.  I usually talk to them to see what’s going on, but then I let them do it.  Sometimes it comes out okay, and sometimes they decide they want to be in a group in the future.  At the very heart of it, PBL is about student choice, so that is a choice that I allow them.

The group members should include:  a leader, the Team Manager; a creative person, the Project Developer; an organized person, the Materials Organizer; and a conscientious person, the Recorder.

A bit of a warning about the Recorder – having one student designated as the ‘recorder’ doesn’t mean that the other three don’t write anything.  This is a big misapprehension on the part of my students and they usually discover the problem when they come to the first summit.  Getting students to write in a science class is incredibly difficult, as though they turn that part of their brains off when they walk through the doorway.  However, as anyone who has looked at the steps of the scientific method knows, the last step is communicating results, usually in writing.  Also, I firmly believe that the act of ‘writing’, of organizing your thoughts about a scientific concept into some sort of order while your fingers are moving is a great way to embed your learning in your brain. 

This issue usually shows up in the Daily Learning Logs, where many times a group will tell me that the Recorder wrote the logs for everyone.  We have a little discussion about how the logs should reflect individual learning, not the group learning. 

At the first of the year, before I know the students very well, I picked the groups randomly.  By the end of the year, for the project that comes after testing, I let them pick their own groups, subject to my veto if I foresee a problem.   For the rest of the year, I have a general idea of students’ strengths so I make an effort to put the groups together with a balance between abilities. My classes are leveled, so there isn’t a huge gap in abilities in any one class.  However, if they weren’t leveled, then proper grouping would be an even more critical activity.  The sort of disorganized method I used for creating groups has worked well enough under these circumstances, but I think I can do better and thus serve my students better.

Last year, I probably did PBL about half the time compared to traditional units.  For the upcoming year, I plan to implement more PBL units.  In that case, the groups should be composed with care and an eye towards what each student can contribute to the group.  Instead of waiting until the school year has progressed to see what they are good at, I plan to inventory my classes the first week of school to see where they fall in the categories above.

Creativity can be tested in a variety of ways, as can leadership.  I plan to use things like Survey Monkey and other instruments to discern their interests and abilities.  In addition to helping with grouping, this will help me with differentiation.  In the past, I’ve looked at differentiation as something to do with the Special Ed or ESOL students, and something that applied in a general way to the rest of the population.  It’s all about the learning styles, right?  With the move to learner-centered platforms, each student should have an individual learning plan.  I need to know what they want to do and what they can do if I’m to guide them correctly.

Wow!  The first week of school is already crammed with ‘administrative’ tasks, from my Harry Wong ‘First Days’ things to sorting out iPad procedures when some students had them the year before and some didn’t.  And now I’m talking about taking more time out from the relentless pace of the curriculum to gather data about my students? 

Yes, I am.

As many people have pointed out before, Project Based Learning requires a huge time investment on the front end of each unit.  I’ve come to the conclusion that this time outlay includes the beginning of the year.  If I put in the effort during the first few weeks of school to assemble information about my students, I anticipate that the rest of the year will be more productive and less stressful, both for them and for me.

Asking Questions

My Learning Liaison asked for this post, requesting that I reflect on how I ask questions. We were discussing my most recent PBL unit where I had given my students the freedom to write their own driving questions.  I gave each group a Tubric from bie.org as a place to start and told them to pick a phrase from each column. When we met for the first summit a couple days later, we discussed their driving questions. My aim at that point was to make sure that the problem they proposed to solve was something that could be accomplished in both the time frame we had and the constrictions of what was available in my classroom.

A small note about my background - my most recent college experience before entering the classroom was law school.  I've mentioned my high school experience in a previous post. Both of these events left me with perhaps an unusual set of classroom perceptions.  Briefly, in high school, I learned not by listening, but by talking about a subject.  In law school, I was subjected to the Socratic method for three years, as well as being forced to do the assignments before they were explained, which I did religiously, although mostly out of terror.  (There's nothing quite like the prospect of losing a bunch of money to motivate exemplary performance out of a student).  In law school, the professors never give out answers.  Instead, you spend an entire class period being the subject of their relentless questioning.  “What about that?”  “What if this?”

I’m not advocating subjecting children to that.  However, I think that using that method in the classroom has benefits.  Additionally, the method of reading the material first and then discussing it later has become quite the buzzed-about technique, although we call it ‘flipping the classroom.’  We could learn a lot from law schools.

The first rule about asking questions is to have a good idea of what the answer should be. That seems obvious, but the concept of questioning requires that you have an in-depth understanding of the topic. That means study.  I have explained plate boundaries or galaxy formation so many times that I could do it in my sleep. However, as human understanding of both of those topics is subject to change, I have to keep up with current advances in the fields in the curricula.   Whatever your content area is, make sure that you really know what you want the final result to look like.

How does this apply to Project Based learning or more specifically, to the place where the teacher asks question – the summits?

If I am doing a regular PBL project, I have the learning standards that apply to the project as my guide. If I thoroughly grasp those standards, then I can guide the discussion to check for understanding within the group. I don't ever give answers because I think that violates the spirit of PBL and the struggle that leads to more in-depth understanding. However, a struggle that is unproductive, meaning it isn't leading anywhere, is frustrating for the students and will lead to them shutting down.  In that case, I still don't give them answers, but I do provide more narrowly tailored materials that will allow them to uncover the answers on their own. When they come back to summit, they are usually bouncing with excitement and a sense of achievement that they were able to master the concept.

In summit, when you are using questions to guide a group to a particular answer, start with the broadest or most obvious aspect of the topic. If I want them to explain that the periodic table is organized in columns by valence electrons and in rows by electron shells, that isn't the first question I ask. Instead I'll ask, "What is the most obvious organization?" or "What is the first thing you notice?"  They can always tell me that it's in order numerically by atomic number.

After that, I continue to ask increasingly narrow questions that allow the students to focus on the answer.  Usually at some point in this process one of the group members will 'get it'. At that point, I let that child take over the questioning, although I warn them not to tell the answer but to ask questions to help the other members understand.

What about in the case where there is no particular correct answer, such as in the case where the summit was a discussion of the driving question?

Again, the key is to know your topic, in this case the topic is 'What is a good driving question?'

Knowing the answer to that is partially the result of practice with writing your own questions for previous projects.  But a few things to keep in mind are that a driving question should be specific, it should apply to the real world in some way, and while it might not be 'solvable' it should be investigable.

In summit, when one group had a question 'How can we prevent drought in West Texas?' the problem was neither solvable nor investigable.   I asked them 'what are the causes of drought?' which they couldn't tell me.  I set them the task to research the causes of drought. When they came for the next summit, they had changed their question to 'How can we make the effect of the drought less?'  This version of the question was something that they might be able to answer.

Another group proposed this question: How can we educate the people of Texas about water conservation?  In this case my question was ‘how? ‘ And I kept after them with 'but how?' until they narrowed their driving question to: How can we educate the population of GMS about water conservation?

Awesome! It was narrow enough to be answered in the time frame we had and with the resources we had available.  And because their question was so well-framed, their finished product was one of the best that I saw for this project.

The temptation is always there to provide the answer, either in the interest in saving time or in saving frustration, but it has to be resisted.   In regards to the frustration issue, as I mentioned above, always have a fall back plan, a different way for the students to find the answer.   If you give them the answer, they won't develop the critical thinking skills that are the heart of not only PBL, but also Lead 2021 and the Common Core.

Time pressure is the enemy of PBL.  While we're all subject to the pressures of 'getting through the material', try not to be affected by the urge to hurry through PBL.  I'm guilty of this too; sometimes that ticking clock of looming testing is too much to ignore.  When it is clear from the discussion that the group does not understand the concept, the key in summit is not to give answers. If they haven't done the work, send them away to try again. If they have done the work, give them an alternative.

At this point, I would normally write a concluding paragraph summarizing what I've presented.  However, in the spirit of uncovering the answers on your own, I'll leave open the question of 'How do you ask good questions?'