The Good, the Bad, and the Odd

After completing a year-long, integrated PBL with my IPC classes, these are my thoughts on the whole thing.  These are presented in no particular order, other than their categories.

The Good

1.     My students became extremely comfortable with presenting, whether to a group of their peers, parents, or outsiders.

2.     They learned how to solve problems, even those that they couldn’t get on the first try.  #failforward is the hashtag of the year.

3.     Everything they learned remained relevant the entire year.  They couldn’t ever put a subject away and say, “Oh we’re done with this topic, so I can forget about it.”  I think this gave them a deeper understanding of the TEKS because of this application piece.  They had to keep using them.

4.     I like the year-long narrative structure because it gave me so much flexibility to pull in more ‘stories’ as needed to suit the TEKS.  We were able to expand the problem as the year went along.

5.     Students tell me that they like being able to use their creativity, and that they aren’t boxed into a particular procedure or method of solving problems.

6.     I like being able to sit down with small groups of students and listen to their ideas.  This gives me a huge advantage in the relationship piece of student/teacher interactions.

The Bad

1.     My room has been an unmitigated disaster since last September.  Several times during the year, I reached my breaking point where I couldn’t take it any more, and had spasms of cleaning.  Possibly of the good – NJHS students didn’t have problems making their community service hours if they were willing to come in and help me tackle the mess.

2.     The level of squabbling on some days made me want to send them all to their rooms.  Oh, wait, I can’t.  I need more corners to send people to for cooling off periods.

3.     The first semester exam was a disaster and the STAAR wasn’t that much better.  One thing that I have to improve is the students’ ability to relate their problem solving to test questions.

4.     On-line research is a skill that is seriously lacking in middle school students.  I had a whole 2-credit class on how to do research in law school – at this point, with technology an inescapable part of their lives, middle school students should be provided the same thing.  Proper research methods will be part of my scaffolding process next year.

5.     The GT students hated me most of the time, because they wanted to know how to do it ‘right’ and I was firm that there wasn’t necessarily a right way.  They were in the mindset that it was all about the grades where I was trying to show them that it was about the process.  As the district moves forward in the implementation of learner centered classrooms, I anticipate that this issue will become easier.

The Odd

1.     We have variously had class discussions about whether human bones make good tools and whether it would be ethical to use them for that purpose, the rugby team from Uruguay, how cavemen made tools, and the things we learned on Minecraft.

2.     One of my classes implemented a very repressive constitution for their last project.  Also, they had a huge debate on whether morality is something that can be legislated.

3.     They know lots of things about Caruthersville, Missouri, and the geography of the southern Pacific Ocean.

4.     We didn’t realize it when we first started, but the initial scenario that @whowe67 and I created gave us almost unlimited ways to expand it to include new topics. 

5.     I liked that I had to be on the top of my game at every moment, but I was brain dead a lot on my time off.  So much so that I couldn’t follow scripted TV dramas – I watched a lot of reality TV and sports last year.

At the end of the year, I was mentally exhausted because project based learning requires more in-depth thinking on the teacher’s part as well.  If I were just coughing up the same lecture from year to year, my creativity and critical thinking would also suffer.  Project based learning is a very involved process for all parties concerned. 

If you go all in on it – doing it full time – make sure you have a shoulder to cry on and another creative mind to bounce ideas with.  I couldn’t have done it without @whowe67, and her guidance, leadership, and encouragement.

I would absolutely do another year-long project.  I think the good aspects of it far outweighed the bad, and the bad can be fixed.  I don’t know that I would do the same scenario of a tsunami-instigated shipwreck, because that story has been told.  Stranded in Antarctica or terra-forming Mars are both intriguing possibilities for the future.

The Transportation Problem

 During the summer, when @whowe67 and I met to plan the IPC year, one of our original ideas was to do the force and motion unit with mousetrap car kits.  Making those cars would be a part of a STEM curriculum as they tried to solve the challenge of putting the kit together to make a car.  But as we continued to talk about what we wanted the year to look like, we realized that giving students those kits would be too teacher-directed, and discarded the idea.

However, we kept the idea of doing some sort of transportation design on the island.  After many brainstorming sessions, we chose parameters for the unit.  The devices would have to travel 10 meters, but no further (because otherwise they would fall off a cliff on the island).  And it would have to carry a cup of water without spilling it.  The students weren’t allowed to seal off the cup to prevent the water from getting out.

The cup of water was a nice call-back to their first challenge – purifying the water.  Also, many of them used their renewable energy sources from the previous power unit as a way to provide power to their devices.  One of the good things about integrating the whole year into a consistent story line is that all the units have significance and can be relevant for a future problem. 

I had eliminated batteries as a source of potential energy for their devices, so the students were left with using either gravitational energy or elastic energy.  They quickly realized that gravity could give them a great deal of power, but because going over 10 meters was a design failure, it didn’t offer a lot of control over their transport method.  During their presentations, many groups explained why they decided to use elastic potential energy, and I was happy to see the detailed thought process that they used to evaluate the two sources of energy.

My students found a variety of ways to solve the problem of transporting the water, but many of them discovered the mousetrap cars via YouTube. 

With the parameters we added to the problem, the students couldn’t copy what they found on YouTube directly.  For one thing, the car had to be stable enough to carry the cup without spilling, and for another, the platform had to be big enough to hold the cup.

During the presentations, I was thrilled to hear the students talking about how they had to change the design from the original, the problems they encountered, and the reasons why things weren’t working.  The depth of critical thinking they demonstrated was impressive.  While the basics function of the mousetrap car remained the same, my students found many solutions to the problem of carrying the cup.  They also made use of a wide variety of materials, many of them salvaged from their kitchens and garages.

If we had kept our original idea of handing everyone a kit, then I wouldn’t have seen so much creativity in the students’ final presentations.

More Rigor in Electricity

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Since I have been teaching IPC, the electrical unit has been a paint-by-numbers sort of affair.  We have board with metals pegs, various electrical components that fit over the pegs, and ‘lab’ sheets that say, “do this, then do this, then do this.”  The booklets that came with these kits include questions that are at the most basic level.  The hardest thing about the whole unit was distinguishing Ohm’s Law from the electrical power calculations and inverting the resistance for parallel circuits.

The unit has always seemed like a curriculum afterthought, something to do to keep students entertained during May, after the state test and before final exams.  It has been a yawn fest for both the students and me.

The actual state standards that mention electricity say:

n   Examine electrical force as a universal force between any two charged objects and compare the relative strength of the electrical force and gravitational force.

n   Demonstrate that moving electric charges produce magnetic forces and moving magnets produce electrical forces.

n   Evaluate the transfer of electrical energy in series and parallel circuits and conductive materials.

http://ritter.tea.state.tx.us/rules/tac/chapter112/ch112c.html#112.38

When @whowe67 and I planned the year-long IPC PBL unit, the electro-magnetic standard was the only one that we couldn’t fit into the scenario.  We had vaguely said that we would work it in when we did power, but we started the year not knowing exactly how we would manage it.

This is a great example of the necessity of flexibility when running a PBL unit.  The plans that @whowe67 and I made over the summer were complete, but over the course of the year, many of the units have changed from our original concept.  Some have been a natural change as we’ve gotten a better idea of the how the year is progressing, and some of it has been at the request of the students.

In the case of electricity, when I was writing the power unit, I realized that electricity would fit into it perfectly.  The challenge for the students became, “How can we design a way to turn a turbine that will generate electricity, given the resources on the island?”

The sources of power on the island would be wind, tides, geothermal, solar, and hydroelectric.  We bought lots of copper wire and magnets, so the students could make simple generators.  The challenge here was two-fold – use one of the renewable resources to move the turbine, and build a generator capable of turning on a tiny light.  The students would use their previously built shelters and wire them either in series or in parallel.

When the students had to actually build an electrical generator, we had many conversations about the very basics of electricity – what it is, how it moves, what a magnet does to electrons, and how the forces between the two interact.  They went far deeper into the concept than I have ever seen in my years of teaching IPC.

Not all the generators were successful.  Some could only measure the electricity produced with a sensitive multi-meter.  But the struggle to design and redesign is where the true learning took place.

We still covered the series versus parallel issue and electrical calculations, so they weren’t missing anything from what students in previous years had done.

What we gained was an enduring understanding of the concept and a way to apply it to other situations.  I have never felt that the electrical unit was rigorous enough until this year.

The Point of Learning Logs

 

One of the buzzwords in my district is ‘innerput’.  This is the process by which we take information and internalize it in order to use it – to apply to a new situation or allow us to optimize our creativity.  The progression of learning using this paradigm is something like this:

INPUT  - information from various sources including research, teacher, reading, or videos

→

INNERPUT – reflection, writing, internalizing, processing INPUT

→

OUTPUT – the information can be applied to a new situation, whether on a standardized test, a new problem, or any other student product

Innerput or reflection is equally necessary for teachers.  Writing these blog posts is one way that I gather my thoughts and put my ideas in order.   There are other ways, but for me, nothing connects learning to understanding quite like typing or writing things by hand.

In a Project Based Learning classroom, innerput becomes even more crucial.  My students are exposed to a vast amount of information via their research and design activities.  If they do not take the time to slow down and process what they are encountering or doing, then they will not get to the deep learning necessary to understand the concepts in my class.

To give my students a chance for innerput, one of the methods I use is the daily learning log.  This is a document that they create and keep, and they should write down what they have done or thought about or learned for that day. 

A learning log can be just about anything that shows information being processed.  Some examples included data tables from testing, design ideas with drawings and explanations, facts from research with summaries of why they are important or relevant, and further questions that their research has uncovered.

Convincing my students that a learning log is crucial has been a battle.  Most students didn’t really produce decent logs until the start of the second semester.  Next year, I think I will try to scaffold the learning log requirement, gradually letting them have the freedom and choice as to how their learning log will look.  I may do something like have questions related to each mastery concept for them to answer or a concept map to fill out.

Another issue has been that students will copy something directly into their log without stopping to think about what it might mean.  This is where my conversations with students become so critical.  Usually my biggest clue that they don’t know what they wrote is use of ‘big words’ or overly complicated sentence structure.  When this happens, I need to have several methods of assessing students’ mastery of a particular concept so I can tease out whether they really understand it.  Many times I will question them, they’ll reply, and I’ll ask further questions.  As we dig into the details of the concept, the student will gradually get a deeper understanding of what they had researched.  At that point, I will tell them to write down what we just talked about in their own words.  Then I look at their learning log again and ask additional questions if necessary.

When I see them pull their notebooks out for reference, then I know that they have produced a good learning log that they can use to apply the information to other situations.  They are gaining a deeper and more enduring understanding of the concepts when they can use their own writings as supplementary materials.

Shelter vs. Heat

During my year-long PBL for my IPC classes, we have been working on trying to survive on an uninhabited island.  We started with water, evaluating which type of water would be easier to use.  Then we moved on to food, which all students agreed was the next critical component of survival after potable water.

Using the energy TEKS, I gave the students the problem of providing a safe and nutritious diet for the survivors of the cruise ship disaster.  The IPC TEKS ask students to evaluate different sources of energy including fossil fuels, geothermal, moving water and wind, and solar.  Additionally, when they were doing the water cleaning unit, most of the groups had decided on some form of heating, condensing, and distilling their water, so a ‘heat’ unit seemed to be the logical next step.

I wouldn’t say that the unit was a total failure, but it didn’t fire their imaginations the way the water unit or the nuclear unit had.  They did the work, but they pretty much slogged their way through it with getting a good grade as their only motivation.  They didn’t put in any hours outside the classroom and they didn’t drive their parents crazy with their obsession with the project.

Bummer.  I’m always sad when a PBL unit falls on its face because I’m addicted to seeing student ideas take flight, where they take my conception of what they should do and turn it into something remarkable, something I never imagined.

When this happens, I’ve found that the problem usually lies in the driving question.  For whatever reason, the problem I posed in the heat unit didn’t resonate with them and they didn’t much care about the project other than the grade.

Driving questions are hard, and I’ve written quite a few of them.  But sometimes no matter how carefully I craft them, they just don’t work.

And sometimes, I feel the question is lame and not my best effort, but the students take off with it.  Just shows that I don’t think like a teenager.  Also, it shows me the importance of getting student input into lesson design.

In contrast to the heat unit, the student response to the shelter unit blew me away.  First of all, this was the unit that they had asked for.  The students clearly understand that this entire year is a complete story, and certain elements should appear in certain order.  My plan was to do it at the end of the year, but when they insisted that it had to come next, I revised my lesson plans and worked it in.  Perhaps that student choice had something to do with the success of the unit. 

Second, for this unit, one of the requirements was that the students build a scale model of their shelter design.  Kids love building things.  And even if a particular student wasn’t into construction, they could do other things to support their group, such as research or writing.

Their final presentations reflected their enjoyment of the project.  I saw many different ways of solving the problem and some in-depth thinking about the issue.  The students maintained a high level of interest in their work throughout the unit.

If I could harness that energy and enthusiasm every time I write a unit, I might think I actually know how to do this.  As it is, this shows me how much more I have to learn!

Just in Time Education

Back in the last century, when the United States was worried about competing with Japan, and I was in industry where inventory mattered, I read several trade publications about a whole philosophy called ‘Just in time inventory.’  It was meant to reduce overhead costs associated with keeping lots of inventory on hand, thereby increasing the profit margin.  The other thing it was supposed to do was to make businesses more flexible and more able to respond quickly to the needs of their customers. 

This latter aspect of it makes a lot of sense to me as an educator.

If our ‘customers’ are our students, then what is the point of trying to give them a product (knowledge) before they are ready for it? 

Granted, many of us are constrained by standardized tests, district expectations of our scope and sequence, or other conditions that may reduce our flexibility. However, within those boundaries, I think it is absolutely possible to deliver knowledge to students when they need it and when they are ready for it. 

This goes along with what my district is moving to as a learner centered platform as well as working in with what I am trying to accomplish with PBL.

When I was doing a unit on chemical reactions with my on-level classes, they had a list of skills they needed to master in the form of ‘I can’ statements.  They are allowed to do these statements in any order that they choose.  One of them was in regard to the Law of Conservation of Mass and balancing chemical equations, which is a difficult skill for lots of people, not just middle school students.

What they did with it was research the concept a bit, and when they thought they understood it, they came to me to show what they knew.  So I would stand at the board, with two or three students, give them problems related to balancing equations, and they would talk each other through it.  I asked them question to clarify their knowledge or if they were stuck, I would give them pointers about what to do next.  In some cases, they really didn’t get it, so I sent them back to look at it again, with either manipulatives to help them or suggestions for things to do.

This gave me an incredible opportunity to talk to them in very small groups and to individualize their instruction.  Also, they came to the session with a bit of background information about the concept, which is something that wouldn’t be possible if all of them were getting the same instruction at the same time.

In another case, we were wrapping up a unit with one of my IPC classes and the discussion turned to what the next unit would be.  I told them what I had planned, but they disagreed, saying that a different unit should be next. 

First, I was amazed that they were that invested in the curriculum that they had an opinion on the sequence of units.  And then, I thought that level of engagement should be rewarded.

I rearranged the units I had planned, went back to my TEKS, and designed ways to apply some rigorous TEKS to what the students wanted to do next.  I have to get all the TEKS covered before the end of the year; it doesn’t matter to me in which order we do them.  Additionally, I was able to work in some TEKS from the lower grade levels to give them a review of some of the concepts that they will see on the STAAR exam.

I’ve talked about the structure for this year long project  before.  My IPC classes are doing units that are part of an overall narrative and I don’t want to take them out of that story by doing things in ways that don’t seem logical to them.  In this case, I’ve rearranged my curriculum to give them what they have told me directly that they need.

A few caveats – this is an advanced class where the students already have the foundational knowledge of physics and chemistry that they can apply to other areas of science.  Also, while they still have to take the STAAR test, they are not facing an End-Of-Course exam for this class.  I believe that other physical/Earth science disciplines build on physics and chemistry, and to get into those disciplines without the proper foundation is a mistake.

With Just In Time Education, I can adapt to the needs of my students, keep them in engaged in what we are doing, and give them ownership in their learning.