What I have learned from 3 years of PBL

1. Planning starts off difficult…

This one is pretty obvious, but cannot be stated enough.  Project -based learning requires a lot planning up front.  It requires looking at your standards, what is required of your students, so you do not lose sight of what is expected of them compared to their peers.  PBL requires a culture change: a change with the behavioral expectations of your students, of yourself, of your classroom, and of your school.  And all of that is before you even plan out your first project.

2. …but it gets easier, and a lot more fun.

Once you have planned your projects, it gets easier to teach than in a traditional classroom.  More importantly, if your projects are created with what may interest your students in mind, you and your students will have more fun.  That is a big if.  I have planned and seen others plan projects that interest the teacher…but the teacher never listened to their students to see if they would find interesting.  The results almost always were the students hated the project and the teacher was frustrated.   This is going to jarring to teachers who are of the mindset that “kids will be interested tin what ever I tell them to”.  If you or you know someone who is in this mindset, this is a big hurdle to clear, but it needs to be cleared before any meaningful teaching and learning is going to happen.  I don’t know how else to state it: people just learn better when they are actually interested-God forbid actually entertained–by what they are learning.

3.  About that culture thing

Ignore it at your peril.  PBL requires a balance of learning facts, reasoning and critical thinking, and creativity.  These three things requires different levels of freedom.  If you are a traditional teacher, teaching facts will come easy.  But when you start getting to the critical thinking and creativity, people need to exercise their curiousity and free will to explore a solution.  This demands a different sort of classroom management.  I’ll put it this way: YOU don’t need to teach from bell to bell, BUT students still need to learn and do from bell to bell.  After planning a project, this is the next hardest task to get a good PBL going.  If you or your school address how conflict between students will be handled, how failure is addressed and fixed, how students treat each other, treat teachers, treat community partners, PBLs go a lot more smoothly.

4.  PBL is a very valuable technique, and it has to be treated with great value.

In my decades with teaching–as a son of a teacher, as a student, as a professional, and now as a teacher–I have learned that education comes in trends of a pendulum swings that evolve from the failures and successes of each past trend.  PBL is now the ‘cool’ technique, and rightly so.  Yet as I interact with teachers there is a lot of misunderstanding of best practices.  It is not merely group learning, it is not merely hands-on learning, and you are not ditching vocabulary or learning of basic facts.  I have reduced these things in my classes, but that is because students now practice the basics by applying them to solving a project.  We all need to be cautious about knowing what PBL is, otherwise people’s misconceptions will sink the idea of PBL.

5. PBL can be for everyone, but…

I tell my students that there are probably no more science discoveries out there waiting to be discovered by one person.  The ideas of the universe that are small enough for one person to discover have probably been discovered.  Same goes for business, activism, etc.  most discoveries now are so big you need teams to discover them. Therefore, learning to work with others is critical.  Being socialable with purpose is important. Yet in a classroom, some people REALLY do not want to work with others.  The prevailing culture is that this is a bad thing, but emerging brain evidence is suggesting that there is a value to introverts that is being overlooked. This is not to say that group learning should be thrown out.  Instead I am saying that we should not overlooking introverts needs or interests.   Talk with your introverts and figure out their needs.  They may need you to have a different way to work with groups or accommodations to do PBL.   Be mindful of different students and their needs.

The Challenges of Prepping for a Year of PBL

Over the past 2 months I have been working hard to regroup mentally and physically from a grueling year in building a project-based learning classroom on the fly. I was officially hired a day before the school year to co-teach a combined class with a pure focus on a student-centered project-based classroom. I am not complaining…only warning that you should avoid teaching in this situation unless you have ample time to prepare. And to me that would require *at least* a whole summer. So here I am, a whole summer now to prepare…how’s it going?:

-Flipped videos are 1/3 of the way prepare (not actually recorded, just prepared to be recorded, so I am really only 1/6 of the way done)

-Curriculum has been reworked with the curriculum specialist and co-workers. This is a critical victory as without this, there would be no plan for the school year, and PBL requires a plan. This is good.

-No hand-on activities have been explored, tried, or picked. This is a big problem.

-Just got back from an excellent New Tech Network conference where I finally learned the basics of PBL the New Tech way from trainers. I walked away with the year’s first project 90% set up (still need scaffolding activities for it). This is good.

-Big heap of grant money is sitting around collecting dust. This is a problem.

-Microscope and microscope camera that I was going to explore all summer long is sitting on the dining room table collecting dust. Not a huge problem, but microscopes are a huge hands-on tool in a biology class.

Good thing I still have a month to go until back to school. Why do I feel that time is going to disappear reeeeeaaallly fast…

Back to work! I am in Chicago at the convening of the Woodrow Wilson National Teaching Fellowship Conference. Looking forward to learning more for my future students!

Erasing the Boundaries of Timing and Learning

twisted clock

Today, Starbucks will be announcing a change in one of their benefits to their employees. Originally, the coffee company offered tuition reimbursement up to $1000 for employees working 20 or more hours. Now, they are offering a program to pay for much of an employees degree to Arizona States online degree programs–including degrees that are not related to anything Starbucks or business. While in terms of education reform this isn’t the biggest deal in the world, it is a significant and subtle step towards where I think education has to inevitably head.

Education has to leave the traditional confines of being on the teacher’s time and instead be on the student’s time. We should make teacher’s time AND student’s time complement each other, instead of one submitting to the other.

I think to say the internet has changed society is about as obvious as saying water is wet. However, its impact is so massive, its very hard to see its influence unfold all at once. In one sense, the internet has given people the freedom of will to accomplish tasks on the time of their own choosing, instead of someone else’s calendar. What I feel online education can do is liberate people’s time to learn and achieve their learning goals in concert with their other obligations in life. These obligations are/used to be formidable obstacles to getting a degree: taking care of a family, working to earn money (usually to pay for a degree AND living expenses at the same time). Starbucks’s move here is very interesting in that in enables their employees to grow (with no strings attached besides working at least 20 hours at Starbucks) without having them sacrifice their job for college. As someone who had to juggle nearly full-time hours at a part-time job while going full-time to college, this would be a great option.

I am intrigued by this because I wonder: What if high schools adopted this attitude? What if instead of having semesters and breaks and grade levels, schools went to advancement attached to achievement of performance-based standards. What if instead of breaks, teachers work hours where spread over what would have used to have been the breaks and their time to teach was given more flexibility along with their students?