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Mistakes, Failures and Disasters with PBL

Cameron Paterson , ,

I presented a workshop on PBL at the NSW ICT Educators’ Conference earlier this year. About 30 minutes into my presentation one of the attendees asked why I was just talking about the successes of implementing PBL? He wanted to know what mistakes I had made along the way. This was a light-bulb moment for me. I work with a colleague who whenever he hears another school advocating some sort of successful program, will always ask, “OK, but where are the warts?”

So yesterday I spoke at TeachMeet Mint about some of the mistakes, failures and disasters I have experienced with PBL. I have been experimenting with PBL approaches for the past three years. My first serious attempt was with a weak Year 9 History class. I was determined to get them writing, and enjoying it. In pairs they wrote chapters for an historical fiction book about an Australian soldier fighting at Gallipoli. It didn’t work very well. The story-line changed from chapter to chapter, with different names for key protagonists and no real thread holding the work together.

The following year my class wrote stories about World War One for a kindergarten class in the Northern Territory, who then illustrated the stories and we made it up into an audio e-book. However, this time my students obsessed over the stories for the 6 year-olds and lost sight of the history, and some of the stories were too bloodthirsty for 6 year-olds.

This year I simplified it and we wrote historical stories for the Grade 3 class across the road and they illustrated the stories for an e-book. Three years in, the project has become more manageable and more successful.

At the end of last year my class provided me with warm and cool post-it note feedback on each of the four projects I ran. In Year 9 I have established a pattern where I teach an overview of the course for about 7 weeks and then for the last 3 weeks of term they go into depth on an area in a PBL assignment. One of the key pieces of feedback from the students was that the first PBL task that they do in the year needs to be simple, so they understand how to learn this way. Three years ago my driving question was the ambitious “Is it best we forget?”. Now it is simply, “How can we write a story that will teach World War One to 9 year-olds?”

Three years ago I also designed a task which asked my class to design viral videos about an aspect of World War II. It was an unmitigated disaster. No amount of critique or feedback was going to salvage this operation. After cringing through bleating goats, images from the film Frozen, and boys engaging in mock fights on the oval, the task has now simply become “How can we design an awesome World War II documentary?” It is simple and it works.

Last year I ran a project for my class to design and implement a social media campaign for rights and freedoms. The students didn’t know where to start. This year it became an advertising campaign for rights and freedoms, which seems much more achievable.

One task that has not required much modification is a task on popular culture, framed around the driving question, “How cool were your grandparents?” Students interview their grandparents, or someone similar, about their memories of music, film, radio, TV, sport and fashion, and then write it up into a short report with a photo for an e-book. This year I am going to send the finished e-book to the grandparents and ask students to come to class wearing one fashion item from their grandparents on the day that it is due.

I’m now thinking for next year that I might move the PBL task to the start of each topic, rather than at the end. I have been considering a teaching principle I heard mentioned in a keynote earlier this year, ensure that “lecture comes later”, starting with inquiry and piquing the students’ interest before delivering the content.

Everything that I have typed above is anecdotal. It is from my memory. I tend to throw out what hasn’t worked and start again, so I no longer have the tasks that didn’t work so well, but that I learned so much from three years ago. Learning (and teaching) is an iterative process. My key message is that I need to start doing a better job of documenting my own learning.

Reconciling Tensions and Radical Openness

Cameron Paterson , ,

A few years ago I returned to fulltime study for a year in the US. My favourite classes were with Tina Blythe and Eleanor Duckworth. Both banned technology from their classes, preferring face to face interactions, and I experienced my most powerful learning experiences in their classes.

I also took a class with Chris Dede, who was fresh from having written the National Education Technology Plan for President Obama. His class was a dizzying array of top US educational technology experts and we were encouraged to use our devices in class. While I sat spell-bound, some of my peers would surf Facebook and this made me question the benefits of technology in relation to learning. I now oscillate between believing that the deepest learning experiences I can design in my classes are face to face conversations, and simultaneously arguing that technology should be ubiquitous and invisible. One of the ways I am reconciling this tension is by explicitly teaching students mindfulness in order to cope with continuous partial attention and our always-on lifestyle.

I have often argued that pedagogy should be the driver, and technology should merely act in support. Project-Based Learning is a pedagogy that works well with technology. My students produce audio e-books for young children, make films, and design social media campaigns for rights and freedoms. We also take part in global learning projects and conduct Skype learning calls.

I know that I need to improve the documentation of the learning in my classes. While I’m a fan of post-it notes and speech bubbles, we also have a class Twitter handle which tweets out photos of our learning, and, when students work in teams, one of them sometimes has my Go-Pro on a headband for real-time KidCam.

Next year I am planning to explore Sugata Mitra’s Self-Organised Learning Environments, I want to get my students blogging, and I’m thinking of using Snapchat to run a short project for students to share photos of local war memorials and commemoration activities. We have a student voice team who attend our Heads of Department meetings and I am curious about what would happen if we adopted the radical transparency of broadcasting these meetings via Periscope. Also, I am in awe of the work being produced by students at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne and I want to learn how to do this myself.

Finally, George Couros now has me wondering whether pedagogy really should always be the driver? This video of Lachlan getting his hearing aid shows how technology can be transformational. Could transformational learning become the norm, rather than the exception?

There is a fragile tension here because, despite the wonderful affordances, in most of my classes computers and tablets are off and we still talk to each other in face to face conversations.

NB. Cross-posted on the NSWICTE website.