#pbl

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.

PBL World 2015

Cameron Paterson , , , ,

PBL1

Last week I completed the Buck Institute for Education’s Advanced PBL Coaching Academy at PBL World in Napa, California. The Academy began with the Question Formulation Technique, which I have blogged about before. This process ensures that students have input into the design of driving questions. We then dissected Jim Knight’s partnership principles, which underpin the instructional coaching program at my school. We used many protocols during the academy and this was reaffirming, and I took part in a Harkness discussion and a Socratic Circle.

The keynotes at PBL World were outstanding. John Mergendoller introduced us to the new Gold Standard PBL, a revised version of the 8 Essentials model.

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Steve Ritz from the South Bronx gave one of the best presentations I have ever heard, attempting to describe it would be an injustice, just watch him here. Ramsay Musallam presented a highly engaging and quite brilliant explanation of how constructivism and cognitive load work together. He showed a gob-smacking clip of John Sweller explaining the limitations of cognitive load theory, which I really must get hold of. Ramsay’s three teaching principles are:

Is lecture happening later?
Are the products public?
Is feedback anonymous?

He showed how filmmakers withhold information to build motivation, citing the mentorship of Yoda in Star Wars and Mr Miagi in the Karate Kid, and showing how delaying the mentoring makes transformative learning possible. If you don’t know anything it’s easy to be curious. If you are given the information, there is nothing to be curious about. The key is withholding just the right amount of information as this is what creates active processing in the brain. He compared the hero’s journey in films with the processes of PBL. The hero’s journey starts with a call to adventure. In PBL the driving question is the call to adventure.

Joseph Campbell

Then Ramsay cited A. Kleon, “If it’s not public it doesn’t exist.” Kids know the value of a public audience, motivation comes from public product. He uses blogging to have students publicly produce work and he described blogging as a medium that can change the world. When Ramsay switched from using Google docs to blogs it enabled students to personalise their products. He also uses Google forms for students to provide anonymous feedback on his teaching.

There were some other workshops on the following days and I didn’t find these as useful, ending up wishing I had also completed the Advanced PBL Leadership Academy which received positive reviews from participants. Next time.

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Finally, Suzie Boss interviewed me for a Buck Institute of Education Google Hangout and we had fish tacos for dinner at the Oxbow Market. It was inspiring having an extended one on one conversation with one of the world experts in PBL and innovation in education.

Key takeaways:

The Coaching Academy greatly affirmed our current professional learning strategy of coaching, CFGs, and instructional rounds. The readings will be useful to share and I’m hoping that some of the speakers will be willing to Skype in to our Professional Learning Forum. Ramsay helped me align my thinking on Constructivism and Cognitive Load Theory, and he reminded me of the importance of an inspiring entry event. I was introduced to an EduCreations unit on Mining Personal Histories which looks useful and I was also reminded of my long-standing intent to complete a Taking IT Global online professional development course.

I have largely pushed PBL in grades K-10. I’m now wondering if I could design a PBL unit around beating the high-stakes HSC?

Education Research

Cameron Paterson , , , , ,

I have commenced several research degrees before giving up on the idea completely. On each occasion I was quickly bored out of my head. I prefer the immediate feedback loop in teaching. The Project Zero work on visible thinking and visible learning makes use of the concept of the teacher as researcher. Instructional Rounds are designed with similar intent. I believe that high school teachers have much to learn from the concept of documentation emanating from the Reggio Emilia early childhood approach.

Yesterday I noticed this blogpost from Harry Webb: a critique of PBL and the new pedagogies. The comments following the post are really interesting. Is education a research-based profession? I know that Richard Elmore claims that teaching is a profession without a practice.

I saw a tweet a few weeks ago that stated that nothing kills innovation faster than the words, “Prove it.” So what evidence do we need that something works? Where does this leave classroom teachers in the ‘my research is better than your research’ debate? For instance, I’m drawn to Ron Ritchhart’s criticism of John Hattie’s work:

“Outcomes are all that matter. And of course there is no questioning of the “outcomes” so we see this all the time in schools. As long as your students get good test results we’ll leave you alone. But there are other outcomes. Hattie is essentially say (ing), so you spoonfeed kids, so you tell them the answers, so you don’t let them think for themselves. Good test results? Great.

Also Hattie is a statistician, not an educator. He looks at outcomes. So in his world this is all there is.”

In February we are hosting researchED Sydney, a conference for educators interested in research- how to become research literate, how to tell the good from the bad, and how to find research that actually helps students in the classroom…

“the focus is on research as a tool- not a set of handcuffs- for improving practice in education. Teachers often find themselves at the end of a chain of authority, usually the bottom. What if teachers engaged directly with research, and researchers, instead? What if researchers reached out to teaching communities and listened to their practical concerns? What if teachers were research literate enough to know the difference between the snake oil that sometimes creeps into the classroom, and research that was robust, cautious and sensible?”

Hope to see you there on Saturday 21st February.