by Andrew K. Miller | Sep 18, 2012 | ASCD, Blog
This post originally appeared on InService, the ASCD community blog. ASCD (formerly the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development) is an educational leadership organization with 160,000 members in 148 countries, including professional educators from all levels and subject areas––superintendents, supervisors, principals, teachers, professors of education, and school board members.
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This past Monday, I had the honor of hosting an #engchat on the topic “Project-Based Learning (PBL) in the English/Language Arts (ELA) classroom.”
[Connect with ELA-minded educators in real-time #engchats on Twitter on Mondays from 7:00 to 8:00 p.m. eastern time.]
During the conversation, some crucial advice came up, and teachers both learned and gave their best advice on designing PBL projects that teach and assess ELA standards, particularly the Common Core State Standards.
Here are four key take-aways from the conversation:
1. Know PBL vs. Projects. I’ve seen this confusion around PBL and projects a lot in my work with teachers, and this Twitter chat was no exception. Projects aren’t bad, but they are not PBL. Projects usually occur after much of the teaching has already happened, and often take the shape of a culminating performance assessment. In the ELA class, this might look like reading a text such as Romeo and Juliet, and then creating a video where the students make a modern interpretation of it. A traditional project usually refers to just this summative assessment video piece.
A PBL project, on the other hand, is the entire learning process—from the summative and formative assessments to the lessons and activities that scaffold the learning. Students might be asked to create a dating guide for other teens, given a text (like Romeo and Juliet) to learn examples (and nonexamples) from it, and use what they learn along the way to create their product. The teacher would be teaching lessons and scaffolding material along the way to support that work.
2. Invite Authentic Writing. PBL calls for authentic products that are shared with a public audience. Instead of just an essay, students could write proposals, guides, letters, and other writing pieces where the writing is meeting a real need. These writing pieces are critiqued and refined as they are constructed by experts, self, and peer evaluations.
3. Create the Need to Read. When doing a PBL project in the ELA classroom, a common mistake is reading an entire text before doing a project. This defeats one of the crucial engagement strategies of PBL: creating the need to read.
Instead of reading the whole text upfront, teachers should give the engaging project upfront to students, where reading the text is essential to performing well on the project. Through this, teachers can scaffold the reading process with the great activities and lessons that they already do. In addition, students use what they learn to work on the project along the way. This creates manageable application of knowledge for all students and creates an ongoing, relevant connection to the text.
4. Don’t “Cover” Reading Standards, Target Them. During the #engchat, many teachers were concerned about targeting Common Core State Standards, especially in literature. My advice is to target specific standards that the text or piece of literature really demonstrates well. There is a tendency to cover all the possible pieces in a text, but in reality, we don’t need to. We have a year, and have time to hit the targets in-depth at intentional times. PBL projects create this opportunity. Use the PBL project to go in-depth on targeted standards, rather than trying to cover all the possible standards that a text might be able to demonstrate.
Designing PBL for the ELA classroom isn’t an easy task, but I believe PBL provides invaluable opportunities to engage students in reading and creating authentic products for real-world use. PBL can “tie up in a bow” all the literacy strategies and scaffolding that teachers must do while fostering inquiry processes for students.
by Andrew K. Miller | May 24, 2012 | ASCD, Blog
This post originally appeared on InService, the ASCD community blog. ASCD (formerly the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development) is an educational leadership organization with 160,000 members in 148 countries, including professional educators from all levels and subject areas––superintendents, supervisors, principals, teachers, professors of education, and school board members.
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Often, we forget to teach thinking skills to students. Project-based learning (PBL) by design, demands that these skills be taught and assessed.
Every PBL project has 21st century skills that are taught, assessed, and transferable across various disciplines.
How to teach and assess critical 21st century thinking skills, however, may not always be readily apparent from the way standards are written. Take these examples from the Common Core:
Reading Standard for Literature Grade 7: Analyze how particular elements of a story or drama interact (e.g., how setting shapes the characters or plot).
Math Standard – Linear, Quadratic and Exponential Models: Construct and compare linear, quadratic, and exponential models and solve problems.
If you unpack these standards, you can separate the concepts from the skills. Concepts like “elements,” “drama,” “quadratic” and “linear” emerge, but so do skills. In this case, analysis and comparison are embedded in the standards.
Analysis, for example, needs to be taught discreetly in order to scaffold instruction toward this standard, as a whole. Likewise, if you have a Math PBL project on Linear equations, then students also need to be skilled at making comparisons. When backwards designing PBL projects to the Common Core standards, be sure to include lessons and activities that teach not only the concepts covered in the standards, but the thinking skills embedded in the Common Core that support learning, across disciplines.
by Andrew K. Miller | Mar 30, 2012 | ASCD, Blog, Whole Child Blog
This post originally appeared on The Whole Child blog, an ASCD initiative to call on educators, policymakers, business leaders, families, and community members to work together on a whole child approach to education. View Original >
Game-based learning (GBL) is a current trend in education reform and, as it becomes more widely implemented, we must make sure we are not simply focusing on the tools. Using games for learning is a great tool, but only if the use is intentional and aligned to best practices for student learning. GBL can, in fact, be aligned to the Whole Child Tenets—healthy, safe, engaged, supported, and challenged—further leveraging it as a legitimate instructional model to reach all students.
HEALTHY
Each student enters school healthy and learns about and practices a healthy lifestyle.
There are many games for learning out there that promote health and well-being. Superbetter was just released and it includes a learning platform with quests and challenges targeted toward various physical fitness and mental well-being goals. Another fun mobile example is Run, Zombies!, an app that turns running into a zombie apocalypse story. There are plenty more games to choose from out there, and again, the games can help engage students in healthy activities in a fun way.
SAFE
Each student learns in an environment that is physically and emotionally safe for students and adults.
One of the essential design principles of GBL (and games in general) is the safety to fail. Often in education, whether through punishing students by grading formative assessments (or not replacing earlier failures with successful summative assessments) or lack of multiple drafts, we teach students that they only have one shot to get the right answer. Games on the other hand make trial and error a safe norm. We can use GBL to foster a safe space for learning in our classrooms.
ENGAGED
Each student is actively engaged in learning and is connected to the school and broader community.
GBL’s intent is to create an engaging environment where students learn both content and 21st century skills. Games engage our students through careful creation. From leader boards and avatars, to freedom to fail and immediate feedback, games and game mechanics can provide another learning model to engage our students.
SUPPORTED
Each student has access to personalized learning and is supported by qualified, caring adults.
GBL aligns specifically to the “personalized” aspect of this tenet. Although games are often collaborative, all games have important, individualized quests and missions. In a game that requires learning of content, the game is highly personalized. Success is only achieved through the individual’s play and learning.
CHALLENGED
Each graduate is challenged academically and prepared for success in college or further study and for employment and participation in a global environment.
Games are often quite challenging. Game designers spend time making the “flow” of the game perfect, where there is just enough challenge, but not so much that the game is impossible. We can use GBL to create an appropriate challenge to learn and practice content.
Through intentional and careful implementation, educators can use GBL and various games to address and meet the needs of the whole child.
by Andrew K. Miller | Feb 16, 2012 | ASCD, Blog, Whole Child Blog
This post originally appeared on The Whole Child blog, an ASCD initiative to call on educators, policymakers, business leaders, families, and community members to work together on a whole child approach to education. View Original >
PBL can create engaging learning for all students, but that depth of learning requires careful, specific design. Part of this engagement is the element of critical thinking. Complex problem solving and higher-order thinking skills, coupled with other elements such as authenticity, voice, and choice, create an engaging context for learning.
One of the essential elements of a PBL project is the teaching and assessing of 21st century skills, including collaboration, communication, and critical thinking. The key takeaway here is teaching AND assessing. You cannot assess something you do not teach. How do we teach critical thinking? Through intentional instruction and intentional experiences. Therefore we need to make sure that the overall PBL journey is one that has both. Here are some elements of a PBL project that you can double- and triple-check to make sure your students are critically thinking
Driving Question: Through repeated practice, you can create a rigorous driving question that is open-ended, complex, and at the same time kid-friendly. A driving question is not “Google-able” but may contain many “on-the-surface” questions. By creating a driving question that requires higher-order thinking skills, the overall project will be infused with critical thinking, as it is present and used throughout the entire project. If you need help with a driving question, please check out these posts in which I go into more detail.
Audience and Purpose: One of the pitfalls that teachers can run into when designing their projects is picking a mediocre purpose and audience. When that happens, the product often becomes a regurgitation of knowledge. If the audience of the project is just the teacher, then the product may or may not have a rigorous purpose that requires critical thinking. If the project is for an outside audience, the purpose may become more complex, because that audience’s lens and needs are unique and challenging. If you pick an audience outside of the classroom and a purpose that is rigorous and challenging, then the project will require some critical thinking.
In-Depth Inquiry: Inquiry is a process that requires investigation, questioning, interpreting, and creating. This process is repeated over and over, because the inquiry itself cannot be finished in cycle. When creating a project, ask yourself if the project will require repeated cycles through the inquiry process. In-depth inquiry leads to repeated moments of critical thinking
Don’t forget that when you demand critical thinking skills, then you must scaffold these thinking skills with lessons, modeling, etc. If you are demanding that students evaluate, you must teach them how. This ensures success on the project and, more importantly, that students are learning how to critically think. The Buck Institute for Education has a great project design rubric that can help you refine your PBL projects to ensure the highest quality learning environment and includes the elements above. This rubric, coupled with the lens of critical thinking as part of the design, can ensure both engagement and deeper learning.
by Andrew K. Miller | Feb 2, 2012 | ASCD, Blog
This post originally appeared on ASCD Express, a regular ASCD Publication focused on critical topics in education. This article appeared in Vol 7. Issue 9, the focus topic being effective school turnaround models and practices. View Original >
Those of us working in online education tout how innovative online education can be, and yes, there are many innovative components to online learning: traditional structures of time, space, the Carnegie unit, and what is considered the classroom are either reframed or broken. By default, online education can lead to some innovative practices, but there is no guarantee of rigorous curriculum.
When I look at curriculum in many online courses, I see many promises and many disappointments. Many courses still mimic the same “sit, get, and give back” mentality. Even a fun and engaging performance assessment can mask the fact that there is no rigor. More important than cool tech tools, online courses should attend to three requirements for challenging curriculum: engagement, collaboration, and construction of knowledge.
Engagement
We need to think about engagement not simply as a singular part of an equation, but also as a complex combination of factors, including management, curriculum and pedagogy.
Conrad and Donaldson, in their online education staple Engaging the Online Learner, say that project-based learning and constructivist principles framed in a collaborative environment lead to engaged online learners.
They write, “Engaged learning is focused on the learner, whose role is integral to the generation of new knowledge. In an engaged online environment, each learner’s actions contribute not only to the individual knowledge, but to the overall community knowledge development as well.”
After you’ve set the stage for engagement, check out the book by Boss and Krauss, Reinventing Project-Based Learning, to align your curriculum with the best technology.
Collaboration
If we want 21st century learners, then we must put them in an environment where true collaboration is a requirement. I am disappointed when I look at an online course and the only sort of collaboration I see is sharing ideas or work on a discussion board. Sharing is a great first step, but creating something new as a team is better.
Instead of just an individual report on a world religion, why not also have students collaborate in a group to create a podcast debunking common misconceptions on a religion. As Sir Ken Robinson says, “Collaboration is the stuff of growth.”
Online courses should balance group assessments and individual assessments. Through this, the individual is held accountable for the learning targets, and the group is honing a 21st century skill, solving problems, coming to consensus, and learning from each other to create something together.
Create this structure for your students and then explore the cool tools that can help your students collaborate to create.
Construction of Knowledge
Although activities and lessons can work on basic skills, these should be formative, not summative, and should be filtered through the larger task that requires construction of knowledge. Students should be creating something new with the content or skills being taught, creating something for a problem or project that has a complex and open-ended answer.
Instead of having students create a brochure or poster about germs, have students come up with a plan to limit the spread of viruses and bacteria for the school. Students will still be required to learn about the content of germs, but they will have to use that information to solve a problem that has a complex and open-ended answer.
In Sync
These three components promote one another. Challenging assessments that require construction of knowledge require students to collaboratively solve problems and require the teacher to use engagement to promote collaboration and keep student interest.
These components are your quality indicators when you are looking for the best online curriculum.
by Andrew K. Miller | Nov 24, 2011 | ASCD, Blog, Whole Child Blog
This post originally appeared on The Whole Child blog, an ASCD initiative to call on educators, policymakers, business leaders, families, and community members to work together on a whole child approach to education. View Original >
OK, so I am a gamer. Not that I have the time anymore, but I do venture now and again into a game, whether a first-person shooter (FPS) or role-playing video game (RPG). I am also a big promoter of Game-Based Learning (GBL) and Gamification. To clarify, GBL is when games are used to balance the learning of subject matter through gameplay with specific learning outcomes in mind. Gamification is applying the concepts of game design to learning to engage in problem solving. Again both are geared toward building student engagement and learning important content. GBL is one method that creates not only a great opportunity to engage students in content, but also keep them active.
Brain-based learning research tells us that being active in and around rigorous learning can help keep students energized in the learning. During the activity, oxygen-rich blood flows to the brain which increases the ability to concentrate. John Medina, published a great book about how movement can increase learning. PBS did a story about a school where students took active “brain breaks” that kept students moving around the classroom. There are many ways to integrate activate movement on a regular basis for students, and using video games is another opportunity.
Microsoft’s Kinect is the key to using games for learning that require movement. Kinect demands students physically interact with the content in front of them. Whether it’s jumping in an obstacle course or moving hands to push buttons, the body is not only engaged in a game, but also in movement. Although it may seem like a far cry to link these games to authentic learning outcomes, the idea is to balance the gaming with the learning; increasing blood flow and engagement while gaming increases concentration for learning content. The other good news is that there are a plethora of resources in this area, some from Microsoft itself. They have a library, some with specific targets toward physical education, which has activities and lessons for students. These classroom activities align the video games to the Common Core State Standards (although they could be a bit more specific), and indicate which video games are necessary. I highly recommend going to DonorsChoose.org to create a funding opportunity for a Kinect in your classroom.
In addition, a Twitter friend of mine, Johnny Kissko, has dedicated much of his work to using Kinect in the classroom with his website KinectEDucation. His site is complete with not only lessons that are tied to specific games, but also applications that can be downloaded and purchased. Because there are so many resources out there, there is no reason for a teacher to not give it a shot. Using video games, and specifically the Kinect, can allow us to harness the power of brain-based learning and the engagement of video games to create student concentration and engagement.
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