by Andrew K. Miller | Aug 18, 2014 | Blog, Edutopia
This post originally appeared on Edutopia, a site created by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, dedicated to improving the K-12 learning process by using digital media to document, disseminate, and advocate for innovative, replicable strategies that prepare students. View Original >
In the project-based learning field, we use the metaphor that projects are the “main course, not the dessert” (as coined in an article from the Buck Institute for Education). Projects are intended to create the need-to-know content and skills, and the opportunity for students to learn them in an authentic context. When teachers first design PBL projects, they are often limited. In fact, I recommend that. Teachers and students must learn to become better PBL practitioners, so limited projects can lead to more ambitious projects. One of the criteria for a more ambitious project is to integrate the disciplines. This can be easy or challenging depending on your context, grade level, and schedule structures. However, if we want to challenge our students — and ourselves — we need to create “full-course meal” projects.
Use a Variety of Planning Strategies
I wrote about many of these strategies in a previous blog post. Teachers need to give themselves lots of planning time, as it is much more complex to create an integrated project. In addition, they need to have conversations about how their disciplines can not only connect, but also add more depth to the learning. Teachers in the image above use a graphic organizer to help plan their thoughts, connections, standards, and project components. The learning objectives and project components have to fit together like a nice puzzle, and should not feel forced — students will know! In addition, there should be limited products, allowing students to synthesize their learning from all disciplines.
Larger Part of the Meal
Not all integrated projects are equal when it comes to the disciplines. Sometimes a project might hit more standards in math than in English, but those subjects are still connected in the project. This might mean that there is a lead discipline where a majority of the project might live. It’s perfectly fine to integrate a project this way. Sometimes certain disciplines are driving the project, while others are there to provide needed and authentic support. Again, it is crucial that the teacher creates the project’s need to know, and it’s OK that there might be more to learn in one discipline than in another. To continue the metaphor, a project might have social studies as the main course for the meal, with delicious sides in CTE, English, and math.
Many “Courses” in the Project
Sometimes, all components of the project can happen at the same time, where the meal includes not only what could be the larger part or “meat” of the project, but also the sides. This might mean that the project is occurring concurrently in English, science, art, and math. On the other hand, projects can move “course to course,” where some courses occur at different times, but one after another. For instance, the project might start in English and art, then move to science, then to math. This can be an effective method for teachers who are concerned about benchmarks and pacing guides. Sometimes, teachers use multiple entry events to continue the momentum as well. It is critical that no matter when the project occurs, in a sequence or concurrently, there is a focused driving question and a project idea that creates the need to know in all content areas.
Until we move out the antiquated, “silo” nature of schooling where disciplines exist on their own, integration can be a challenge. However, we need to look for opportunities to integrate in PBL, where deeper learning can deepen even more as students make connections, explore across disciplines, and synthesize the learning. A full-course meal project, while challenging to create an implement, can be a powerful learning experience for students.
by Andrew K. Miller | Jul 21, 2014 | Blog, Edutopia
This post originally appeared on Edutopia, a site created by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, dedicated to improving the K-12 learning process by using digital media to document, disseminate, and advocate for innovative, replicable strategies that prepare students. View Original >
I have a commitment to high-quality PBL experiences for all students. I want to make sure that the projects teachers and students are creating and implementing together meet some minimum quality indicators. The Buck Institute for Education has an excellent rubric to assess a PBL project, as does the New Tech Network. This can help to make sure that your projects are in fact PBL and not a “dessert project.” To that end, some of the terms and ideas that come up from time to time get on my nerves. Why? Because they run the risk of undermining high-quality PBL. Here are just some of the terms and ideas that I have issue with.
“PBL Lesson”
PBL is not a “lesson.” Lessons are short-term instructional plans that take anywhere from a part of a day to multiple days of instruction. They focus on limited learning objectives. In addition, a lesson has a limited amount of assessments. PBL, on the other hand, has many lessons built into it. In fact, teachers plan PBL projects to meet multiple learning objectives, and use the lessons within it to scaffold the learning for students. Summative assessments take the form of products, and many formative assessments are planned to ensure that students master multiple learning outcomes in a PBL project. When people use the term “PBL lesson,” it incorrectly oversimplifies the learning objectives and scope of a PBL project.
Unrelated Public Audience
Yes, one of the essential components of PBL is indeed a public audience. But PBL doesn’t simply call for the work to be made public. The public audience component needs to make sense in terms of your project. It must be connected to the challenge, scenario, or problem of the project. If you have students creating and proposing new bridge designs, it would make sense to get an architect or engineer to review the designs. Simply posting it on a website isn’t enough, and may not create the relevance and buy-in you want for students. It is critical that when teachers consider the public audience for a PBL project, the audience must connect in authentic and relevant ways. Ask yourself these two key reflection questions as you pick the right public audience:
Who needs to see our work?
Who would find our work helpful and important?
Inquiry Equals Research
Research by itself is not inquiry. The Buck Institute of Education describes inquiry in PBL this way: “Students are engaged in an extended, rigorous process of asking questions, using resources, and developing answers.” Yes, research is one part of inquiry, but again, only one part of it. Inquiry is a cycle. When teachers launch the project, they should create a Need to Know list that includes students’ questions, and they should use that list to guide the project. As students learn more, they develop new questions. These questions might be answered through teacher-designed activities and scaffolding, through research, or even through fieldwork. This process of questioning and developing answers takes more that just one cycle. If we want deeper learning in a PBL, there needs to be more that just research — there needs to be inquiry. Consider this graphic posted on TeachThought.
Voice and Choice in Products Only
One major oversimplification is that voice and choice in PBL projects has to do only with the products that students create. Yes, this is one aspect of voice and choice, but another key component is how students conduct and spend their time in the project. Teachers need to consider not only what their students create, but also how they give students space to make decisions around teamwork, tasks, and the inquiry process. Now, this level of voice and choice depends not only on the age group, but also the level of the PBL learners. At the beginning stages of PBL, there may not be as much voice and choice, but there needs to be some. Many elementary teachers, for example, lead discussions and brainstorming sessions with students to help them figure out the next steps in the project, whether that takes the form of some instruction from the teacher or more inquiry. In PBL, all students can have some level of control in the inquiry process.
These are some of the terms and ideas around PBL that get on my nerves. If we want to make sure that we are in fact doing great PBL in our schools and community, we need to avoid these misunderstandings and incorrect ideas. While PBL has a variety of implementation methods, structures, and lengths, there are some minimum criteria that a project must meet for it to be PBL.
by Andrew K. Miller | Jul 18, 2014 | 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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I’m really excited to be part of the FIT TeachingTM Cadre. It’s a group of amazing practitioners that build a culture of achievement, design purposeful lessons, and implement effective formative assessment practices. These are three components of the upcoming ASCD Summer Academy on FIT Teaching (The Framework for Intentional and Targeted TeachingTM). This is one amazing way to make sure you are “FIT” when you return to the classroom in the late summer and fall. However, if you missed out on your opportunity to reserve a seat at the ASCD Summer Academy on FIT Teaching, there are many other ways you can get “FIT” this summer.
Start Reading: The summer is one of my favorite times to catch up not only on light reading, but also on some educational reads I’ve neglected during the year. We have some time during the summer to focus our learning. Perhaps you’d like to learn a bit more on one or more aspects of FIT Teaching. You could start with the Formative Assessment Action Plan or Checking for Understanding if formative assessment is your area of learning. Or, you could read How To Create a Culture of Achievement in Your School and Classroom, if you’d like to work on build the best culture you can in your classroom or school. These books are great for a book study or even a primer before related professional development, as they have very practical strategies. Or, consider some ASCD AriasTM publications—short books that can be read in one sitting with strategies that can be put into practice right away.
Watch a Webinar: Nancy Frey and Douglas Fisher presented a webinar on June 4. They will be going over the framework and explaining what it looks like in the classroom, as well as sharing resources. In addition, they will align FIT Teaching to existing teacher evaluation frameworks, a concern for both classroom teachers and education leaders. Watch the webinar to get not only the basics, but also the rationale.
Take Time to Reflect: Take some time this summer to reflect intentionally on your use of formative assessments in the classroom. How have you used formative assessments to meet the needs of all students? How have they changed the way you teach? What steps did you take to build a classroom culture of achievement? How will you make sure your lessons are targeted to not only content goals, but also language and social goals? These are just some of the reflection questions to ponder that connect to FIT Teaching. Great teachers reflect on their practice, and you can use FIT Teaching to focus this reflection.
FIT Teaching may seem like a lot, but I’ve found it really ties all the great practices I’ve done as a teacher, as well as great practices I’ve seen, up in a nice little package, where everything connects and makes sense for not only instruction, but our students as well. If it feels like a lot, focus your learning on just one of the areas. It will surely ensure that you become a more “FIT” teacher.
by Andrew K. Miller | Jul 7, 2014 | Blog, Edutopia
This post originally appeared on Edutopia, a site created by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, dedicated to improving the K-12 learning process by using digital media to document, disseminate, and advocate for innovative, replicable strategies that prepare students. View Original >
I wrote a blog about one of the pitfalls of personalization for the ASCD Whole Child Blog. Specifically, that pitfall is the lack of engagement. With all the focus on personalization through time, pacing, and place, it can be easy to forget about the importance of engagement. No matter where students learn, when they learn, and the timing of the learning, engagement drives them to learn. When we factor all the pieces of personalization together, we can truly meet students where they are and set them on a path of learning that truly meets their needs and desires. Project-based learning can be an effective engagement framework to engage students in personalized learning.
Moving Past “Course-Based” PBL
Due to the antiquated restraints of the education system, most educators are forced to implement PBL in a “course-based” manner. This means that the project occurs within the traditional discipline structures, where there may be integration, but learning is framed within grades and competencies. In addition, start and stop times, driven by the Carnegie unit, force teachers to start and stop a project for all of their students around the same time. What if PBL wasn’t held to antiquated rules of time, space, and discipline constructs? In that ideal situation, students could be engaged in personalized projects.
Student-Designed Projects
Students at Phoenix High School have been engaged in a model similar to the one I’ve described. In it, students design their own driving questions and select the 21st century skills they want to work on, as well as the content learning objectives. They select and design their own products to show their learning in a true commitment to performance assessment. They decide on due dates, benchmarks, and the authentic audience of the work. There is also a heavy push toward community impact and work outside the four walls of the classroom.
My PBL colleague, Erin Sanchez, (formally Erin Thomas), created an amazing graphic of this continuum that shows the power of PBL truly aligned to the learner. As teaching colleagues, we did our best to implement personalized projects for students, and we experienced many of the same challenges faced by teachers who attempt to do this. However, we also saw the payoff: engagement! When students are truly in the driver’s seat of their learning, the impact of their work and the learning associated with it can be powerful!
Role of the Teacher
When teachers move toward personalized PBL, their role continues to shift, just as it does when teachers move traditional instruction to “course-based” PBL. While still involved in the design process, they also serve as advisors. Teachers frequently use question techniques to help students focus and crystalize their projects and project plans. They coach students in creating effective driving questions and student products. They’re still involved in frequent formative assessments, but instead of planning all instructional activity for the students, they help students plan it themselves. In addition, teachers help students select standards and learning targets that will align with the project and products. Teachers at Phoenix High School, for example, help ensure that all standards are targeted for a year, but do not limit the standards that students may want to hit in a project. Here the teachers create and facilitate the infrastructure for the learning rather than designing the PBL projects themselves.
Not every teacher may be ready to jump into this type of personalization. To make it work, they’ll be required to adopt a different teaching role. They’ll need strong management skills and a commitment to disruptive innovation. In addition, the current constructs of the education system may hold us back. What if we could make this dream of personalized PBL a reality? I say that we work toward it, creating a push on the system that demands change in the education of our students.
by Andrew K. Miller | Jun 13, 2014 | Blog, Edutopia
This post originally appeared on Edutopia, a site created by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, dedicated to improving the K-12 learning process by using digital media to document, disseminate, and advocate for innovative, replicable strategies that prepare students. View Original >
I know that many project-based learning teachers are fearful of fully embracing PBL due to the expectations around standardized testing. We need to honor that fear, because it’s not coming from a bad place. Why do we worry? Because we care about kids! Many of our kids are held accountable by the standardized tests they take. From Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate to end-of-course and graduation exams, we want to make sure that our students are successful. But how do we avoid the pitfall of only teaching to the test?
The Good News
Edutopia recently released a study that showed the success of PBL projects in AP government classes. These projects were deployed in two school districts that were different not only in terms of place, but also socio-economic status and demographics. Students who took the PBL course generally scored higher, especially in the areas that called for deeper understanding, where the knowledge is applied in performance tasks in the exam. This makes sense. PBL, with its emphasis on depth rather than breadth, creates learning that “sticks.” We remember learning in a context that is relevant and connected to the real world.
AP is Changing
CollegeBoard has released the major changes and a timeline for these changes on their website. A couple of key points they make around these changes are:
Greater emphasis on discipline-specific critical thinking, inquiry, reasoning, and communication skills . . .
Rigorous, research-based curricula, modeled on introductory college courses, that strike a balance between breadth of content coverage and depth of understanding.
Here we can see how 21st century skills, a major component of PBL, are being leveraged and honored in the revision. If we take the appropriate time to scaffold and assess these skills in our PBL class, we are preparing our students for the AP exam, no matter the content. Also, PBL does demand content knowledge, as we want students to learn the content in depth and apply in relevant context. In addition, multiple-choice questions are being reduced in the exams, with a greater emphasis on questions that require deeper thinking.
AP Classroom PBL Tips
Embedded AP Assessments
I wrote a blog on a similar topic about embedding standardized testing stems in a PBL project. For AP, it is very similar. The AP exams from the past are released, and teachers can continually go back and steal practice material from these exams. Instead of doing practice AP exams outside of a project, use parts that are relevant to the project. Find test questions to apply toward whatever content you might be targeting. These could be multiple-choice questions for a quiz on Friday or an essay question as part of the project. This will not only prepare students for the exam, but also give you great formative assessments to know how students are doing and adjust instruction as needed. Additionally, it includes the “test prep” within the context of a meaningful project.
The Meaty Content
As teachers look at past exams, they should analyze the tests for the content that is often tested or is worth a large part of the exam. We want this specific content to stick, perhaps more than other content. PBL can help the learning stick for these areas of the exam. It’s similar to power standards, where teachers target learning objectives that are heavily assessed, complex, and perhaps challenging. PBL projects are rigorous and complex, and can provide a great space to hit these major content areas of an AP exam.
Target Critical Thinking
We all want our students to be critical thinkers, and much of the AP exam requires a heavy deal of critical thinking, especially with the changes that are occurring. AP teachers should be focusing on the critical thinking skills needed as well as on the AP content itself. By doing this, teachers are preparing students to navigate critical thinking questions, tasks, and prompts regardless of the content they encounter on the exam. Consider using this rubric from the Buck Institute to support students in building their critical thinking skills.
Hopefully these tips will help teachers design and implement PBL projects that help students learn important content within the AP framework and the skills needed to access the AP exam itself. The AP exam is changing, and students are finding success on that exam through PBL projects. We as educators can support our AP students by creating learning that sticks through PBL!
by Andrew K. Miller | May 26, 2014 | 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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We already know about best practices in assessment. We know that we should use formative assessment to look for patterns in errors and adjust instruction. We also know that we need to have clear learning targets to assess, and that these assessments can be common. We know a lot. One area we don’t yet know as much about is how time factors into assessment.
Time is always an issue for educators. We never have enough, and we often feel we must rush through the material. Great educators try not to let time get in the way of good instruction. But even then, time can get in the way of better use of assessment. We use some sort of formative assessment exercise to check for understanding at the end of the day’s lesson; we give end-of-unit assessments; and our districts and states often take a specific week to give an end-of-course exam or grade-level assessment. What’s interesting here is that time is still the inflexible piece.
Why do we always assess students at the same time and let that be the governing factor for student achievement? We know that students each learn at their own pace. Some take longer; some take a shorter amount of time. We have the same high expectations for our students, but we also know students take different amounts of time to get to those high expectations. One critical element of personalization is that time is no longer the driving factor. Instead of relying on the Carnegie unit, students show mastery and are assessed when they are ready. Granted, so many outside forces are demanding our time, but how might we move past them to meet students were they are in the assessment process?
Create Rigorous Competencies
To start being more flexible with when to give assessments, you need to begin with the end in mind. Many schools that have become more flexible with when they give critical summative assessments create rigorous competencies from standards, including the Common Core. Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey also advocate for this:
“Grade-level teams or departments usually specify course competencies and corresponding assignments. Competencies should reflect the state standards while offering students an array of ways to demonstrate mastery, not just paper-and-pencil tasks. The competency assessments should be numerous enough that students can adequately gauge their own progress at attaining competencies; generally 7 to 10 per academic year is best” (2009, p. 24).
Competencies are built from standards and include measurable and transferable learning objectives. When designing a competency, you keep both academic and 21st century skills in mind so that the competency moves toward applied learning of multiple learning objectives. When you cluster standards and objectives like this, you can be more comfortable designing flexible assessments to meet these synthesized objectives.
Be Flexible When You Summatively Assess
It is perfectly appropriate to formatively assess the whole class after giving a lesson, and often educators formatively assess students individually. Through the formative assessment process, we can differentiate, give feedback, and meet the needs of students. When we formatively assess, we know when students are ready or not ready for the next steps. This is where time often gets in the way of good intention. If students are not ready for the summative assessment, why should we make them do it? It may be appropriate to allow some students to take the summative assessment after other students have taken it. Again, this should be a rigorous performance assessment that demands construction and application of knowledge. Summative assessments should only been given when students are ready, and, therefore, we must personalize when we give them.
Allow for Late Work
This is probably one of the most challenging shifts for veteran teachers. On the one hand, we want to foster good work ethic, which means adhering to deadlines; on the other hand, we want to be flexible to meet the needs of all students. The key here is to know what are you are assessing. Are you assessing work ethic or content? Students should never be punished for not learning content in a specific amount of time, hence allowing work to be late. Some educators find it appropriate to assess the 21st century skill of work ethic, but they in turn do not let that affect their content learning grade. Once you allow for late work, you can have students complete assessments, mostly summative, at various times.
The movement toward flexible time for assessment is obviously challenging, but these steps can make the shift more manageable—even in the face of immovable educational demands on our time. If we begin with the end in mind when designing assessments, we can use personalization to keep time as a malleable component to meet the needs of all students. This is a move toward true personalization of assessment.
Reference
Fisher, D. & Frey, N. (2009, November). Feed up, back, forward. Educational Leadership, 67(3), 20–25.
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