by Andrew K. Miller | Oct 11, 2013 | 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 >
Authenticity — we know it works! There is research to support the value of authentic reading and writing. When students are engaged in real-world problems, scenarios and challenges, they find relevance in the work and become engaged in learning important skills and content. In addition, while students may or may not do stuff for Mr. Miller, they are more likely to engage when there is a real-world audience looking at their work, giving them feedback, and helping them improve. This is just one critical part of project-based learning. However, maybe you aren’t ready for fully authentic projects. Where are some good places to start taking the authenticity up a notch in your classroom?
Authentic Products
Does the work matter? Does it look like something people create in the real world? It should. Much of the work we do in the classroom may not be like the real world. Wouldn’t it be great if it were? Now, I’m not saying you need to make every piece in your classroom completely authentic, but consider having your major summative assessments reflect the real world. If you truly want the work to matter, make your products not only look authentic, but actually be authentic. Follow this link for a list to consider.
Needs Assessment
How do you make the work be authentic? One way to is to conduct a needs assessment of your community. You can facilitate students to conduct this needs assessment by having them design the type of data to be collected, collecting and analyzing that data, and then developing action plans. These action plans can include real-world projects that you help your students align to curriculum standards. Paired with authentic products, the work now matters to the community and can make a difference.
Authentic Audience and Assessment
Edutopia has a great section on Authentic Assessment that you can use to get started. It goes over definitions, features videos, and includes tools to help make the assessment process more authentic. Part of this is having an authentic audience to give your students feedback. Sometimes that audience can be parents, but often it’s made up of people who, in their everyday lives, do the same or similar types of work to what your students are doing in the PBL project. So instead of just a public audience, make it an authentic audience. Remember, this audience doesn’t just participate at the end of the work, but is engaged throughout.
Authentic Tools
When you partner with an authentic audience that can give honest feedback about the work, they may also be able to provide you with authentic tools. These tools might be construction-type materials, or they might be technological. Different work calls for different tools, and having the right tools can help students do more authentic work. As you plan your work and projects, find those real-world connections, and ask them what tools they use.
Whenever I build PBL projects, I try to make them as authentic as possible, not only because it helps engage students, but because the students start becoming social change agents. Education shouldn’t stop at engagement in learning — it should be about engagement in our world in community!
by Andrew K. Miller | Sep 27, 2013 | 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 >
Providing your students with a public audience is not only a critical part of the project-based learning process, but it’s also a great strategy for building authenticity into assignments to create work that matters. We often leverage our students’ parents and guardians in this process because 1) they are easily accessible, and 2) they are our partners in their children’s learning plans. Why not then continue and build this partnership in PBL? John Larmer wrote a great blog about how to build parent support for PBL, and one of the best ways he mentions is to keep them involved in the PBL project you launch in your classroom. Here are some strategies to consider as you leverage parents for your next PBL project.
Use Technology
I know many teachers use technology tools like Edmodo in their PBL projects, and Edmodo has a way to set up parent accounts. Use Twitter as a backchannel chat with a classroom hashtag to communicate. Use Skype to bring in parents who are experts on content and skills as well as for entry events.
Parents as Experts
Our parents and guardians are experts not only in a wide range of job-specific content areas and skills, but also in hobbies and other outside interests. To explore this resource, send home a survey to ask parents about their interests and areas of expertise. As you discover what is just phone call away, start building a huge database of experts who can support your PBL activites before, during and after the project.
Parents as Assessors
If you plan to have parents or guardians as part of the assessment process, make sure to orient them to the rubrics they will be using. Don’t think that they need to look at the entire rubric. If you have a team of parents and guardians assessing a presentation, for example, jigsaw it! Or perhaps just have them use a checklist along the way as well. The other key piece here is to have parents and guardians give growth-producing feedback. Give them stems such as “I like . . .” and “A good next step would be . . .” This will help focus the feedback and keep it balanced.
Parents as Planners
One very powerful way to make parents or guardians a critical part of the PBL project is to involve them in the planning process. Having a content expert with you in the planning stages can help ensure that all gaps are filled and that you’ll have more eyes to ensure a quality project. In addition, seek out parents who are familiar with the Critical Friends Group critique protocol, because they can provide excellent feedback before you launch the PBL project. (Don’t forget to involve the students in your planning process as well).
Thank You!
It’s easy to forget this part. Please say thank you to your parents. Record a class video. Have students write thank you notes. Send a letter home signed by the class. This seemingly little piece can go a long way toward a continued partnership with your parents and guardians.
As you partner with parents in your PBL projects, remember this one piece of advice: just ask! You aren’t going to get anything if you don’t — and the worst-case scenario is still the same. But keep asking! Before you know it, you will have many parents and guardians who are more than willing to help in whatever way they can. This will lead to a better school community and buy-in for authentic PBL.
by Andrew K. Miller | Sep 17, 2013 | 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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Educational leaders, I have an important announcement for you! (You’ll get the joke later). We are always pressed for time. Many of us do not have collaborative planning time, or if we do, it is limited. There is never enough time, and so we have to be creative, both in creating space for work and in changing how we would normally spend our time. The staff meeting is one place where we can be creative with time and refine it to meet our professional learning goals. Here are some things you might do to restructure and “flip” the staff meeting.
Quit the Announcements – You know what gets old at a staff meeting? Announcements. At every staff meeting, I was always frustrated when we spent 15–20 minutes going over logistics and making announcements. You can record these announcements, create a document, or send an e-mail and spend the time asking clarifying questions instead. This way, you can save time for better work; work that teachers will find more meaningful.
Teacher Led PD – Based on needs assessments of teachers, we create targeted professional learning activities. Frankly, we don’t need to do this creation ourselves. Our teachers have great ideas, and we can ask them to share these ideas that are aligned to faculty and staff needs. We can co-create professional learning sessions. Build your teacher leaders and have them model great instruction by leading focused professional learning.
Ongoing Protocols – Discussions can sometimes get out of hand. We are educators, and often we love to talk…and talk…and talk. I’m guilty of this as much as the next teacher. Let’s honor the talk, but also focus it. Choose professional learning protocols to use in staff meetings. Perhaps it’s a critique protocol or looking at student work protocol. Regardless, your staff meeting can now become a time where revision and reflection occur, and student learning is the focus of the time.
These are just three ideas you might use to start flipping your staff meeting. It can be a valuable time for professional learning, but only if we are creative with that time and shed some of the “traditional” ways they have been used. How do you foresee flipping your classroom for the upcoming year?
by Andrew K. Miller | Sep 11, 2013 | 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 >
Play has earned some inaccurate baggage of connotations over the years. When we talk about playing in education or play time, many would push back that it is not appropriate to play in classroom, or that play is not good learning. This could not be farther from the truth. I think Fred Rogers put it best:
“Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning. But for children, play is serious learning. Play is really the work of childhood.”
Remember when you were a kid and were always playing? You often made mistakes, but those mistakes never got in the way of you trying again, trying something new, and ultimately coming to a place of success. Wouldn’t it be great if we got just a little more of that into the classroom?
Why Play?
Play does so many positive things for us in terms of learning. When we play:
We build skills like confidence
We strengthen relations with others
We develop creative skills
We problem solve and tinker
We learn to be flexible
People who play learn to question something, predict an outcome, and evaluate their predictions through the process of play. When we play, we persist through challenges — and we even enjoy it. Play builds excellent social and emotional skills and helps create a culture where those skills are valued at school. Probably one of the most important aspects of play is the way it treats failure and mistakes as non-punitive, ensuring that we have opportunities to learn from whatever went wrong. Yes, play makes failure fun. I love the use of the word “tinker” to describe play. It’s serious work, but it’s also fun work. Play values the process of learning as well and the product.
Elements of Play
The Strong, an organization devoted to the study and exploration of play, has broken down the elements of play. They use this great equation:
Play = Anticipation + Surprise + Pleasure + Understanding + Strength + Poise
Their Elements of Play graphic breaks down this equation in emotions. For example, anticipation is associated with interest, readiness and ultimately wonderment. Understanding is associated with empathy, skill and ultimately mastery. When I look at these emotions and descriptors, I get excited about creating them in my classroom. I want to work in a room where we create things like joy, ingenuity, awakening and even balance. I’d love to foster these elements of play by actually creating time to play.
Ideas for You
The Museum of Play is just one organization that champions the cause for play. They offer many resources including studies, activities and also great quotes about play. In addition, as you play with students, you can teach and assess creativity. As articulated in an earlier blog on creativity, it is important to break down what creativity means for students, encourage play, and set creativity goals as they play over and over again. You can develop Makerspaces in your schools and communities to foster tinkering and play in all kinds of contexts. Use game-based learning as a model, and create either “gamified” units or use games as part of the instruction. There are so many possibilities for embedding play in your everyday instruction. From these possibilities you can help reframe failure. It can be become not only non-punitive, but also a learning opportunity. More importantly, the forgiving context of play can make failure fun!
As you head back to school, don’t forget to carve time out for playing with kids. Let’s honor the reality that all of our students are kids, and because of that they need time to play. Although play may look different from 1st grade to 12th grade, all kids want to play, and we can use play to motivate students toward being creative, toward collaborating and tinkering in our classrooms, toward creating high-quality work and assessments. Also, don’t forget to play as an educator — you need it, too! Like I say to my fellow educators and students, “Let’s have some fun and fail forward!”
by Andrew K. Miller | Aug 19, 2013 | 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 >
Let’s have an honest conversation on the issue of coverage. Whenever I work with teachers, I always hear the genuine concern about coverage of material. And it’s true — most teachers, based on structures beyond their control, are forced to cover a lot of material in the year.
AP teachers must cover world history and chemistry content to prepare students for the AP tests, a series of exams that call not only for knowing a lot of content, but also its application. Non-AP teachers also face the same issue of covering many standards in a short year. I work with teachers to build great PBL projects that focus on deeper learning, and I always hear, “I have so much content to cover this year that I don’t have time to do a PBL project.” Again, this concern comes from a real place. I’ve experienced it both as a student in the classroom and teacher in AP and PBL classrooms. However, I have a few responses for this common concern.
Starting the Conversation
“How’s the coverage going for you?!?”
The typical story here is this. We have a lot of material to cover, either because the pacing guide calls for it, or because we mapped out our year to cover that material. We prepare our students for an exam that will occur in a week or two. We are successful in preparing them for that exam through a variety of lessons, lectures and instructional activities. Most students pass the test, but after the weekend or even weeks later, they can’t remember the content. They are then forced to relearn or review content later. Sometimes we must take up class time to do this. In general, coverage doesn’t ensure that the learning “sticks” and may even take away from time that we need to teach other content and skills.
“Do you really cover everything?!?”
Most teachers who cling to the excuse of coverage aren’t actually covering everything. Because students have different individual needs and the character of a classroom changes every year, teachers differentiate and make adjustments to meet those needs. This means that some standards or learning objectives may not be given the content they need. I was guilty of this when I taught world history. I just didn’t have time to do it all. However, teachers still make good choices here. They look at the standardized or AP tests and pick the content they’ll hit during that year to make sure students are prepared. If Gothic literature or specific texts are frequently on the AP literature exam, I make sure to pick those texts. Let’s just honor that fact that we make good choices for our students and yet may not cover everything we want to or need to cover.
I admit these questions are somewhat crass and could be perceived as rude. However, I am simply trying to elicit an honest conversation on coverage of material. My personal opinion is that we use this excuse of coverage as a crutch when we, as good teachers, are actually not as committed to it as we think.
Covering Your Bases with PBL
If you are concerned about coverage of material as you build your PBL projects, consider these few ideas to alleviate your fears. They will help you focus on “uncoverage” and steer you more effectively toward deeper learning.
1. Pick the Major or “Meaty” Content and Skills
Some of our standards are easily taught and assessed in a limited time frame, while other standards and learning objectives require a length of time. This is either because of what the pacing guide dictates or because our teaching experience has told us so. The “meatier” content and skills are a great place to aim for deeper learning. They take time because that’s often part of deeper learning, so why not use a PBL project?
2. PBL Projects Uncover Multiple Standards
In addition to “meaty” standards, teachers have targeted multiple standards for a PBL project. A PBL project can have a single-disciplined or multi-disciplined focus. There is space for teaching and assessing multiple standards. In addition, you can use a PBL project to “spiral” in standards you may have already targeted for continued practice and assessment.
3. PBL Projects Require Critical Thinking
It we want the knowledge to “stick,” then we must have students think critically with it. When designing a good PBL project, we make sure that it simply isn’t regurgitation of knowledge. If I see a PBL project going this way, then it might be a design flaw. It could be a problem with the driving question, the rubric or a number of other factors. Design with critical thinking in mind, and make sure the PBL project demands it.
There are of course other reasons that PBL projects work, and there is research to support it. I think we need to stop using the excuse of “coverage,” first because it may not even be an honest excuse, and second because it isn’t working. Let’s do what’s best for our students and focus on “uncoverage” by creating PBL projects and units that focus on deeper learning of the content, where students remember the material, think critically with it, and apply it in new contexts.
What are your strategies to reframe the conversation of coverage to “uncoverage?”
by Andrew K. Miller | Aug 1, 2013 | 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 had a great time at the PBL World Conference in so many ways: as a presenter, as a panelist, as a listener, as a collaborator, and even as the subject of art. (Now, that is something I would never, ever have guessed!) Everyone took away his or her own ideas for implementing PBL projects, but one theme I noticed throughout the entire conference was assessment. Assessment remains a challenge for many of us who do PBL, but I left the conference feeling more confident not only in the assessment practices I have done, but also in generally accepted best practices. Here are some of my big takeaways:
Assess 21st Century Skills
There were many “deep-dive” sessions on teaching and assessing 21st century skills, from critical thinking to creativity and innovation. (I myself recently wrote a blog on the latter.) This may be a challenge for some teachers, as most of us are good with assessing our content area, but not necessarily 21st century skills. Use already-existing rubrics to target quality indicators for scaffolding activities where students learn and practice aspects of the 4Cs. If we truly value 21st century skills, then they must be taught and assessed as we would do with any other content area’s knowledge and skills.
Assess Process and Product
It is crucial to assess not only the product of a PBL project, but also the process along the way. Formative assessment is key here. There must be benchmarks not only in terms of content, but also product. Traditional formative assessment tools can be used along the way for students to reflect and revise their work, as well as set goals. In order to ensure not only quality but also critical learning of content and skills, we must value the PBL process as well as the product.
Authentic Assessment
“Keep It Real” was Sam Siedel’s call for PBL — in other words, to make the work authentic and meaningful to students. When students create products, it is crucial that the assessment is authentic. Instead of doing all the work yourself, have an authentic audience contribute. Since the students are doing meaningful work, it only makes sense to get that work to the experts and audience who need it. In addition, let’s think about authentic assessment as something that’s also student-driven. Have students assess their own work and well as the work of their team members and peers.
Embed Standardized Assessments
I wrote a blog on this subject awhile ago, and it still holds true: standardized tests remain a concern for teachers. In fact, they are a concern for teachers across the globe. Educators I worked with from Canada, India, Israel and Indonesia all expressed the same concerns and fears around standardized tests. The key here is embedding that material within PBL projects to keep them somewhat meaningful while still practicing for the standardized test.
In addition to these tips, check out Edutopia’s Classroom Guide: Top Ten Tips for Assessing Project-Based Learning. The ideas I’ve just described are articulated in that guide, along with more assessment strategies to draw from.
What are your best tips for Assessment in PBL?
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