Inspiration
I designed my first project-based learning unit in 2009. My school Board had been looking at ways that our school could become more progressive, and we had formed a team to go out and see what other schools were doing around the idea of project-based learning. I volunteered to be on this team because I had been trained in project-based learning as part of my teaching credential program at Sonoma State. However, I entered the teaching profession at a time when PBL was not encouraged and standards-based learning was the rage.
At this same time, the two prevailing paradigms around language instruction were phonics driven instruction vs. whole language instruction. Whole language instruction was a more holistic way of looking at reading instruction, and it had many useful precepts, but it did not provide the in-depth systematic phonics instruction that children needed to “crack the code”. Some children do, in fact, crack the code before they arrive at kindergarten, and these are usually the children who are read to by parents the most. This fact fueled the argument for a whole language approach. This is why the battle waged for almost a decade until the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) initiative put a final nail in the coffin of whole language instruction although there are proponents remaining.
With the adoption and implementation of NCLB in 2002 (cite here) and its focus on more highly educated teachers with the proper credentials, test scores began to rise slowly but surely. The problem was that the paradigm shifted so radically that testing became the “raison de etre” for many school districts, and Superintendent and principal jobs were won or lost based almost solely on the ability to “raise test scores” for the school or district. Teachers were spared this culling due the strong teachers union that fought tooth and nail to keep teacher evaluations from being connected to student test scores.
In 2009, the school where I taught was a public school, but our numbers were so low (under 100) that we were in a unique position to “try PBL” as most of our test scores could not be revealed in the local newspaper due to our low numbers. The system is designed to protect the anonymity of individual students. With very low class sizes, this is problematic, so scores are only reported if your class size is over 10 students. (http://star.cde.ca.gov/star2012/SearchPanel.aspxcite here)
We would still be accountable for our standardized test scores and vulnerable to “state takeover” if they dipped, but we believed the process would help us raise scores in the long run, so it was a bit of a leap of faith. We were also very lucky because we had a very good school board with several teachers on it that understood the underlying philosophies of project-based learning. All the teachers at our school eventually dove in at different times and to varying degrees until finally this year our Board resolved to join the New Tech Network of schools which is a network of teachers using project-based learning in their classrooms and sharing a computer system called Echo (http://www.abileneisd.org/domain/215) to plan and share their systems and units. This network of teachers emphasize teaching with “the 4 Cs”: communication, collaboration, critical thinking and creativity while helping to develop 21st Century skills (http://www.nea.org/tools/52217.htm). You do not need to belong to a “club” in order to implement PBL, but the rural nature of our school and the fact that we did not have peers in our own grade level to collaborate with made it an imperative for us.
Much of what I have learned about project-based learning also came from instruction I received in a GATE credential program offered by Napa County and run through San Bernardino State University, as well as from attendance at yearly CUE conferences and Napa County Office of Education (NCOE) technology trainings. Each year I have grown in my understanding of teaching through the PBL method, but I am far from an expert. Each year, I learn a little more and refine and reflect on my process. As with any type of teaching strategy, you are never really done learning, and you are always searching for someone who is a step or two ahead of you from whom you can learn.
I was not as inspired to share as I was inspired to continue learning, but part of this masters program requires the sharing of what we have learned, so I had to think hard about what I wanted to say around the topic of project-based learning and 21st century skills. The way that I have chosen to do PBL is to study different countries, and it may be unique, but it is not earth shatteringly innovative. In PBL, it really doesn’t matter what you study; it matters that you are learning how to learn. It matters that you are learning the 21st century skills of communication, collaboration, creativity, and critical thinking. It matters that you are learning to think innovatively. It matters that you are learning habits of mind and character. Studying different countries just gave me a framework to not have to completely re-build the wheel each year and it also allowed me to teach from my passions, which is travel, history, science, other cultures, other languages, foods, dance, art, famous people, literature, etc. There is not much that will not somehow fit into the framework of studying other countries. It works for me, but it is not the way; it is just one way. Although I backward plan more lessons than I can ever complete in the year, I also leave room for following the students’ interests and sometimes we go off in unexpected directions based on their lead. This is the rub of PBL. You need to completely plan your year, and then you need to be willing to let go of all that time put in planning if the class takes off in another direction.
For example, last summer I did the initial planning for three semesters based on travels from Greece to Italy to England. I wanted to trace the roots of Democracy from early Greece into Ancient Rome and then on to our roots of Common Law in England. Of course, this would all be modified to the kinder level, but they would learn important ideas and vocabulary like Democracy, Republic, voting, representation, etc. Kindergarten is not too early to begin being exposed to academic vocabulary. This was my plan, but when I got my class list I had a class composed of 70% Hispanic ELL, I decided to switch my plan to travel from Spain to Mexico to the USA. Our driving questions were “What is a country? What is a culture? How does a culture change over time?” It was a good decision, and I will be able to do my Greece to Italy to England journey another year. When I was teaching a K-1 configuration, we traveled from England to France to Italy, and when we were done, I got to ask the kids where they wanted to go the following year since I was keeping them. They chose Asia, so we went from Japan to China to Hawaii. (I know Hawaii is not a country, but it used to be sovereign and we studied it form its beginnings.) No matter what country we are studying, we are comparing and contrasting it to the United States. This fits with our standards and makes sense. How can you know what a country, state, city or neighborhood is without knowing that there are others and we are part of a bigger world?
Because we are so small, we usually have a whole-class culminating project and children work together towards that goal. For Italy we painted a mural on our classroom windows with the help of a local artist. For Japan we built a beautiful Japanese garden. For Ocean studies we painted an ocean mural tarp that is the windbreak for our sandbox. For Mexico we made in interactive Google Map of cities the kinders chose to study. For Spain we made a mosaic tile piece and a photography mural in homage to Diego Rivera. For England we built a castle that housed our reading nook and was also used in the school 8th grade play. For Hawaii we had a family Luau with a green-screened video presentation on the history of Hawaii and a music and dance performance. For USA we built an imaginary city of the future called Innovation Town out of legos and displayed it for Open House night.
Project-based learning is a form of inquiry-based learning, but the most pure form of inquiry-based learning I ever tried was when I piloted the Renzulli program for a year when I was teaching 8th grade. That was a program that cost $50 per student and it began with a user learning style survey. Students’ interests and learning styles were determined in a long survey and then learning modules were presented to them each time they logged in based on their proclivities. There were project modules and timeline templates, etc.
Students had Renzulli learning time for one hour a day. It was a well-designed program, but my biggest take-away from that experiment was that students craved collaboration with one another, and they eventually gave up on their individual programs and decided to do a play together. The pack mentality in junior high is amazingly compelling. They need each other and to work together as much as a kinders need each other and need to play to learn. In the end, the kids did not like the Renzulli Program, and we didn’t purchase it the next year.
For the future, I am looking into working with the Jane Goodall “Roots and Shoots” program (https://www.rootsandshoots.org/) and also creating a mini innovation lab based on the one I read about in Creating Innovators by Tony Wagner (http://www.tonywagner.com/resources/creating-innovators) .
My initial idea is that the students would keep a problem journal and then bring those ideas back to the classroom for us to brainstorm solutions together and then select one potential project at a time to pursue together as a group. I used this model before when we studied marine mammal protection at the junior high level and watched segments from the academy award winning documentary, “The Cove” (http://www.thecovemovie.com/) . We had four separate groups come up with ways to raise either money or awareness for marine mammal protection, and then in the end, we narrowed it down to select one group idea. We designed and ordered rubber bracelets, and we raised over $500 for the Sea Shepherd Society. Students had to cost out the price of having the bracelets made in the US vs. in China and that became an interesting debate as we had one student who felt very strongly that we should have them made in the USA even though they did cost more. That was a turn that I did not foresee and it was a truly a student led journey. From the very beginning of my PBL journey I got the taste of what it could be like to be the “guide on the side” rather than just “the sage on the stage” (http://designerlibrarian.wordpress.com/2013/05/24/reality-check-sage-on-the-stage-vs-guide-on-the-side/) .
At the kindergarten level, students also take us down roads I did not plan to travel. In our England studies, one student had a relative from Scotland, so we got to see a man in a real kilt and learn all about the different clan kilt patterns. We also took another unplanned detour to study the flag of St. George’s Cross when one student had one and brought it in to share (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_George%27s_Cross) . This is a very typical part of the PBL process. Students bring in their own or family knowledge, guest speakers and artifacts, and community experts take you in directions you could never have planned to go. It becomes a dynamic process as the word spreads that you are studying x, y or z and someone says, I have something to share on that, or I can teach an Italian cooking lesson or help you write your names in Japanese. The good news is that your projects will truly come to life like Pinocchio in Geppetto’s shop (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinocchio ); the bad news is that you will never have enough time to finish all the cool lessons that you originally planned to do, but that is okay.
There is a great quote in a completely unrelated field of writing that applies to the way I view PBL. “You need to have the headlights on quote.” You do need to backward plan and you do need to be intentional, but you also need to be open to letting of your planning and following and supporting those natural curiosities. There is nothing more important than that. In order to be successful at this, you need to completely get your head around the fact that it is not what they are learning that is important; it is the process of learning how to learn that matters. After years of even decades of teaching kids to jump through the requisite hoops so that they could score well on a bubble test, it can be hard to let go of this old paradigm and truly believe in the process. I still find it hard myself sometimes. It has been engrained in me for so long to keep stuffing them full of facts! But I check myself, and to be perfectly honest, once you have taught this way for a while, you would never be able to go back to the old way. It is truly fun to teach this way. I love it when the bell rings and kids scream, “No!!!!”
I also completely believe in the importance of developing Core Content Standards, and these two statements are not contradictory and therein lies the rub. These two paradigms can seem so fundamentally opposed. You will hear people drag out the old “filling an empty vessel” quote from Plutarch that is so overused and misapplied in my opinion that it is almost comical at this point. I’m guilty myself; it’s a good quote. (http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/p/plutarch161334.html) Having taught upper grade math from 5th grade to 8th grade, I can tell you that you will struggle at math if you have not achieved automaticity with your multiplication tables. Similarly, automaticity with phonics is the number one predictor of success with reading comprehension. (cite here) Do you need to memorize all the 50 states still? Probably not; you can Google it. Is there a place in education for memorization? You bet! Memorization is an important fundamental skill and there are many real world applications where you will need to memorize so that your brain will be free to use the higher order thinking skills that come along with applying a memorized data base. ( cite here) In Brain Rules, John Medina talks about the importance of understanding the neuroscience of how we learn and that we need both a “richly developed data base of knowledge and the ability to create and improvise off this database.” (http://www.brainrules.net/ )
One of the best real world examples I have ever heard to explain this dichotomy is the doctor who has all the steps of his operation memorized and goes over it in his head the night before the surgery to make sure it is committed to memory. That way, when something unexpected happens the next day in surgery, his brain is free to react creatively because it is not encumbered by trying to recall the steps needed to complete the surgery. Would you like to have the doctor whose teachers told him not to bother to memorize because it was like “filling an empty vessel”? I think not. Do you want the doctor who can only memorize steps and not react creatively to problem solve when something goes wrong? Definitely not. We need both skill sets and the teaching profession needs to reflect this real-world truth about how we learn based on modern neuroscience and functional magnetic imaging of the human brain at work. There is no such thing as left-brain, right-brain thinking (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/08/130814190513.htm ), but that term is still getting trotted out as a rationale for educational design. There is also no such thing as only 7 or 8 multiple intelligences (http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21929320.200-separating-neuromyths-from-science-in-education.html#.U5pQF9iYbIU ); there are thousands of them (Medina cite here). We need modern neuroscience to drive the future of educational design; we need to look forward, not back. I don’t even believe that the proponents of either side believe that things can be that black and white themselves. To wit, have you ever attended a class that had no syllabus, a pure exploratory lab, ready and waiting for you to explore at your leisure and in no particular direction? Of course not, and neither have I. That teacher or professor has some things they would like you to know. They have some “water for your vessel”. The best of teachers will make room in their hours for you to learn something from then and for you to learn how to learn. The very best of teachers will be learning alongside you. They will spend some time helping to build a database of knowledge and give you some time to learn process skills as well.
The adoption of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS)( http://www.cde.ca.gov/re/cc/ ) that reduced the number of standards to include core competencies that we want each child to have has paved the way for project-based learning because the Smarter Balanced Accountability testing (SBAC) (http://www.cde.ca.gov/ta/tg/sa/index.asp ) that comes along with the CCSS emphasizes written communication, critical thinking and creativity. Students explain their mathematical reasoning and answer broader questions in writing to show their critical thinking processes. This is so much more valuable than a bubble test that measures whether you know that the Nile is in Egypt or what sea it lets out into. Again, you can Google that. You can’t Google your letter to the editor as to what are the next steps to enable Israel and Palestine to build a lasting peace.
Clearly, there will be some adjustments necessary in implementing the SBAC tests, but the most important benefit will be that teachers will modify their curricular time to place a much greater emphasis on writing. The desperate steeple chase that used to begin when the gates opened on day one of the school year and continued until the first testing day in May left very little room to take time out to develop in-depth writing skills in the various writing genres. If you could get one completed writing sample in each genre in a year, you were doing pretty well. Some teachers borrowed silent reading time to do silent writing time, but there was never enough time to get everything done and this created a state of stress for students, teachers, administrator and probably parents too (http://edr.sagepub.com/content/20/5/8.short ). (http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02568549209594836#.U5pUk9iYbIU ) and (http://hechingerreport.org/content/testing-taking-schools-teachers-one-school-explain_15431/ ). Teachers were far too busy trying to cover far too many standards in the sacrifice of breadth over depth. ( http://voices.washingtonpost.com/class-struggle/2009/02/will_depth_replace_breadth_in.html )
One study conducted revealed that it would take ___ teaching hours to cover all the standards that teachers and students were being held accountable for learning. (cite here or leave out if I can’t find the cite).