PBL Learning Team

A group of Teachers met today at Kelly Road to discuss Project Based Learning. We've ordered BIE's PBL Starter Kit as a resources and will be working through that together as a way to inform and evaluate our practice. We've also started a blog dedicated exclusively to the group. Its online here. 

One of the things we did was share our questions. Here's what we came up with:

• What questions do we have?
• How does PBL work?
• How does PBL benefit our students?
• motivation
• engagement
• success
• building core competencies (thinking, communicating, personal and social competency)
• Definition of “The Educated Citizen” (we heard this recently and understand its in the BC school regulations, but do not know where)
• literacy and numeracy foundations
• understanding rich content
• core competencies
• How do we cover curriculum through PBL?
• What is “true PBL”, is there “true PBL”?
• How much information is required before students jump in?
• How much Teacher Direction/ Guidance is needed?
• How do we facilitate and let students drive?
• What role do driving questions play?
• How do we come up with really good driving questions?
• What skills and experiences do students bring to projects?
• How do different disciplines come together in projects?

We agreed its the highlighted questions that matter most. Its the difference this way of learning makes in the lives of our students that matters most. We want to be intentional about evaluating our practice based on the difference it makes for students. We are excited to be learning together!

What questions do you have about PBL?

cross posted at: http://sd57learning.blogspot.ca/

Talk of Change - Embracing Project Based Learning

change_thoughts, a photo by MMcDonough on Flickr.

I gave my first Professional Development workshop yesterday on Project Based Learning (PBL). While I've talked to Colleagues, Parents, and Community members about PBL, this was my first chance to have a deeper, focused dialoug with educators about PBL. 

I was very cognizant in putting it together that I wanted to create opportunities for rich conversations and sharing of ideas, activities, and strategies. I borrowed and adapted questions from David Truss's presentation "7 Ways to Transform Your Classroom". The questions participants discussed together and shared thoughts on were a powerful part of the day, in my opinion. 

Selling anything, though, is not easy. As George Couros points out, we need to be strategic if we want to help others embrace change. George poses three questions that we can answer for Educators as we present change. Let me share my thoughts on them as it relates to PBL:

• How will this save me time?
• Such a valuable question for Educators. I want to acknowledge that adopting and settling into new Teaching practices takes time and energy, we all know that. For me the investment pays off in the product, and we'll get to that in a minute. In my experience the payoff with PBL is in two places. First, I save time preparing discrete tasks. My projects are almost always chunked into pieces that stretch over 2-6 hours of class time. So, once students are engaged in a new activity we roll with it for a few days, allowing me to do much more guiding, facilitating, informal breakout workshops, and formative assessment. Secondly, I save time in assessment. PBL lends itself beautifully to AFL practices that look a lot like students developing ownership by understanding where they are at and where they are going in their learning. This requires coaching and practice, but does not require that I collect small pieces of work daily, or even every few days to document the small steps in their learning journey. I should say to that my context is also a BYOD program. This saves a huge amount of time for me photocopying discrete tasks. I've moved my project outlines to Google Drive so students have current (and ever-changing) copies shared with them and they can be set up to comment on the outline or even edit as needed. 
• We need to focus on different, not more
• Yes. Some of the shifts I've been cognizant of in my practice as it related to PBL are in the ways I synthesize and summarize information, share resources, and share my expertise. As I move to PBL I fully desire to shift my instructional methods from Teacher centered to Learner centered. It strikes me as odd that so often we stand up and synthesize and summarize content for students. We need to teach students to synthesize and summarize content. If we are too worried about covering the content to let the students summarize it for themselves then perhaps we are trying to cover too much content (and I don't mean to get too involved in the debate over covering content here, I am more interesting in suggesting that this is one way that PBL is different and not more). My argument on resources is very much the same. Students need to be able to effectively find and critically curate content online. We are doing them a disservice if we find it for them, and we are doing them an even greater disservice if we do not teach our students to use a variety of resources. So we shift from finding and curating and sharing resources for our students to having them find, curate, and share their own resources. Lastly, PBL comes with a shift in expertise. Methods of Inquiry seek to involve community and experts outside the school. Although I'm not there yet in my practice, efforts to do this have been rewarding. I believe the same can be said about the learning community that exists within the classroom. Prensky writes about a Partnering pedagogy where we are all Teachers and we are all Learners. We need to shift our practice enough to allow students to embrace the roll as the experts that they are and are becoming.  
• Is this better?
• I believe so. In the presentation I respond to the "Why?" question with three arguments: because of shared experiences, because of shared findings, and because of shared understanding of best practice. There's a lot to unpack there, but I'll leave that to the presentation itself. After reading Couros's post the piece of this I feel I missed was the way in which its better for me. Ultimately I am most satisfied as a Teacher when the Learners I'm working with are most satisfied in their Learning. To that end, yes. PBL has allowed for deeper, richer, more meaning learning for my students and left me more satisfied in my Teaching!

Do you agree? What burning PBL questions are on your mind? Does PBL save you time? What shifts has it come with in your practice? Is it better for you and your students? What conversations are you interested in having as you consider change?

Student and Parent Survey on PBL and BYOD

This month wraps up the first year of our Project Based Learning (PBL) Choice Program, the Northern Learning Centre. In the last few weeks of classes we gave students and parents the opportunity to share their perspectives on Project Based Learning as well as our Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) model. Here's what they said (click here view the .pdf in its own window):

A School Garden is Born: The Story of a Facilitated Project Launch

We were stoked to have Greg Jonuk, a trained facilitator, help us launch or #krssgarden project this week. Greg and I had been planning the morning for weeks in order to best give voice to our community and to mine their ideas, questions, and comments as best we could.

Here's the run down of the morning (for more detail see the agenda):

• "Teacher Talk Show" - Greg interviewed Beth and myself to give some context to the project
• "Press Conference" time for participants to share aspects of the project that excited them, aspects that scared them, ideas for what success would look like and questions about the project
• "Open Space" time for participants to:
• Respond to the prompt: "In order to have a successful garden at KRSS we need to think about..." and stick their ideas to a wall
• Shop for topics on the wall and decide which they individually wanted to discuss
• Discuss topics in small groups (this proceeded in three rounds after students had chosen which topic they'd discuss in each round)

We've now taken all the input from staff, students, and parents and combined it into a Google form. Now we can begin prioritizing our work as we plan on school garden!

PS. Sorry about the formatting of the linked documents, it was lost in the conversion to Google Docs

KRSS garden planning session from scchase

Great Opportunity for community partnership

I'd love to see schools partner with Otway to help prep the site and the community to host the Canada Winter Games. I wonder what kind of projects could come out of this.
Opinion250 Mobile

Rock Wars Project Idea

This project was inspired by a guitar wars assembly seen at College Heghts Sencondary a few years ago. The purpose of the project would be to have students work in teams locally and with other host schools to run a rock wars assemblies internationally. Teams would be responsible for planning the event, promoting the event, designing shirts for participants (possibly done in collaboration with an art class), running sound and lighting equiptment (possibly in collaboration with local experts), running live video coverage of the event with a decibal meter to judge audience response to performers (possibly shared with another school running the event via Skype), and in general making a contribution to the school community by hosting the event!

Logistics in a 21st Century Classroom

• I've read about a number of schools that have created learning spaces that are very conducive to collaboration and communication. I'd love to see areas dedicated to experimentation - equipped with webcams; areas dedicated to recording audio and video - with some sound buffers; grouped tables for lessons and break out spaces galore!
• Would/ could parents attend monthly meetings? Meetings every term? What would be reasonable yet sufficient to create relationships that foster enhanced student achievement in a radically new environment.
• What will be the balance between 21st century skills and 20th century curriculum? Is it okay to lean toward the here and now?
• How will KRSS ensure the program supports the necessary technology to make such a technological classroom possible? Bandwidth? Print access?

Projects Ideas for 21st Century Classroom

These are not necessarily original ideas, but are inspired from other websites mentioned in this blog. 

• debates
• math games fair
• science fair
• organize school events
• meetings
• ongoing blog of experience 
• mini math lessons via video (ex, algebra tiles and linear equations)
• democratic elections (for positions of responsbility in the classroom/ school/ at meetings)
• committees
• organization of school and community events, clubs, teams, fund raisers (student plan, organize, run, and reflect on events)
• ambassadors to other schools (teaching math games, conducting science demos and/ or projects with students, presenting technologies to help young readers, demoing math manipulatives)
• periodic news papers/ broadcasts
• I see the progression in a 21st century classroom very much one of a gradual release of responsibility. I think it would work well to start with activities where everyone is responsible for learning the same material, but presenting it in their choice of way, and/ or a series of activities where everyone is responsible for learning different material, but presenting it in common ways (so as to familiarize themselves with methods of demonstrating learning, provide exemplars for future use, and evaluate the relationships between the type of knowledge gained, and the method of demonstrating learning)
• After reading some of the information on Innovation Unit I've been thinking about a few new projects that would have a local focus, and a local impact. I would love to see some community partnerships into some of these projects. Ideas include; A project on sustainable trail building. The trails could be mountain bike, ski, or multipurpose, but would include research into trainbuilding techniques, local flora, fauna, topography, microclimate, and use; A second local project along the same vein I've been thinking about it is one on winter backcountry use. This could include studying weather patters, snowpacks, avalance gear and technology, GPS technology, and winter survival skills. The specifics of the projects would be entirely up to the students, but our goal as a learning community would be to create local partnerships and produce a product that could be shared with the community.
• A day in the life of ______________ (a project where students really research a career of their choice and report back to their classmates)
• Wikipedia creations (students find something they have expertise on and create content to add to wikipedia)
• Environmental Stewardship (student teams create, design, and implement projects to help green their school and make it a better environment for the life that exists in and around it)
• Documentaries/ Commercials/ Promo Videos (students create videos to promote Prince George/ their favourite book/ a novel they've read that's been turned into a movie...)
• School News/ Radio (students create broadcasts to be shared with the school/ community)
• Technology You Need (students research and market emerging, cost saving technologies to local businesses, VOIP phone?, Google Reviews, Twitter, Urban Spoon)
• Winter Frisbee Golf Course/ Golf Course Used for Cross Country Skiing/ Skate Park/ Indoor BMX park? (Students create their own piece of the park as part of a course the class would put together)
• Build a trail project (students work together to design a sustainable mountain bike trail with no net impact on the local ecosystem)
• Backcountry safety (students create PSAs to help teach younger students the value of backcountry safety)
• Here's another site with a host of "Challange Based Learning" (CBL) Projects teachers internationally are developing and implementing. The CBL format is analogous to PBL, but with its own unique process and Apple spin. 
• http://www.challengebasedlearning.org/
• Tweet Up where students take on roles as characters (for example, this could be science based and students could take on the roles of historic scientists; alternately, this could be socials based, and students could take on roles as 
• Class Elections where students have to campaign and run for roles in class government, modeling their platform on a certain party, individual, the position they are running for
• Toy Building Project where students design toys research, design, and send children's toys to an underprivileged community in BC (possibly floating toys to go along with Science 8 Water Unit).