Project Based Pitfalls

Of all the educational innovations being discussed lately, Project-based Learning (PBL) might just be the one that makes the most sense in Social Studies classrooms. Many of us, in fact, have come to PBL almost by accident. I remember one teacher being very embarrassed when I praised his PBL approach. "I'm not doing this because I'm some brilliant teacher," he said, "I'm just lazy." And indeed, a PBL classroom is a space that is much more comfortable and relaxing for you, just as it is much more engaging and even empowering for your students. But there is, in fact, a great deal of work that goes into a successful PBL lesson but, like many things, you more you do it, the easier it becomes! As you consider building (or expanding) your PBL toolbox, keep in mind these three pitfalls to avoid:

1. Trying too much too soon.

First, there's a temptation to either bite off more than you can chew. If you set your sights too high, perhaps by deciding over the summer that you will create a fully PBL course by August, you can quickly become overwhelmed and give up in frustration. To avoid this, first, choose a manageable goal: where is one unit you can "test the waters" of PBL with reasonably good chances of success? How could you possibly build from there? How long will it really take? Spend some time googling, contact me, or consider joining the Project Based Learning Community on Google+ to get ideas and support as you make your plans.

2. Don't assign "castle projects."

On the other hand, sometimes we're tempted not to do enough. This is the trap of creating projects that aren't really Project Based Learning. To be PBL, a project has to require students to think deeply about problems grounded in the content and standards, so that their conclusions are the learning that is needed. Otherwise, you might just be creating what I jokingly refer to as "castle projects:" big, beautiful creations that really demonstrate Dad's wood-working or Mom's styrofoam crafting, but don't really do anything to help students understand the lessons in the ways called for by the standards (and which might also raise some serious questions around equity for all students!). To avoid this trap, ask yourself some questions:

1. Are students answering a significant, meaningful question through the project development process?
2. Is the learning of the project aligned to the standards I'm intending to teach?
3. Have I already taught everything I want them to know for this project? 

Your answers to the first two should be "yes," or you may be making a "castle project." Your answer to the last question, however, should be "no." If you've already taught what the project is demonstrating, you don't have project based learning, you have project based testing. 

3. Don't foreclose student voice, choice, or thought.

The final trap was recently brought to my attention while reading an article from Edutopia titled "A World of Project Ideas (You Can Steal)." The article talked about the starting point for any good PBL lesson: the driving question. The very first example was this:

Who were the most influential leaders of the Civil Rights Movement in terms of impact upon today's society?
Notice the phrase, "most influential." This embeds critical thinking into the project because it prompts students to develop criteria and then make a defensible argument for why they selected a particular leader. Imagine the wide range of products students might produce to tell the story of a particular leader. That's a good sign that students will have voice and choice in the project, deepening their engagement.

The question is a perfect Social Studies driving (or guiding) question. It's the explanation that caught my eye: critical thinking is embedded in the question, it says, because the phrase "most influential" prompts students to develop criteria.

Stop and think about that for a moment.

Prompts students to develop criteria.

How many of us would give students the criteria? No? Maybe not in your rubric, but what happens when a student asks "what do you mean by most influential?" We're teachers. Our instinct, when a student asks a question, is to answer it. And just like that, we've turned project based learning into a castle project. The point of this activity is not to pick the right Civil Rights leader. The point is to think deeply about what Civil Rights leaders did and said, and what forms of impact they have had, and how lasting that impact has been. And none of that will happen if you answer the first question students ask: "What do you mean?"

Because, in the end, castle projects are all about students showing you what you want to see. But Project Based Learning is about students telling you what they want to say. And there's no room to hear their voices if you're doing all the talking.

"Life v. Debt"

Dr. Heather Kaiser has developed a year-long interactive to teach elementary students the realities of, as she calls it, "Life or Debt." This aligns to, among others, Standard 5.E.2, "Understand that personal choices result in benefits or consequences." She describes it like this:

The challenge is for students to end the school year "debt-free".  As the teacher, you are going to make this a difficult task - just like IRL (in real life).

Head over to her blog, Stimulating Science Simulations, for her full description, or go directly to her website to download your own copy!

"Time to learn:" Tech Camp 2017

Tech Camp (#CCSTech17) was held June 20-21 at GCHS. Several of you were there as participants, and three of our Social Studies colleagues presented: Gaundi Allen, ACMS, Angela Westmoreland, PFMS, and Cris Higginbotham, PFHS. We caught up with Cris "Higgie" Higginbotham to discuss her approach to teaching and how digital technology plays into her classroom. "Ms. Higgie's" classroom has been featured on this blog before, but in this conversation we got to talk more about her total approach to student learning and achievement.

Jonathan Frantz: What would you say is your overall "philosophy of teaching?" How do you approach planning your instruction?

Cris Higginbotham: First off, technology has to enhance the actual learning. It's not "this cool tool for this, and that cool tool for that." It has to enhance the learning. Sometimes bells and whistles are tempting, but you have to step back and make sure the bell and the whistle actually add something to it, and doesn't just sit on top looking pretty.

JF: Okay, but then why bother using tech at all?

CH: Students need it. They're going to go into a world where technology is relevant and important. College admissions look at the student's web presence: do they have a website, do they have a blog. Employers do the same thing. So if you're not teaching kids how to have a creditable web presence, you're doing them a disservice.

Look, tech is in everything we do now. There are very few things that you don't need tech to do.

JF: So what do you ask them to do with technology?

CH: It's really more about what I don't do, and that is, I don't allow them to use technology to take notes, to do the basic stuff. Instead, it becomes the product. They can take a picture of a diagram if they need to, but they have to write it because brain research shows they need that to learn.

JF: Do you find that your students are good with the tools you use?

CH: The thing is, this is why technology is important for us to do in the classroom: I have juniors and seniors who don't know how to attach a document. They don't know the difference between a share link and a URL. They don't actually know how to do what they need to be able to do. If we don't teach them, who's going to do it? How are they going to learn?

JF: What would you say to colleagues who don't know this stuff themselves? I can imagine readers asking themselves "Wait, what's a share link? What's a URL?" What would you say to them?

CH: It's time to learn. The day of "kids know how" is gone. Kids today are actually less knowledgeable about professional use of technology. When I gave an assignment to find a "cool" way to present, the kids came back with PowerPoint. Kids might have lots of access to technology, but they don't know how to use it to produce. They don't know how to use it in education. They don't know how to use it professionally. They don't know how it works.

Students now are digital consumers, not producers.

JF: I've noticed that you're all about student products. Why is it important for kids to be producers? Don't they just need to get down the important information we give them?

CH: They shouldn't. It goes back to brain research: If you can't take what you've been given and turn it into something new, explain it in a different way, or use it in a different context, you haven't really learned it.

Take today: I went into a session [at Tech Camp] and learned about a website I didn't know about. But if I don't do something with it now, I'm not going to remember it. What you do with it is part of the learning process, just like taking quizzes is part of the learning process.

I really pushed my American II kids this semester. Everything they learned, they had to create a product. They complained the whole time: "Again?" But every one of them passed that test: two "Bs" and all the rest "A." And the "Bs" were high.

JF: That's fantastic. The deeper processing that comes from making products rather than just taking notes really sounds like it pays off. So how would you say your philosophy of learning impacts your approach to how you teach history?

CH: We're working in American History II -- all of us teaching it at PFHS -- we're working to write discussion questions instead of notes, to make it more discussion-based, almost Socratic. We've already finished the first unit. They do a reading, online or in print. Then they get a list of discussion questions for the entire unit and it's their responsibility to attempt all the questions before they come to class. Where they answer the question, there's a column on the side for them to link a document to the question, so they're supporting their answer with some source. So then when I put the "presentation" on the board, their answers to the questions become the notes. We merged presentation, discussion, reading, and primary sources into one cohesive learning task.

As far as the sources, each group gets a stack, and they divvy them out. Whatever documents a student gets, they have to become the expert on those, but every student has access to all of them. Then we do activities that involve all the primary sources.

The point is, for every unit, there's a core set of primary sources that all the discussion and learning is centered around, and then they produce a product that shows their understanding of that learning.

JF: Sounds amazing! Thanks for your time, thoughts, and all you do for our students.

Up the creek learning

As we enter the summer, these posts will shift from highlighting what teachers are doing around the county to reflections on our practice as teachers. The first comes from my own experiences. If you would like to contribute your own reflection, please email me, or comment on this post. Have a great summer!

The most important thing I ever learned about learning was not in my teacher preparation, grad school, or National Boards process. It was canoeing merit badge class.

I grew up spending summers in a canoe. I knew how to canoe. I did it all the time. So when I got to summer camp as a young Boy Scout, I signed up for canoeing merit badge. It would be easy!

Well, I knew how to paddle from the front of the boat, with my Dad in the back. I didn't realize that the hardest part of canoeing was when you were in the back of the boat or, worse, in the boat by yourself. So, second day of class, I was done. I told my father (at camp with me) that I was quitting the class, because "I didn't know anything" about canoeing.

My father didn't reassure me, didn't insist that I did know something, but he did insist I stay in the class. "You don't take a class because you know something," he said. "You take a class to learn something." He told me that the fact that it was hard was exactly why it was good for me to be in the class: it showed that I had something to learn, a reason to be there.

I think sometimes we forget this in our lives as teachers and professionals. We forget that learning is hard, and, frankly, people don't usually like hard work. So students, like most people, tend to avoid hard work. In practice, this means that they often would much rather do easy things, like filling out worksheets or copying definitions, than hard things, like writing, analyzing, or creating. And they "vote" with their behavior: students sitting in rows copying notes from the screen into a notebook tend to be "easy to manage."

All my life, up to that summer camp, I sat in the front of the canoe with my Dad in the back. I was there, because I was easily managed. But I hadn't learned what I needed to know. When the work got hard... I tried to quit. I voted with my behavior.

But I wasn't allowed to quit, nor was I given a different, easier lesson for canoeing. I was given the context for why it was hard. I was reassured that, if I worked through it, I would be successful and that it was worth it. Fortunately, the outcomes of the learning were apparent to me: not just a merit badge, but a skill I wanted and valued. Sometimes, that's the challenge for us: we have the merit badge (we call them "grades") to hold out for the kids, but the skills that the grade represents are not valued by our students.

So what did I really learn from canoeing merit badge? I learned how to keep my head above water, both literally and figuratively. Despite the fact that I felt so over my head at the start, I had support, encouragement, and lots of time and practice to figure out what I needed to know. Every day, I got a little bit of instruction on how to do something, and a whole lot of time doing it with the instructor watching and giving feedback, so, yes, I learned how to paddle a canoe. But far more lasting and more importantly, I learned how to be successful. I was successful because I knew the learning was important to me, I could see how each lesson built toward the ultimate goal, and I had support of peers, parent, and instructor when the going got rough. For our students to be successful, we need to do three things for them:

1. Find ways for the learning we have planned to be meaningful and important to them.
2. Give them challenging tasks that clearly move them toward that meaningful and important learning.
3. Support them when it gets hard, not by making it easier again, but by encouraging them through the difficulty.

None of those things are easy for us to do. Teaching is hard, hard work. So is learning. And both are a lifelong journey. If you're looking for support, encouragement, or feedback on your teaching and learning journey, drop me a line.

I'll bring my canoe.

4th Grade Students Take Stock Market Prize

Most American millionaires start out by attending public schools. Four of Miss Palmer’s 4th graders have intentions of becoming millionaires when they become adults. They are off to a great start by competing in the North Carolina Council on Economic Education’s (NCCEE) Stock Market Game (SMG).  The NCCEE’s SMG is an academic competition that teaches students skills to help them to make informed economic and financial choices. Tia, Myasiah, Aniya and Lori-Ann work as media assistants and were coached by Ms. McClellan and Ms. Gibbs in this academic competition.  This all-girl team competed against over 21,000 others in the SMG. They placed third in the Eastern Region 2017 Stock Market Game and were honored on May 19th in Greenville, North Carolina by the NCCEE during their 31st Annual Awards Banquet. NCCEE Executive Director, Ms. Sandy Wheat, and NCCEE Executive Board Member, Mr. Blaine Wiles, who represented the North Carolina Bankers Association. Both saluted the team comprised of girls and even asked them to share a tip on which stock to invest in.  The team also got to visit East Carolina University while on this educational field trip to Greenville.