Grades, rain, rehearsals, science fair projects, and lots and lots of PBL. This week has been extremely busy, and I haven’t had a free moment to truly sit down and reflect upon the beginning of my daft plan to ask my 9th grade honors students to create their own PBL. They turned in their first major essays last Friday, and I needed to get those graded before today to send home on their interim reports. This was also the end of my first PBL with my CP English I class, so I spent a good deal of time looking over, tweaking, and grading those websites. My daughter also began her first week of rehearsals for our school district’s production of Wizard of Oz and submitted her project for the science fair. Any spare moment I had quickly disappeared this week. But I can’t go a week without reflecting because I want to ensure things go better in the future.
Don’t get me wrong. This week’s PBL lessons went well. As I mentioned, my CP students finished their website pages, and we published them for administration and other classmates to see. The students wrote personal narratives, a short opinion essay, and an I Am poem. They created hand-drawn Wordles and recorded an interview with a classmate. Then they loaded all of that and some personal pictures into a new Google Site I created for the class. I made the site ahead of time and added individual pages for each of them and me (to model the process along the way). I didn’t want to overwhelm them too much with the technical side, although Google is so user-friendly, most of them picked up the how-tos in a hot minute. One student who isn’t usually a talker or socializer quickly finished his, complete with backgrounds or each section, and then offered pointers to the other students. The final product may not be perfect, but that’s not what’s important to me. My students gained these important skills during this project:
- Basic technology skills--Students worked in Google to create a project folder, type documents, copy and paste material into a Google Site, upload videos and images to the website, and format the webpage as they desired. Students also recorded and submitted videos of their interviews using the recording feature in our school district’s learning management system.
- Basic word processing skills--Students typed and shared their documents, changing the font and size as they desired.
- Communication and interpersonal skills--Students interviewed each other to practice their interviewing skills, learning how to ask more questions when they don’t receive enough information from a question.
We’ve now moved on to our second PBL unit—Learning from the Past—which requires students to record an interview with a friend or family member at least twice their age about their freshman year in high school and research that year. The interview and research becomes a booklet we print and bind for both the student and interviewee to keep. I’ve completed a slightly more tedious version of this unit before with varied success, and I’m hoping by cutting out some of the less meaningful tasks, I will see more completion of the booklets. My original hope was to have the final product completed by Valentine’s Day; that obviously isn’t happening. I introduced the project briefly on Wednesday after we looked at the website. We then jumped in on Thursday with the hook, previews of books created in the past (with the understanding this would be different) and partner brainstorming of interview questions. I typed and printed the questions for them to use during the interview. I could tell some were reluctant to complete this assignment. (“Ms. Lux, ain’t nobody gonna sit down me and talk to me about themselves for 45 minutes.” I told them they’d be surprised, and I hope I’m right.) Their only experience with interviews was with each other, and those lasted less than five minutes, so I decided we needed to watch some interviews to learn about interview behavior, questions, and follow-up questions to address this particular Need-to-Know. We watched excerpts from two interviews—with Louis Zamperini and Katherine Johnson—and noticed the posture, hand gestures, facial expressions, comments, and eye contact of the interviewers. My students also discovered an interviewer is going to use prior knowledge and knowledge learned during the interview to shape later questions. When they left class Friday, eight students appeared excited, four students seemed reluctant, and one student showed no reaction. Students should arrive on Monday with completed interviews. I plan to call home during lunch and after school to the parents of the students who haven’t completed the interviews. We really can’t move forward until those are done.
My English II Honors class’s planless PBL hasn’t quite gone as expected, which is strange to say because I didn’t have much of a plan to begin with. I knew I wanted them to research the hardships of early American settlers and colonists. I knew I wanted them to have the option to work individually or in groups of up to four students. I knew I wanted them to use primary sources to conduct the research. I knew I wanted them to create a product that would teach other 9th graders about their topics. Beyond that, the project was open-ended. Perhaps that was a little too many parameters, or perhaps it was too few. Some of my students have been successful. Others have struggled.
We began the unit on Monday, exploring the boundaries of our country through time and discussing the course’s essential questions: 1) What makes American literature American? 2) What is the relationship between literature and place? and How does literature shape or reflect society? I divided students into groups, gave them some large paper with the questions, and asked them to engage in the consensus protocol. After they drew their conclusions about each question as groups, we discussed them as a whole class. With a fifteen minutes left in class, I broached the idea of our project and asked for some feedback and suggestions from them in the form of an exit slip. Their feedback allowed me to address their concerns as I structured the unit a bit more. Many asked about how the groups would form (I let them choose), if the grade would be as a group (it would not), if they could work alone (not a problem with me), and if they could get extra time (my initial response is no). We began picking topics on Tuesday after I showed them their online note-taking document (a chart with columns for sources, summaries, and usable quotes). Most students found a group (of friends) and decided on a topic by the end of class on Tuesday, but that’s as far as the smooth sailing went.
Students began looking for new topics on Wednesday as they struggled to find primary sources on their topics. I guided them to sources and/or brainstormed new topics with them on Wednesday and Thursday and thought we were good until I looked at their individual documents. Many were still struggling to find information, and I’d hoped they would be able to meet with classmates outside their groups for a quick critical friends protocol during class on Friday. That would have to wait. We (I?) need to step back and examine this process again:
- Behavior—for the most part, not an issue. I’ve addressed two phone issues during the week and refocused two groups on a few separate occasions. They are on task and working. It’s not always silent in my room, but they are often talking about what they are reading.
- Need to Knows—They know what constitutes a primary source, so no issue there. Do they know how to find a primary source on their topic? Maybe not. Perhaps I need to conduct a quick mini-lesson on that on Monday. Do they know what kind of information to look for? Maybe not. I think a mini-lesson on focused research is also in store.
- Final product—Are my open-ended parameters too much for them? Or should I focus them in to one type of product? Perhaps a game? A website? This is something I need to discuss with them.
Blogs (hopefully) to come next weeks:
- Review of Buck Institute’s “Out of the Gate” PBL resource website
- Reflection on the concept of personalized learning
- Weekly PBL update
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