So, what the heck did I learn? Here are the steps we practiced over the three days of training:
1) Meeting the problem: Students have to meet, or interpret, a messy, ill-structured problem-similar to the ones we encounter in the real world. In the training, we all had to develop a problem to use in our classes. After racking my brain, I decided to instead to use the brain of my husband, who is the guy in charge of anything that's on the ground, on wheels, or plugged into a socket of any kind at our school. If anyone can come up with a real-world, messy problem, it would be him, since he pretty much encounters them on a daily basis.
My husband suggested a project on which he would soon be working--redesigning our back access road, a road that wasn't really built for the traffic that it currently sees. So, after using his wonderful brain to come up with an idea, I and my fellow physical science teacher decided to use that idea to teach metric measurement to our freshmen. We wrote up the problem as a script that my husband would read in a vodcast (because it would be more authentic if he asked the students). Here's what we came up with:
The school is looking to redesign and resurface the back access road to the school. Since you will be the ones driving on the new road once you get your permits and start zooming around, the Director of Building and Grounds(that would be me) would like student input as to how to redesign and resurface the road. I will need proposals of input that I will present to the school board, and the Board is requiring that each proposal have a metric scale drawing of the new road design.
Also, the road is currently very costly to maintain and repair. There have been issues with the road in the past, such as people parking along the side of the road, people driving on the grass on the islands and along the edges of the road, improper drainage, the base of the road being improperly laid down when the road was built, and trucks and heavy equipment being driven on the road when the road was not designed for such vehicles. These issues need to be addressed in your proposal.
We are looking for any input that you may have so I can incorporate it into my proposal from the board. You will present your proposal to one or more administrators on <insert day here>. Your budget for the proposal is $65,000. We need your input, since you will be future users of the road, and we would hate to see it closed down due to its current issues.
2) Know/Need to Know List: After meeting their problem, students use the information in the problem to develop a T-chart of what they know and what they need to know based solely on what's given to them in the problem. We were lucky enough to be able to give our problem a trial run using the other teachers in the room as our students, and they came up with a possible know/need to know list (pictured below). In our trial-run, we had to do some coaching when compiling the list--in other words, we had to ask some guiding questions to prod our captive audience into coming up with some of the "need to knows" about the metric system. Coaching students, rather than telling students, is key in this model of PBL. The teacher's role is to guide them in their learning and to their learning, not do the learning for them.
3) Problem Statement: From the Know/Need to Know list, students generate a problem statement. In our group of teachers, we were writing our problem statements using this format:
"How can we (need a strong verb here with the task) in such a way that (insert conditions here)."
For example, the possible problem statement for our problem would read like this:
How can we give an administrator input on how the back access road leading from Prospect Street to the high school should be redesigned and resurfaced in such a way that it is:
- safe
- durable
- cost effective
- easy to maintain
4) Mapping the Problem: We also mapped out all the possible directions our problem could take students (also pictured below). This needs to be done before introducing the problem to students. We were glad we did this, because we realized that we would need to coach students away from some areas and towards others if we wanted to be able to complete this PBL unit within our given time frame. We also realized that some areas that could be explored with this problem (environmental impact) might best be dealt with in another class (i.e., Biology or our Environmental & Biological Issues class). You can have students map out the problem as well, so they can get some direction.
After this, students in groups will choose a "need to know" to research, and then come back and present their findings to the larger group. Then, students will generate possible solutions, determine which one is their "best fit" solution, and then work on their solution--which will culminate in a presentation to the class. But the process doesn't end there; after all groups have presented their solutions, they all get "debriefed," and asked to reflect on their learning using metacognitive strategies. Overall, this PBL strategy resembles the same process used by the company IDEO, as depicted in this video.
One central idea that was emphasized to us during the workshop was this: While the students are to encounter learning in a messy form, your planning for the PBL unit must be tightly structured ahead of time. This means doing all of the steps above ahead of time, and may require calling in experts from the community, or lining up experts to Skype or e-mail ahead of time. While this is pretty labor-intensive, I am thinking about alternating units like this with inquiry-based units, especially in my Biology classes.
While you may be doing a lot of the work of planning, in this process the students are sure to do the work of learning. And it's not just your average, run-of-the-mill learning; it's realistic and engaged learning, using real problems.
Any thoughts, ideas, or suggestions (especially if you're a pro at using PBL)? Feel free to leave them in the comments below.