Jeneane Allgood--final reflection

                                                                                                                                   Jeneane Allgood

                                                                                                                           PBL Cohort Summer 2016

                        When I was offered a spot in this course, I knew I needed the hours for recertification, so I gladly signed up with Mrs. Stancil.  Having entered teaching through Critical Needs or Pace, education classes always seemed to teach me about the newest “fad” trend that never seemed to stick around for very long. I figured that this class would be no different, and that couldn’t have been further from the truth. 

                        PBL, or Project-Based Learning, is a strategy for teaching a standards-based unit to students through the use of protocols, formative assessments, activities, sustained learning, and a culminating summative assessment.  A PBL unit is centered around a driving question and a problem statement that frames the purpose of the lesson and how the topic relates to real life, or authentic learning. Protocols are tools that can be used for collaboration by groups of students to show what they have learned, giving the teacher an idea of whether or not the students are truly grasping the lesson.  Protocols can also be used to give feedback to students on their project, which is necessary for critique and revision, both of which are important aspects of PBL. 

                        Now that I have explained some of the key components of PBL, I will explain what makes PBL different from other learning strategies.  To understand PBL, you’ve got to start with the end in mind. That is, “What do I want my students to know or be able to do by the end of this unit?”. The next logical question would be, “How do I get them there?”.  In our class this week, we learned that Project-based learning (PBL) is a way to teach students in a way that is meaningful for them and teaches them information in a way that they will retain the information because they researched it and worked with it, and weren’t simply just “spoken to”.

So, what would a typical PBL classroom look like? A PBL classroom would have students working in pairs or groups working towards solving a problem or answering a question. A teacher would be walking around, guiding research, answering questions, and giving feedback on work completed thus far. Many classrooms have projects as part of their curriculum, but as we learned from an article we read, these projects typically come at the end of the unit after most of the key information has been taught. Thus, these types of projects have been called “dessert” projects. PBL emphasizes making projects the “main course”. This means that sustained inquiry learning is incorporated into lessons throughout the unit, such that one day students might be researching different ways that cells communicate, and another day they might be seeing how disease may result from faulty cell-to-cell communication.  One or two days of research is not enough. Through teacher-student interactions and student-student interactions, students are able to find out information that can be synthesized and put together like puzzle pieces to work towards a final culminating project or task. I think of it like a staircase.  Each day builds upon the next, resulting in a final product that demonstrates true learning on a topic that hopefully has a personal connection to the student because there was some sort of choice involved in the kind of research that they got to do.

                        As a teacher, taking this class has helped clear up some of the misconceptions that I had about PBL. I really just thought it was a fancy way of saying that students were teaching themselves, but now I know that is not the case. In fact, PBL takes quite a bit of planning on the part of the teacher. Taking this class has helped me shift my focus, because it really makes me focus on the end-product first, asking myself, “What do I want students to know?”, and then mapping out a logical way for them to get there. In the past, most of my projects were “dessert” projects---teaching my students a bunch of content and then seeing what “sticks”.  I now see that by getting students to research some information themselves and collaborate with other students to relate it to the driving question or overall problem, that my role as a teacher has changed.  My role has shifted from “absolute leader” and “giver of information” to “facilitator” and a source of constructive criticism.  I love the wording that we used in a lot of the activities that we did (“I like….”, “I wonder….”). It made giving and receiving feedback so easy, less hurtful, and more importantly---I was OPEN to receiving the feedback…I didn’t dread it like I normally would have.

                        One of my favorite professors in college used to close his lessons in our Human Physiology class with “Why do we care”, so I feel like that is an appropriate way to end this reflection.  Why should we care about PBL? To me, we should care because it is a completely different way of getting information across to our students.  Yes, we are still teaching, but we are serving more as facilitators as students discover new information and see how it relates to an over-reaching problem or question.  Before this class, I really wasn’t familiar with the profile of a SC graduate and which skills they are expected to have.  I was amazed when I looked at that list later on this week and saw how PBL emphasizes most of those skills. I don’t think I could say the same thing about my traditional lessons.  That is an “a-ha” moment for me (as I would call it in my class). This whole week has been an “a-ha” moment for me.  I really was skeptical coming into this week, but I am a full believer in PBL thanks to all of the activities that we did this week.  I feel like I can accurately convey what PBL is to my colleagues and get more people on board!