Welcome To Our PBL Course Blog!

Welcome to our course blog! For those of you new to blogging, hopefully this experience will expand your ideas for online communication to use in your classroom or for personal use.

For you bloggers out there, please feel free to use options you are already familiar with such as adding links or other helpful media to your posts. Following each course meeting, you will be logging in and posting your thoughts and comments related to our course reading.

This is a place where you can share and discuss how what you are learning from your course readings, from our discussions in our meetings, and your interactions with your professional learning communities and your colleagues as you collaborate to find strategies and solutions to apply best practice strategies and structures for project based learning.

Please share successes and failures as you work to implement what you are learning into your classroom practice.  Most of all, reflect on your learning process. In order for us to extend our classroom community to an online setting with this blog, it is important that you also read and respond to the posts of your peers. After each course meetings, please post your thoughts and then also choose two of your colleagues to respond to as well. Please also feel free to share any questions, comments, or suggestions.

We look forward to the learning process that will occur from this online community.

Sincerely,

Dawn Mitchell

Blog #3: Growth of Soft Skills

When I think about soft skills development in my chemistry class (the class in which I am implementing PBL this year), my thoughts return to a former chemistry student that I now have in AP Physics.  This young man is quite intelligent (as his presence in an AP Physics class would suggest) but he has a lack of social intelligence.  He is smart enough to recognize this as a limitation and he attempts to work around it but the problem often comes out.  I recall a conversation that I was having with him that he chose to have in front of the other members of the class in which he accused me of lying.  If I did not know him well enough, I might have taken it as a more serious issue.  I tried to help him through the work-around skills that I knew that he had developed, but this was just one of those days and one of those interactions where nothing was working and things were just escalating.  In the end, I simply had to tell him (forcefully) that it was time for him to sit down and keep quiet.

I think about him because I wonder if more attention to soft skills in his time in K-12 might not have given him more tools to be able to work through these bumps in the road for him.  I worry that similar bumps in the future will become serious roadblocks.  I know that educators cannot dedicate all of our time and efforts helping one or two young people fix their deficiencies, but in working with student soft skills this year I realize that there are more than one or two that really would benefit from such skill building.

In this semester far more than last (when I first implemented this form of PBL), I have seen real growth in soft skills. As a teacher of "hard science," I have been thinking about developing a metric by which to measure this development.  I have done qualitative research and I realize that there are limitations and pitfalls of relying strictly on qualitative without quantitative research to provide a foundation on which to apply it.  To be fair, when studying human behavior, quantitative research without qualitative to provide context also has pitfalls and serious limitations.

One of the most important additions that I added to my PBL methodology was behavior contracts.  It pushed my students to think in advance about those expectations of their peers and gave group members a constructive way to deal with the frustration that many had in the past with the "slackers" in their groups.  Before starting or in the early stages of starting the first PBL project with a class, I have students answer 2 questions: 1) what are the positive aspects and 2) what are the negative aspects of doing group projects.  Inevitably, the group members who don't do their fair share of work is at the top of the negative list.  I do this as a hook for getting students to develop a social contract.  Even when the requirements of the contract don't meet the needs, students learn to plan for effectively for the future.  I am convinced that in future group work, they will have skills for developing a set of group expectations and requirements that will help them more effectively negotiate group and team work.  They have learned that keeping their peers "on task" is not just the teacher's responsibility and they have learned to take group responsibility for group success.

This is just one example.  As the Apostle John wrote in the closing verse of his gospel, "If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written."  OK, so that bit a bit of an exaggeration, but I hope that you get my point.

Additionally, as I improve and refine my implementation of PBL teaching and learning the manner in which I approach and help students build soft skills will also improve.  In the future when my students have the opportunity to use those heightened soft skills and their success is also heightened, I doubt that many will realize where those improved skills were developed.  A few will.  I will hear from them.  And all the stress of the complaining and resistance to doing things "Mr. Tedder's way" will have been worth it.      

Blog #2: Area of PBL Growth

The last time I felt this overwhelmed was my first year doing National Certification (it took 2).  That year, National Certifications was the only thing that I did.  I made the mistake this year of doing way too many things...some my own doing and some imposed on me.  Imposed on me was all the times that I was sick this year.  Never have I been sick so long and so often.  Here near to the close, I feel that I have--in a similar way--accomplished something important.  I am trying, nevertheless, to avoid as much as possible doing anything new next that I don't have to do.  My effort will be to consolidate and polish my PBL lessons and maybe insert more elements in other units.

As has been the case so many times in my life, I trust that I will not realize all that I have learned and learned to do until next year and the year after.  When I am in the midst of learning something new and trying to apply it, that is my focus and I have difficulty recognizing from whence I came.

From the beginning of this class, I recognized early on that this PBL method had a lot of similarities to things that I had done in the past.  I could see the benefits and many of my students saw the benefits particularly after they found that they were more successful in college than were many of their peers.  But the negative response and lack of support by administration was very disheartening and I fell back to the safe position of --for the most part-- traditional teaching.  What is shocking is how this still impacts my implementation of PBL.  I am constantly second guessing myself and holding back as I--often subconsciously--avoid the negatives that I experienced.

I have grown far to slowly in my embrace of this process.  I struggled to see where I have grown.  I am focused on where I am going and find a mental block in looking back.

I have built skills and refined my application of the methods and techniques.  I know a great deal about how to have students use a Consensus Protocol to compare and value the ideas of all group members.  I know a great deal about how to encourage effective peer feedback.  These are not small things.  Let me break these down to explain.

When students get together to begin a group project, they have learned to seek the easiest way out.  They follow the lead of whatever student in the group sounds as though they know what they are doing, that is know for having high grades, or has the strongest personality.  Valuable input by students with insightful ideas are overlooked and devalued.  The consensus protocol requires that all students, at minimum, read and consider all suggestions, recommendation, or ideas.  Each time I observe the process being used, I learn more about getting students to value all ideas

When students have given peer feedback in the past (prior to used PBL protocols), I have noted that students give "attaboys" rather than giving any feedback that might hurt the feelings of their peers.  As a result, the peer feedback did not serve to improve the product produced by students.  I developed a method of providing feedback that uses some of the recommended PBL techniques and my own method of using technology to have students give feedback that is anonymous to their peers but not anonymous to me.  This technique also allows me to grade feedback for effectiveness.

Here is how all this impacts me and my instruction.  As a result of this PBL learning experience, I am a more effective deliverer and I expect and plan to be even more so.   And my PBL learning experience continues.