Mandy Irick- Class 3 Blog #5 Putting in the Time

Time is a term that will resurface constantly when embarking on this PBL journey whether it is the construction phrase, implementation or finalizing it. Time management comes in many forms within a PBL project. The first being when are you as the teacher going to implement the PBL and how long are your projecting to complete it. This is relatively easy at first because you map everything out carefully knowing when you need to transition to the next concept or have certain assessments completed. It isn't until the implementation of the PBL begin that this all changes. With the first PBL I personally constructed, I had this unreal expectation that it was going to encompass almost all of a nine week grading period heavily modeled after a balanced literacy model. Since the topic was social injustice and connection to past and present, the amount of flexibility of materials was limitless. However, once the reality set in, I realized this project was going to have to be scaled down quite a bit. The beautiful thing about constructing a PBL, is that you get lost in the excitement of creating and all the possibilities that can come from it. In my case, it was in the summer when as teachers we are fresh faced, relaxed and the school realities haven't bombarded us just yet.  When those realities like not having my own classroom, testing, grades, interruptions, pacing guides and other complications came into play, I then realized the outline and length needed some brevity. So the PBL went from eight weeks to three weeks. This made it more manageable and offered a compromise with the teacher I was going to co-teach this with.
The implementation was another part that I haven't factored in. When students began to immerse themselves in the task, something became apparently very obvious...THEY LACKED STAMINA. Although they were invested in the process and determining how to arrive at their conclusions from the driving question, the students struggled with the amount of time they had to spend on this. With another PBL project that I piloted with an 8th grade teacher, we would noticed that after some many days they would begin to redraw and focus attention on other things not necessary to the PBL. At first I was disappointed, yet I started to reflect on the research read and learned. Present day students lack the stamina it takes to sustain interest for long periods of time because they have not been conditioned in this way. This coupled with the fact that middle school students have on average an attention span around 10 to 12 minutes, sustaining large amounts of time completely engaged is difficult. The system that we devised after talking about the noticings during the PBL was simple. If the week was going to be spent on the PBL, we would use 4 out of the 5 days to be totally consumed with the tasks. The other day would be spent on something separate from the PBL. This helped to give the students a break and almost re-energize them to continue on. Some times more breaks were needed if we felt as though the students had hit a wall and couldn't move past it. Even through the times spent on the PBL, the structure of the way it was presented in class changed. It removed the predictability and repetitiveness that can occur.  For instance, the students were working on the research section, we had them do a gallery walk, provided a mini-lesson for research, broke them up into small groups and did guided groups with them. I really tried hard to incorporate activities that required movement and less with some more formalized writing. Another day, we talked about interviewing, had a think-pair-share with four questions, then a times challenged to see who could post their questions on a group document the fastest. The key to making their time meaningful is play around with structure and give them some time off of the project. Some days we all need a break so we can come back to the task ready to work which is the same for the students.