Year 9 became Shaun Tan experts and surprised their teacher!

At the end of last term I was very tired. Well, I seem to always be tired these days. It could be the low-iron vegetarian diet or it could be my lack of sleep or it could be that I seem to work constantly. Regardless of the reason, at the end of last term I was tired. I was so tired that I almost taught a topic from the front of the classroom and with worksheets. Almost. I didn’t because I couldn’t. Instead, encouraged by hubby Lee, I gave Punk Learning a go. You can read about it here. I was pretty unsure of the success of that approach with Year 9 by the very end of the term. After I introduced them to SOLO taxonomy, they all self-assessed using the four different dimensions and most identified themselves as at the unistructural or multistructural level of understanding about Shaun Tan – that’s the guy they were studying.

I thought to myself, ‘Holy shit! These kids aren’t learning anything. What am I going to do?’ Well my answer to that was to do nothing much. Why? Well it was the end of the term and I figured we’d just start fresh next term with a different topic (sound familiar? yeah, it’s what most teachers do.) Anyway, there was a problem with this. I had already asked my son’s teacher if my students could present their learning about Shaun Tan to his students. My students even wrote persuasive emails to Mr Smith asking if they could pretty please present to his class. I forwarded these emails to Mr Smith, he agreed for them to come and a date and time was set. Holy crap! We were committed to presenting to Mr Smith’s year 5/6 class – the class of which my son is a member!

Understandably, I was a bit worried about how the day would turn out. We have five different groups who all wanted to present something different about Shaun Tan. When school resumed for Term 2, we had a class discussion about the running order for the event – we had about an hour to fill – and then we realised one student had left the school and she was a big part of one team. Argh! Amazingly, my class rose to the challenge and all agreed to help out – phew!

I typed up a running order and when the day came, my whole class turned up at the beginning of recess so we could head to the primary school next door where we were to present. One student even came even though he had broken his finger the afternoon before – he didn’t want to let us down! When we got to the primary school we found the Year 5/6 class waiting for us in the school hall. My students looks nervous, but I joked around with them and putting on a brave face, we headed into the fray! Each team got up and presented their stuff – the biography of Shaun Tan, his distinctive style as an illustrator and author, a close reading of the picture book The Rabbits and a discussion about the importance of imagination. My students were really great at making the presentations interactive by asking questions, praising students and rewarding them with lollies. The Year 5/6 class were super polite and engaged in the presentations. They were the perfect audience! I cheered a lot and smiled until my cheeks hurt.

At the end of the presentations the Year 9 students ran drama activities with the Year 5/6 students and these were crazy fun. At first Year 9 were a bit ‘too cool’ to play and improvise, but eventually they were running around pretending they were being attacked by deadly rainbows and then dressing up in silly costumes. I too was standing up on chairs trying to escape the deadly lava! The event ended with small teams of Year 9 and Year 5/6 students presenting improvised role-plays to the rest of the students. It was really fun watching the older students relax and play with the younger students. The best part was seeing students, who are usually reticent to join in group activities, just having fun and enjoying themselves.

I have to admit, I thought the ‘Shaun Tan Workshop’ might have been a flop, but my students really did impress me with what they knew about Shaun Tan and their ability to apply what they learnt to a new context. I don’t think any of the students will be forgetting that experience any time soon. This project reinforces to me the significance of a public audience – it really does ‘up the stakes’ for students and gives them an opportunity to see themselves as learners with knowledge to share with others. I am very thankful that Mr Smith kindly gave up some of his students’ time so as that my students had a great public audience for their project. He was really fun and relaxed which helped my students to relax also.

And to think, those projects were all planned entirely by my Year 9 students with no input from me! Punk Learning – with a bit of trust, freedom and responsible risk-taking – maybe it works?

5 tips for presenting project learning to a ‘public audience’

I’ve probably blogged about this before, but I’m going to do it again because over the last two weeks I’ve had experiences that remind me of the centrality of an authentic public audience for PBL. Rigorous, effective and meaningful PBL involves a ‘public audience’ according to BIE. It is one of their 8 essentials of PBL:

Students present their work to other people, beyond their classmates and teacher – in person or online. This “ups the stakes,” increasing students’ motivation to do high-quality work, and adds to the authenticity of the project.

Obviously for a very busy high school teacher who is responsible for 6 classes all from different age groups can make finding a public audience a real challenge – it can even seem like a chore! I’ve noticed that often this is the one element of PBL that is neglected simply because it seems too hard or too ‘high risk’ – students end up just presenting to their class or posting products to the web. My colleagues often say that I am ‘brave’ when I plan for my students to share their learning with an audience outside of the school. I think what they really mean is ‘crazy’. It can seem completely insane, especially when you are well aware that your students may not have created/designed a product that is impressive in and of itself. Often the product itself does not reflect the process of learning taken to get to that end result. Sometimes teachers are embarrassed that a public audience will judge the students harshly on what they see, or even the students themselves are nervous or embarrassed about sharing their product that they feel doesn’t meet their idealised vision of what they planned. BUT this is exactly why we need to have our students share with a public audience. They need to experience that reflection on learning, that self-evaluation of their product and why it does or doesn’t meet their expectations. They need to be given the opportunity to explain the learning process involved in designing their product – whatever it may be. They need to learn to publicly value that learning is a process. We need them to step up and take ownership of their ideas, their experiences, their effort and their potential failures. It is through this process of public reflection that students develop the skills needed to be life-long learners.

However, there is something important to remember when planning to share learning with a public audience. Just like in the classroom, a friendly, safe and welcoming culture is important when students present their ideas and work to an audience. We do not want our students working in a hostile and unfriendly learning environment and as such we do not want them presenting in an environment that is threatening or intimidating. It is essential that you create a fun and friendly mood for the presentation of learning. Here’s five things you and your students can do to create a great mood for public presentations:

1. Have students create the invitations. Make sure that students are directly involved in inviting guests. You can even have students choose who the public audience will be. Students might want to design invitations to send to guests, or they might just want to help you write the email to be sent out.

2. Have a practice presentation in the space. If possible, get your students to have a trial run-through of their presentation. Just like adults, young people get nervous in front of an audience and feel better if they have rehearsed. Encourage the use of palm-cards if students are particularly nervous.

3. Share your favourite bit. Ask students to choose their very favourite part of their product (such as their favourite stanza from a poem, or paragraph from a story) and get them to share that with the audience. They might even like to share their favourite learning experience such as reading outdoors in the sunshine or editing their video using iMovie.

4. Create a video. If a student is particularly nervous about presenting in front of an audience, ease their fears by allowing them to record a voice-over on a slideshow or create a short video sharing their learning with the audience. This is especially helpful for those students who pretend to be ‘unreliable’ and don’t show up at the presentation, when really they are suffering from anxiety that they don’t wish to share with others.

5. Decorate the venue and feed your guests! Involve your students in creating a part atmosphere for the presentations. Learning shouldn’t be boring and serious – it should be fun and engaging! Have students bring in a plate of food, make sure hot and cold drinks are available and even have some balloons or colourful displays around. Make sure that when you introduce yourself and your students that you are jovial and smiling. It really makes a difference!

Hopefully these tips will help you and your students feel more confident and relaxed when sharing their projects with a public audience! My next blog post will outline how I had a super successful final presentation with my Year 9 class, even though I expected it to be awful!

Project Awesome really is awesome!

Since the beginning of Term 2, my Year 8 students have been working on ‘Project Awesome‘. This is a project that connects them with a small rural school, North Star Public School, which is in the far north-west of New South Wales. Currently my husband Lee Hewes is at the school doing his 4 week practicum – you can read about it here. He’s training to become a primary teacher. We thought it would be cool if we connected out classes for a project whilst he was on prac, and since he is being supervised by the ever-cool Michale J Sky, we have been able to plan and run a great project. So great, in fact, that it is awesome.

You can read about Lee and Micheal’s planning process for the project here. My part was pretty easy – I told them what I had to ‘cover’ with my class (we’re reading a novel) and I suggested a driving question, product and possible audience. Michael and Lee had the harder part which is ensuring that the project was sufficiently rigorous on their end by designing learning experiences with all 8 of the BIE essentials in mind. They did a really tops job, I reckon!

For me, the first two weeks of the project involved the hook lesson (each student was filmed introducing themselves to the North Star students in 30 seconds – this was shared with the North Star students via our combined class edmodo group), the introduction of the project via a project outline (North Star’s project outline is almost identical except they’re studying the picture book Happy Little Refugee and we are studying the novel Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian) and then identifying what they ‘Need to Know’ in order to be successful at the project. We generated a class ‘Need to Know’ list that has been written up on the classroom wall as a ‘Learning Checklist’ kinda thing. We also connected with the North Star 3456 class via Twitter where both classes asked each other a range of questions such as ‘What do you do on the weekend?’, ‘Who is your favourite band?’ and ‘What do you do in your holidays?’ This introduction was fun and got all students thinking about the similarities and differences in their lives. We then started reading the novel.

Week three of the project was a lot more reading of the novel and completing a ‘Life Stories’ matrix where we recorded key events, life lessons learned and the narrative devices used by the author to communicate these events and lessons. I’ve also been introducing my students to the Super Six Comprehension strategies (making connections, questioning, summarising, visualising, monitoring and predicting) which has helped them ensure they are fully understanding the novel as we read it aloud as a class. One of my students who sometimes struggles to maintain his focus on learning has been really engaged with the reading of the novel and our connection with North Star PS. Every lesson for the first three weeks he asked me about watching the North Start video (they too were going to make a video introducing themselves) and also has enjoyed the novel so much that he asks me to not stop and fill out the table. Well, last Thursday he was delighted when we got to watch the North Star video (you can watch it here) and even better, on Friday we Skyped with Michael, Lee and the North Star kids. My students really enjoyed this experience. It was rewarding to see a student who is usually disengaged, taking a leadership role to lead the discussion with the North Star students. He, and his peers, were very respectful in their comments and quite insightful in their discussions about the importance of life stories and the similarities between the texts we’re reading and the North Star kids are reading.

Over the next week both classes will start the ‘designing and creating’ cycle of learning (the first part was the ‘discovery and inquiry’ cycle of learning) where they are going to create visual representations of their own life stories to share with each other via edmodo. I’m really looking forward to seeing what the North Star students create, but I’m even more excited to see what my students reveal about themselves through their representations. Connecting classes has been one of my  most favourite experiences with project-based learning. The best part for me is that it is relatively easy and every time has resulted in high engagement from all students.

 

PBL: bringing together divergent theories, strategies and tools #EDMT5500

My last blog post was about what my students in the Introduction to Teaching and Learning course at Sydney University have been learning about this semester. A lot of the conversations that we’ve had are around bringing together this broad range of ‘edu stuff’ in the classroom? Well, it’s become a bit of a running joke that my answer to everything is ‘PBL’ … but, for real, all of these things DO come together beautifully in project based learning. Let’s have a look at just how that can be the case.

I break my PBL into three parts (I call these ‘cycles of learning’ in my class) that roughly equates to the assessment that takes place during each project – they’re being assessed formatively twice and summatively once. Each cycle of learning engages with a variety of the learning strategies, tools and theories. (Sorry about the randomly coloured fonts … this post is kind of a thinking post for me as I prepare for tomorrow’s seminars, lol!)

PROCESS 1: EXPLORE/RESEARCH/INQUIRE/DISCOVER

BIE 8 ESSENTIALS OF PBL: In-depth inquiry, Driving Question, Need to Know and Significant Content

METAPHORS FOR LEARNING: Campfire, Waterhole and Cave

Punk Learning: students generating punk questions and designing own projects

DESIGN THINKING: Intending – Establish needs wants and goals. Defining - Name, list and describe what is involved. Exploring – Imagine, organize and analyze possibilities.

STRATEGIES: KWL table, speed-dating, think/pair/share, think/puzzle/explore

TOOLS: Diigo, YouTube, Edmodo, blogging, ClassDojo

THEORIES: Blooms Taxonomy (Remembering, Understanding, Analysing), SOLO Taxonomy (Unistructural, Multistructural), Quality Teaching Framework (Deep Knowledge, Deep Understanding, Problematic Knowledge, Higher-order Thinking, Engagement, Social Support, Students’ Self-Regulation, Student Direction, Students’ Self-Regulation, Background Knowledge, Cultural Knowledge), 8 Aboriginal Ways of Learning (Story Sharing, Learning Maps, Symbols and Images)

PROCESS 2: CREATE/PRODUCE/DESIGN/COMPOSE

BIE 8 ESSENTIALS OF PBL: Voice & Choice and Revision & Reflection

METAPHORS FOR LEARNING: Cave and Waterhole

DESIGN THINKING: Suggesting – Decide, present and explain your proposal. Innovating – Continually improve as you produce what is proposed.

STRATEGIES: hexagonal thinking, master and apprentice, think/puzzle/explore, goals/medals/missions,

TOOLS: Edmodo, ClassDojo, blogging

THEORIES: Blooms Taxonomy (Applying, Creating, Evaluating), SOLO Taxonomy (Relational), Quality Teaching Framework (Higher-order Thinking, Substantive Communication, Engagement, Explicit Quality Criteria, High Expectations, Social Support, Students’ Self-Regulation, Inclusivity), 8 Aboriginal Ways of Learning (Deconstruct/Reconstruct, Non-Linear, Symbols and Images, Non-Verbal)

PRODUCT 3: SHARE/PRESENT/CONTRIBUTE/PUBLISH

BIE 8 ESSENTIALS OF PBL: Public Audience and 21st Century Skills

METAPHORS FOR LEARNING: Campfire and Life

Punk Learning: self-assessment using the ‘Punk Learner’ rubric

DESIGN THINKING: Goal-getting – Judge, measure and evaluate your success. Knowing – Remember, integrate and apply what you learn.

STRATEGIES: goals/medals/missions, master and apprentice, think/puzzle/explore,

TOOLS: Edmodo, ClassDojo, Slideshare, Scribd, Blurb, Twitter, YouTube

THEORIES: Blooms Taxonomy (Evaluating), SOLO Taxonomy (Extended Abstract), Quality Teaching Framework (Engagement, Explicit Quality Criteria, High Expectations, Social Support, Connectedness, Narrative, Cultural Knowledge, Knowledge Integration), 8 Aboriginal Ways of Learning (Community Links, Land Links, Story Sharing)

Teaching teachers is fun but challenging …

For the last three months I have been working at Sydney University each Tuesday. I’ve been running seminars for the #EDMT5500 course, Introduction to Teaching and Learning – kinda mental, huh? I’ll admit that it has been a really challenging experience for me. Not because the content of what I have to teach is difficult of foreign to me, but simply because I have only two hours a week with these awesome people who have chosen to be teachers and I feel it simply isn’t enough time to get to know them. I mean, I’ve tried really hard to get to know their names and how they learn (super important to me as an educator) and to also cram into that time everything that I think a new teacher should know and be able to do.

Like most teachers (I hope), I believe that learning through doing is more powerful than learning through listening. I’ve done my best to have my students engage actively in the types of activities and learning experiences that I’d like to see them create for their students. But it is a challenge to not stand up the front and just talk about my experience as a teacher. You see, these guys are super excited to have a practising teacher in the room with them for two hours a week. They have so many questions about teaching and learning (of course I don’t know all of the answers), that at times we just fall into semi-casual discussions about my experiences and my beliefs. That last bit is the rub, of course … when I’m up the front and they are all asking questions, it’s hard not to believe that my ideas and opinions are the most important, the more right. I think that’s symptomatic of the ‘sage on the stage’ experience – feeling superior because of our location within the room and the attention we garner. This is problematic in high schools but it’s down-right dangerous in universities.

Anyway, apart from that little bit of self-criticism, I think that overall my experience has been super positive. Mostly I’ve just been skimming the weekly notes/PPT for the week and then running with my own ideas about what is central and most relevant for my students. They have been introduced to so many teaching approaches, strategies, tools, theorists, practitioners and activities that I think none of them really have a reason to start their teaching career as a ‘sage on the stage’ unless it’s what they truly desire to be. I hope that from our course they’ve been challenged to think differently about teaching and learning and that they’ve discovered that the labels ‘teacher’ and ‘learner’ can be applied to every individual who is participating in the learning experience.

Here is just a super quick list of what my #EDMT5500 students have been exposed to during the first 9 weeks of the Introduction to Teaching and Learning course. I’d really love it if you commented below with other approaches, strategies, tools, theorists, practitioners and activities that you think a new teacher should be exposed to before getting their first class!

- SOLO taxonomy

- metaphors for learning spaces

- Blooms Taxonomy 

- Quality Teaching Framework

- Australian professional standards for teaching

- 8 Aboriginal ways of learning

- Elmore’s instructional core

- Tait Coles’ punk learning approach

- Project Based Learning

- Design Thinking (iDesign)

- Thinking activities: KWL, speed-dating, think/pair/share, hexagonal thinking, master and apprentice, think/puzzle/explore

- edmodo, Diigo, slideshare, scribd, YouTube, classdojo, Twitter

- constructivism and constructionism

- Seymour Papert

I’m sure there’s a bunch of other things we have covered but I can’t remember, lol.

Project Based Learning and the Australian Curriculum ‘General Capabilities’ (Part 3)

This is the third part of my posts on the Australian Curriculum’s General Capabilities and Project Based Learning (PBL). The first part is here. The second part is here. What is PBL? Read about it here.

Well it’s taken me ages to get to this last post. School and life has been hectic. Isn’t it always? I intended for the three posts to be completed for SDD Term 1 and it is now the end of Week 2. Luckily these General Capabilities are so straight forward and everyone always covers them with their classes, right? Oh, wait … no. That’s NOT the truth. Whilst Ethical Understanding and Intercultural Understanding are essential capabilities for awesome humans, they can so easily be overlooked when teachers feel pressured to prioritise content.

ETHICAL UNDERSTANDING

According to the AC website, ‘Ethical understanding involves students in building a strong personal and socially oriented ethical outlook that helps them to manage context, conflict and uncertainty, and to develop an awareness of the influence that their values and behaviour have on others’. This is pretty important stuff, right? I mean, in high school we’re often working with young people who simply lack resilience or a deep appreciation for their own values and how these can impact those around them. Why? Because they are young people finding their place within the world. But maybe it’s because they don’t understand or can’t appreciate the relevance of what they are doing RIGHT NOW in their school lives. To teenagers, school can often seem like they’re in a holding pen waiting until they’re given the chance to be morally responsible. In order to support our students to develop ‘personal values and attributes such as honesty, resilience, empathy and respect for others’ (Melbourne Declaration on Education Goals for Young Australians) we need to create learning experiences that foster and nurture these values and attributes.

Project based learning is about problem finding and problem solving. Not the problems in the back of the book, or the imaginary problems identified in a novel, but the REAL problems of our world that need addressing. It is in the driving question of a project that we see the centrality of problems. These problems might be based in the class (How can we design a learning space that supports the needs of all learners?), school (Can we, as students, prevent bullying in our school?), local community, (How can we educate our community about the impact that individuals’ decisions have on others?), national (Can we create a short film that will change politician’s attitudes to climate change?) or global (How can poetry be used to inspire people to donate money to combat the global food crisis?). The best problems, of course, are those identified by students through their own personal experience or through their own in-depth inquiry. To help students with their problem-finding, you could use this sentence from the AC as stimulus for discussion and brainstorming: Complex issues require responses that take account of ethical considerations such as human rights and responsibilities, animal rights, environmental issues and global justice. It simply is NOT enough to have our students writing persuasive speeches or research articles or poems about these issues, handing them in to teacher for a grade and ticking a box. We MUST empower our young people to actually actively take part in making a contribution to their world – to truly contribute their ideas to solving complex problems.This means ensuring that their learning has a public audience.

Of course, we can’t expect on class doing PBL to solve the world’s problems – but many hands make light work. According to the AC, Technologies bring local and distant communities into classrooms, exposing students to knowledge and global concerns as never before. With the capacity to bring others into our classroom vis Skype, edmodo, social media etc, we have the capacity to work together towards incremental changes to our somewhat shitty world. Giving students a taste of what their own personal capacity is, to develop their understanding of themselves as ethical human beings, is really central to our jobs as teachers.

Here’s a video of me talking about the importance of fostering Ethical Understanding in the young people in our care:

INTERCULTURAL UNDERSTANDING

One of the reasons I love the Internet is because it has made our world a little bit smaller. It’s made it easier for me to appreciate the shared nature of humanity and opened my eyes to the importance of connecting and collaborating with people all over the world. However, I do often ask myself whether that’s just me idealising the Internet. Chatting to my students and observing how they use the web, it seems to me that maybe it’s not actually being used in a way that bashes down contextual and cultural boundaries, bringing about a truly global community. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I know that my students are connecting with other young people from all around the world – especially those who are gamers. But is this reinforcing cultural divides as they seek out others with the same or similar cultural contexts to themselves? For the AC, intercultural understanding assists young people to become responsible local and global citizens, equipped through their education for living and working together in an interconnected world.

Creating learning experiences that provide students with the opportunity to connect and collaborate with students from backgrounds different from their own truly does nurture intercultural understanding. During PBL, students develop essential 21st century skills as they establish connections with other schools or with experts from outside of school. PBL provides the students with the the ability to relate to and communicate across cultures at local, regional and global levels. Currently my Year 8 class is connecting with a small rural school (North Star Public School) in northern NSW in their attempt to answer the driving question What can we learn from the life stories of others? This project requires them the engage with a text that explores the life story of an individual from a culture very different from their own – for my class they’re learning about the peoples indigenous to North America and learning about the impact of colonisation on these peoples. They are also connecting via twitter, edmodo and skype with the North Star students to share their own life stories and in doing so they are cultivating values and dispositions such as curiosity, care, empathy, reciprocity, respect and responsibility, open-mindedness and critical awareness, and supports new and positive intercultural behaviours. The project covers significant content for both classes as they are actively engaging in their wider world and discovering something new about others and themselves.

There are many more learning experiences such as the one I have outline above that my students have enjoyed over the years because of project based learning. Using this approach to learning truly opens our eyes, as teachers, to the potential connections our young people can make with others. It doesn’t have to be connections from outside of the school either. At my school, we have a number of students from Japan, Korea and China, who spend one to two years studying at our school. My colleague ran a wonderful project at the beginning of the year where his Year 12 students planned and ran the introduction activities for our new international students. This was a awesome opportunity for all of the students involved to learn about other cultures and it gave them the chance to identify culture and develop respect. My goal for this year is to have one of my classes to work on a project with a class with Aboriginal students. I recently discovered the 8 Aboriginal Ways of Learning and am very keen to design a project that incorporates all 8 ways because I believe they are the ways my students learn also. Working at a school on the Northern Beaches in Sydney isolates my students from the potential to truly develop their understanding of the cultures of the original inhabitants of this country. It’s time that I use my PBL skills and the technologies we have available to break down these cultural barriers and create awesome learning experiences for both classes. I just have to find the right school to connect with!

As I’ve said before, I’m a big fan of the AC’s General Capabilities. I think it is essential that we continue to value our young people as the future of our world and support them as best we can to develop or strengthen these important attributes of awesome humans. I truly do feel that an approach to learning such as project based learning that is experiential, authentic and engaging provides our learners with the BEST opportunity to hone these very important values and attributes.

Project Based Learning and the Australian Curriculum ‘General Capabilities’ (Part 2)

This is the second part of my ramblings on the Australian Curriculum’s General Capabilities and Project Based Learning (PBL). The first part is here. What is PBL? Read about it here.

CRITICAL AND CREATIVE THINKING:
At my school, this is becoming our central focus for the implementation of the new NSW syllabi. I think it’s because my principal is really keen on it – she’s also an advocate for quality feedback and valuing skills over content. Pretty awesome for our students to have her as our leader, I reckon. I think critical and creative thinking are life-long skills that all people should master; it’s this type of thinking that can lead to a happy and successful life. Of course, teaching critical and creative thinking skills is a conundrum to teachers who feel pressured to cover a lot of content. Luckily for people using PBL as their main pedagogy, critical and creative thinking is much easier to teach … well, I don’t even think it is ‘taught’ during PBL as much as it is developed and refined.

In the style of PBL that I’ve developed over three years, I break down projects into three main parts: inquiry/discovery/research, create/compose/produce and present/share/promote. Of course, the first part of the project doesn’t really stop … inquiry is an iterative process and necessary at all stages, really. I should probably create a picture to show that one day, lol. I use a lot of visible thinking strategies at all stages of PBL, and these are implemented to develop and strengthen critical and creative thinking. Making your thinking visible is, I believe, an important 21st century skill. I’m not saying this type of thinking is new – um, hello Newton, da Vinci, Shelley – I’m just saying that it’s even more important in our world today as our problems become more complex and more immediate. Strong critical and creative thinking is necessary if our young people are to thrive in our kinda ridiculously fast 21st century world. If we spend time making thinking visible – showcasing to ourselves and our peers what we’re thinking, how we’re thinking and why we’re thinking like that about a topic, product etc – then we are valuing critical and creative thinking; we’re having conversations about it in class. It’s not a case of, ‘Oh, I don’t/can’t think that way.’, it’s about empowering our young people to see that they can and do think this way.

So, over the years my PBL projects have seen my students develop their creative thinking through composing and designing awesome products like podcasts, websites, rap battles, narrative poetry, collaborative novellas, machinima, short films and anthologies of personal essays. This process is predicated on revision and reflection. Visible thinking strategies for brainstorming and planning that my students frequently use include star-bursting, KWL tables, think/pair/share, think/puzzle/explore and mind-mapping on portable whiteboards. Another excellent creative thinking activity is whole-group ‘what if’ question-asking when students present plans or drafts of their work to their peers.

As previously mentioned, projects necessitate in-depth inquiry. Students are developing their critical thinking as they learn to curate information found on the Internet (and sometimes even in books!). There are lots of protocols available to support students in their ability to judge the quality, credibility and relevance of information that they find on the web. PBL means that students aren’t being taught these skills in a ‘one-off’ lesson, rather they are using these methods time and time again at the beginning stages of their projects. We need to have young people who are critical of the content that is delivered to them via the media – this is essential in a media rich age where consumerism has become the natural state for our young people. A great activity is to actually teach students how to use google – people expect that this knowledge and skill is a given. It is not. Here’s a great website and poster for your classroom wall. My students have also started experimenting with the question formulating technique (QFT). This is a strategy that supports students in their question asking as they learn to identify open and closed questions and how to develop the best questions to ask. The QFT has resulted in some great ‘punk questions‘ which students have made visible to their peers through writing with whiteboard markers on windows and posting punk questions to the walls of the classroom.

Finally, giving students the freedom to pursue their interests in projects (even if all you feel you can allow is choice in product or audience), allows them to think more deeply about their own passions. Passions are the drivers of creative and critical thinking. There are a number of stages within PBL where students can be given a voice – what is the significance of the topic to their lives, what are their concerns about it, are we missing something pertinent to them as human beings – two being the crafting of the driving question (use the BIE tubric to help) and through daily reflection of their feelings about the project and their learning. To discover student interest you could do one of these activities: get them to write you a letter introducing themselves to you, get them to list the five things most important to them in their lives, do circle time where you focus on favourite ways to learn, favourite activities or what they want to do when the leave school OR get your students passion blogging once a week about what they value the most right now.

PERSONAL AND SOCIAL CAPABILITY:
All teachers want their students to go off and live happy and successful lives. Just what successful means and looks like varies massively between our young people. This is something that we, as teachers, need to accept. Successful for all students is not a Band 6 in the HSC or top bands in NAPLAN (that might be success for you as teacher). In fact, success for many of our students is simply to be happy and healthy. To feel safe and to feel valued. I really like this capability because it requires we teachers to see the human being behind the student. Does that make sense? Well, maybe it’s better if I quote the ACARA document:

the Melbourne Declaration on Goals for Young Australians (MCEETYA, p. 5) states that ‘a school’s legacy to young people should include national values of democracy, equity and justice, and personal values and attributes such as honesty, resilience and respect for others’.

This capability is about considering how our young people are developing emotionally and socially. It’s about being great role-models and facilitating learning experiences that ensure these young people are being given the opportunity to develop their self-awareness, self-management, social-awareness and social-management (these are the four elements of Personal and Social capability as outlined in the AC document, here). According to the AC, if you just teach the document, students will develop all of these aspects of personal and social capability. This may be true, but I’m slightly cynical about that. Covering content can easily be done through more traditional transmission-style teaching practices (insert jibe about worksheets) and does not necessarily mean that this capability will be explicitly targeted in the learning experiences being created.

The best type of PBL is real-world and authentic. As Suzie Boss says, PBL gives students the opportunity to contribute to and change (even slightly) their world. Boss says all projects should target one of the three As: action, awareness and advocacy. According to Lee, we should add two more: activism and anarchy. (Hehe!) Essentially, if a project is going to be significant and engaging and valuable, it will allow students to develop a sense of themselves and their role within their local and wider community. Students will work on real-world problems in their community or wider society (such as transport issues, employment, youth homelessness, environment issues, bullying, depression etc) and contribute to solving these problems in some way. My students have engaged with their local community through our projects, for example students raises awareness of human trafficking by writing an article for the local newspaper, they took action on depression and bullying by composing and publishing poems online and they will be advocating for the valuing of imagination to Year 5 and 6 students at our local primary school in May.

By giving our young people a voice through seeking a public audience for their learning, their compositions and their concerns, we are helping them to develop a better sense of themselves as active and effective contributors to their local and global communities.

(The final two capabilities will be outlined in the final part of this series of posts. Sorry it’s a bit massive, lol!)