I’ve been unwilling to write a blog post for a week or so now … and that’s a big deal for me because I love writing my blog. I got a little bit grumpy by a post that I read about PBL and the suggestion that teachers create narrow questions and projects as a means to control student learning. You can read Ewan’s thoughts about PBL and design thinking here. His post hurt me and I found it hard to control my fury, unleashing a rather immature series of tweets about his post, and it made me feel heaps better. Ho hum, I am me.
But then I realised that what he did was awesome, it really challenged my way of thinking about ‘PBL’ (whatever that is) and how I approach being a teacher. This year has been chaos for me – in and out of class, feeling outta my depth with stuff – and I haven’t honed my students’ group-work skills as well as I would have liked. In fact, I’ve been controlling their learning all year. But is that such a bad thing? I really don’t know anymore. This year I’ve watched three year groups participate in a project that wasn’t very well designed and lacked the embedded skill-development, planning and reflection needed to ensure a project’s success. The projects weren’t terrible, they were just very loose and I’m not sure learning outcomes were achieved. Learning outcomes?! Yes – that is something that we teachers are responsible for. Like it or not. I would suggest that we teachers would be rather lax in our roles as education professionals if we just threw outcomes out of the window, tossed kids a problem and then hoped that they learnt something relevant to our subject as they grapple with it.
What people on the ‘circuit’ selling products to educators forget is that we high school teachers are subject specialists. You might wanna kill us, but we won’t die easily. I know I joke and say ‘let’s kill the teacher’ but really I have so much respect for educators who are P.A.S.S.I.O.N.A.T.E about their subject – why not share your expertise and been seen as an expert? Doesn’t mean young people can’t be in control of their learning – the pace, the form, the direction. I know this blog post is crazy untidy and directionless, but I’ll just leave you with this … if the projects that I set for my students are ‘just another boring school project’ well at least I help make their learning visible every day in class. My role is to help them see where the might get to and why it might be worth getting there. So there.
Oh, and here are some ‘narrow’ projects that I have ‘designed’ and will ‘teach’ for the next three weeks. You might see them as heavily teacher-directed, and you’re right – they are. And I like it that way – it’s appropriate for this point in my students’ learning careers.
That’s a really interesting post. I’ve forwarded it on to a couple of people. I think I share your views about what can be achieved by a passionate and open-minded teacher. Okay, there are probably teachers out there who are trying to do ‘How do I write an effective novel report?’ projects but most of the projects I’ve seen have fulfilled the ‘design thinking’ criteria.
Mind you, I do like the idea of ‘helpful disobedience’. My favourite personal example of this was from the class that I’d asked to do a final presentation on romantic (or anti-romantic) poetry. And one of the students did an interpretative dance based on John Foulcher’s Summer Rain.
I had noticed your silence and was thinking you were wrestling with this. Let me share my perspective not being as far down the PBL path as you: I just started a project with my year 8 class and wanted to make it ‘real’, moreso than just handing it in for the teacher, so I got the class to visit the target age group and interview them. At about this time I really got into the idea of helping along the process of our project by incorporating the phases mentioned in design thinking. I guess this is where I see the overlap between PBL and DT.
I think that DT can help design our PBL projects. Like the free toolkit says design thinking is ‘a mindset’. I have always admired what you’re doing with PBL (I couldn’t be where I am without the ideas you’ve shared on your blog) and I am glad that you have wrestled with these ideas, if only for the fact that is is helping you to validate what you ARE doing. You don’t have to justify what you are doing to anyone but yourself, and this is, i believe, the reason for this post.
No one can deny your passion for the subject and your students and for making their learning more relevant and fun. At the end of the day PBL, DT, whatever else you can think of, these are all just words: labels for our brains to classify things. It is how we adapt these ideas to our classroom and make it work for our students that matter ( and outcomes are important for this). Where you incorporate student voice (in the design of the project, the completion, etc) is up to you. In a specific subject like English, you have things to teach and using projects to do so is a great way to do it. I could see a full DT project being run for an elective where students have to design something not subject specific, but in saying this if you check some of the case studies on the DT website the teachers have used it to design projects a la PBL. So it’s not a matter of either/or (isn’t it funny how we make duality when we don’t need to) but ‘AND’.
@Will Richardson would say that we are Master Learners alongside our students. It’s not about giving over total control to students but learning along with them, guiding and being part of the process of learning. We definitely have something to offer our students (experience, knowledge, skills, strategies, insights…) and indeed, as you note, have a responsibility to ensure that outcomes are met through the process.
In my former incarnation as a science teacher, I became deeply invested in an instructional mode fondly known as models-based reasoning, or MBR, growing out of work at the University of California, Davis, University of Arizona and elsewhere.
Models-based reasoning, at its root, presents natural phenomena to students under carefully designed/constructed circumstances so that students may perceive the phenomenon such that discreet elements of the phenomenon may be teased out of the bigger picture. Students then undertake a collaborative and sequential process of reasoning and debate to arrive at precise understanding of the concept at hand. This methodology began in the disciplines of physics and chemistry, but thoughtful teachers in the life sciences are also using this to great benefit, particularly in the areas of genetics and evolution.
MBR is a very carefully guided process, a cognitive analogue to PBL. MBR does not take a student by the scruff and shove him/her outside with the command, “Perceive and Reason!” Why? Because students lack observational skills and the scaffold to understand simple phenomena, something required before a student can step into a very complex world and make empirical sense of it. While eager to learn and very capable, they are ignorant of both fact and concept.
Failing to carefully construct the learning context to narrow a student’s perceptual options provides too many phenomenological diversions, quickly leading to the hardening of misconceptions (shared and often easy, thus powerful, simplifications) students bring into the room; in short, the method can fail as predictably as having students memorize tables of factoids. I suspect the same holds true for any discipline, as our culture (the American political process comes screaming to mind as I write this) is rife with examples of unthinking, uncritical perception, something mercilessly exploited by well-oiled marketing machines. People simply believe what they’re told, thanks to a lack of cognitive skill.
My understanding of Design Thinking is that it is a powerful practice developed for solving complex problems, and practiced by individuals who have already acquired higher-order thinking skills. Design Thinking as a teaching/learning method does not seem to be appropriate even for collegiate-level learners unless they already have a body of knowledge and effective collaborative skills under their belts. Gaming as a teaching/learning modality is informative here: when gamers come together to solve complex problems, they bring their considerable and long-established gaming and social skills to the process. You don’t throw a non-gamer into the pool with skilled gamers as they tackle a complex project. I’ve been that person; it doesn’t work.
I suspect those who hold DT as superior to PBL will, when in the presence of flesh and blood adolescents, eventually concede that while DT has its place in advanced settings, our students first need to undertake a journey in communication and logic, to walk before they sprint. PBL in the hands of cognitive nurturers like Bianca Hewes is that very process.
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