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)

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!)

Project Based Learning and the Australian Curriculum ‘General Capabilities’ (Part 1)

**Disclaimer: during these posts I will be referring to the General Capabilities as outlined in the Australian Curriculum. However, I am a NSW English teacher and therefore I will be implementing the new NSW K-10 English Syllabus in 2014. All AC content (including the General Capabilities) is embedded within that syllabus document created by the Board of Studies. These posts, however, are designed to be relevant and accessible to all teachers in Australia, hence my reference to the Australian Curriculum and not the new NSW Syllabi.

There’s a lot of talk about the Australian Curriculum at the moment – some positive and some negative. I know that I often come across as a negative person on this blog and via social media, but I’ll say confidently that I am optimistic about the Australian Curriculum. Why? Because it is an opportunity for change and renewal, two things our schools desperately need. I’m also excited because of the AC’s clearly articulated awareness of the need to change our perceptions of our learners and our practice as teachers. This is articulated through the General Capabilities and the Cross-Curriculum Priorities. In this post I’ll only be focusing on the former, however. If you don’t know what the General Capabilities (GC) are, check out image below, taken from the AC website (click on it to enlarge). I love the central description of our goal as educators for our students: successful learner, confident and creative individual and active and informed citizen. It really gets to the heart of my personal philosophy as a teacher, that my job is to help shape great human beings. But since the term ‘great’ is relative, I think it’s safer to stick with what they AC says, lol. As I go through the GC, I will show how each capability aligns with elements of BIE’s ‘8 Essentials for PBL‘ (Voice and Choice; Significant Content; In-depth Inquiry; Public Audience; Revision & Reflection; Driving Question; Need to Know; 21st Century Skills) and, where possible, give examples of how I have engaged with each capability in my PBL English classroom. It is my belief that PBL is a pedagogy that provides students with the opportunity to strengthen, develop and demonstrate each of these capabilities.

LITERACY:

As an English teacher, I’ll happily argue that this is one of the most important capabilities in the list. The most important? Yeah, it probably is. I think literacy is the need to know for all young people. Being literate opens the door to the other capabilities. Without being literate, it’s very difficult to contribute and participate meaningfully in society. It’s not impossible, it’s just very difficult. Remember as well, that literacy includes visual literacy and critical literacy as well. During project based learning, literacy is developed through both explicit instruction and through more constructivist, constructionist and collaborative learning strategies.

A key driver of all successful projects is significant content. As I’ve explained previously (add link), content may be deemed significant by the teacher (as in, it’s in the curriculum), by the students (personal interests, contextually relevant or real-world problems) or both (negotiated curriculum where teacher discusses with students the content to be covered and through negotiation a compromise is reached where individual interest, contextual concerns and real world problems are connected meaningfully to the content the teacher is ‘required’ to cover). If the content is deemed ‘significant’, engaging, relevant, real-world and interesting by students and the teacher, then greater learning outcomes should be expected. How does this relate to literacy? If young people feel passionately about the content they are more likely to push their literacy skills further (reading and writing more complex texts). I’m sure many teachers would be surprised at the technical and complex vocabulary of many gaming and coding websites that teenage boys read.

Furthermore, a key aspect of PBL is the process of planning, drafting, peer/self assessment and revision. When applied to written or spoken products, this process has a significant impact on students’ literacy skills. This process becomes more pertinent for students when they are producing the product for a public audience – online or face to face.

As an English teacher, my students frequently engage in this iterative design-like process. I have even developed a feedback-feedforward peer and self assessment method to support student learning even more. You can read about it here.

Oh, and remember, literacy is not just the domain of the English teacher. ALL teachers ate responsible for it – the Australian Curriculum makes that quite clear. Scared? Well, looks like it’s time to do a cross-KLA project and invite your favourite English teacher to join!

NUMERACY:

Just like literacy, numeracy is the responsbility of all teachers. This terrifies me a little because numbers simply aren’t my friends. BUT, just because I don’t get into Maths, doesn;t mean my students don’t. PBL provides students with the opportunity to think in a more open way about their subjects. The segregating of subjects is an unfortunate consequence of the traditional schooling model. 30 minutes on a sport bus trip chatting with colleagues from other faculties and you’ll discover wonderful connections between your subjects. My colleague (a Maths teacher) and I got excited talking about poetic metre and imagined all sorts of other cross-overs between English and Maths. The moment we stop talking about covering content and we start talking real-world applications of our subjects, we realise the need to see our subjects as interrelated. This links back to what I said above about significant content, when we are driven by interest and real-world application, not only does engagement improve, but so too do learning outcomes.

The trend in the US at the moment is STEM – that’s the integration of the study of Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths. Through multidisciplinary projects, students are mastering STEM skills that they identify they need to know in order to be successful. Moreover, these projects drive students through a process of in-depth inquiry as they determine what they need to know and just how to find out this information or develop these skills. You can look at some truly impressive STEM projects here.

As an English teacher, running projects in just one subject area, my students still develop and apply their numeracy skills. Sometimes my projects require students to conduct in-depth inquiry through surveys and analysing the data they collect. They also engage with the data collected by others (often accessed online) and use this to support their findings about their topic. It seems silly, but even everyday numeracy comes into play as students estimate and calculate the amount of food and drink needed (and related costs) when planning the presentation of learning to a public audience.

Project-based learning necessitates in-depth inquiry. A significant part of both qualitative and quantitative research is accessing numerical data – be it graphs, statistics, tables etc. This applies to all subjects. If we don’t give our students the opportunity to engage with significant content through in-depth inquiry, we’re missing a wonderful chance to allow them to appreciate the power and importance of numbers, not just in Maths class.

INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION CAPABILITY:
Whilst PBL isn’t about technology (you can easily complete an awesome project without access to any technology, I know – I’ve done it!) it certainly is enhanced by access to a range of ICTs. I think what’s cool about PBL is that ICT capability develops naturally as part of the students’ learning. It’s not about learning to use a particular online tool or program just for the sake of it, or because it might make boring work a little bit more engaging. The early stage of all projects is in-depth inquiry – this is the stage where students are driven by deep and personally-developed questions about the project. Like everyone in 2013, students will begin their research on the Internet. This phase gives teachers a wonderful opportunity to model effective research skills and the importance of curating information using a variety of online tools (social bookmarking sites and tools like Pinterest, Scoop.it are popular at this stage). Students learn this skills not because the teacher has determined it’s good for them, they learn them because they need to know them in order to be successful with their project.

Collaboration and communication are key to PBL because students spend most of their time working in small teams. We’re told so often that these are the 21st century skills for young people to master – the workforce is collaborative and globalised therefore our students need to be able to work in a team and to communicate effectively with anyone, anywhere, anytime. This is where a online classroom is essential – not a space where resources a access, but rather a space where students can collaborate and communicate whenever they need to. I’m an edmodo fangrrrl and everyone knows it. This social network for education allows students to develop their digital citizenship (communicating with courtesy, compassion, and clarity) in the eye of their teacher and they can communicate with their teams whenever they need to. Teachers can easily assess the development of these 21st century skills and quickly give feedback to praise good behaviours and redirect negative behaviours.

ICTs play a big part in the revision and reflection process of PBL. In all projects, students are required to draft and revise their work. This process is enhanced through the use of tools like google docs (great for collaborative writing and planning) and more familiar programs like MS Word where students can use track changes and comments to illustrate their revisions. One of the core routines of PBL is goal-setting and reflecting on learning. This process can be done in a workbook, but it’s far more effective when it’s done using a site like edmodo or blogs. Blogging throughout a project really allows students to appreciate that learning is a process and that improvement happens over time. Blogging gives students a place to voice their concerns about the project as well as the joy of successfully solving a problem of creating something amazing. You can read about how I use the think, puzzle, explore protocol for students blogging here.

Finally, the most obvious use of ICTs during PBL is for the creation of the product and accessing a public audience. Allowing students to have a voice and choice as part of a project is essential to ensure engagement and relevance of learning. This voice and choice typically comes into play around the product that teams will be produce to demonstrate their learning. If you’ve seen BIE’s ‘PBL explained’ video, you’ll know that students might choose from a range of forms, some including ICTs, such as videos, websites and online magazines. Sometimes I don’t give students a choice. I love setting a challenge for my students, so they need to create a type of text they know nothing about, forcing them to develop their ICT capabilities. This can make some students uncomfortable, because they’re really being pushed, but ensuring that you’re there to provide support just in time means that this is responsible risk taking. My students have created cool products such as websites, podcasts, short films and online fiction – things they would normally not get the opportunity to do in English.

Of course, all of these products would mean nothing if they didn’t have an authentic, public audience. Teachers are time poor (and our students are too!) so having access to an online audience rather than an after-school audience of mums and dads, can be really helpful! The best thing to do, in my experience, is to connect with another class from somewhere else in the world – even if it’s just the primary school 40 minutes away. We have a range of technologies at our disposal that can facilitate this connection – skype, edmodo and YouTube have been our favourites. If connecting with another class sounds too risky for you, do a bit of networking and see if you can get a guest expert to Skype in to hear your students’ final presentations. Our young people need these experiences – their learning should not be confined to the four walls of the classroom!

In the next post, I’ll look at the last four capabilities and how I think PBL provides students with the opportunity to strengthen, develop and demonstrate these capabilities.

Visual representation of the ‘shadow’ concept for Yr 11

Below is a photograph of a diorama I made tonight as a model for my Year 11 advanced English class. They have their visual representations of the shadow concept due this Friday – with a 300 word rationale – and I thought I’d make one as a model to show them how they might be able to do it. Making it and writing the rationale only took me a couple of hours, so I reckon they can ace it even if they leave it until the night before, lol. It’s quite a personal piece, but it was rather cathartic making it and sharing it. My mum will be cool with me sharing it, she’s very open about her experiences and I think this is part of her healing process (and probably mine too).

This is the assessment task if you’re wondering what I’m going on about: Assessment Task 1-2013-2

VISUAL REPRESENTATION:

RATIONALE:

The process of individuation necessarily involves struggle and trauma as the individual acknowledges the role that social taboos and values have on the evolution of his or her shadow. It is only once the truths hidden in the darkness of the unconscious mind come to light in the conscious mind, that the shadow can be genuinely integrated into the True Self. I have chosen to visually represent this personal understanding of the Shadow through the diorama form. My diorama represents a truly personal inner journey, namely my developing awareness of the truth about my mother’s experience of Forced Adoption and the unconscious impact that this has had on my life.

 Symbolism of the question mark and barcode on the baby carriage represents my lack of knowledge regarding my half-brother and intends to provoke similar feelings of confusion in my responder. Contrastingly, the colour symbolism of the background washing from black to red and then to white, aims to inform my responder of my shift from being ignorant of mother’s traumatic past (black) to the embracing of the positive impact this discovery has on my understanding of my self (red then white). Finally, the tactile jutting out of the scissors and Band-Aid from the diorama dramatically illustrate my belief that social taboos and values impact the evolution of an individual’s shadow.  The scissors symbolise the cutting of the primitive mother/child bond. I also used key words on the scissors to represent society’s values and taboos in the 1970s such as BFA which stands for ‘baby for adoption’ – the acronym used on paperwork in hospitals that participated in forced adoption. However, the Band-Aid acts to signify a coming to light of the truth through the National Apology for Forced Adoption and the impact this had on my ability to heal through understanding my past.

 This diorama, whilst derived from personal experience, prompts the responder to consider their own shadow and how it may be shaped be elements beyond their control, specifically social taboos and values. Whilst bringing our shadow to light is painful, it is a necessary part of our inner journey towards Individuation.

Hunger Games 2212: my rejected ISTE presentation

I wasn’t ever going to blog about this, I really wasn’t. The project many of my Twitter friends know as #HG2212 was one of my most favourite learning experiences of last year – and a favourite of my students as well. That’s why I applied to present it as ISTE in San Antonio this year. Well, as you can guess from the title of this post, my presentation wasn’t accepted. I’m not writing this post to bitch about being rejected (because I think karma played a big role in my rejection and that makes things balance out in my head) but to share the project a little for the first time. Why? My very dear Twitter mate @carlaleeb asked me about the project today because a colleague of hers is about to teach the Hunger Games. My other great Twitter mate @pollydunning is keen to give this project a go as well.

I don’t plan to write a long and detailed post about the project. What I will do is share the recording of my presentation from edmodocon12 in August last year. It was a truly emotional experience sharing this project – yes, I cry in the video – simply because the project was such a moving learning experience. It was my life and my students’ life for two weeks straight, 24/7. There are some aspects of the project that I am not at liberty to disclose because they do not belong to me – they belong to Dean Groom who helped me nut out the project and sort out the annoying details that involved numbers. The idea for the project was also pretty much stolen from @Towney77. However, when I run this again this year I will definitely be simplifying the gaming elements and using edmodo much more cleverly to tally XP. It can be done.

So here is the video – be warned, it goes for well over half an hour and I do literally cry in it. You need to click on the link here and scroll down to my name and click on the little arrow beside it. It’s a lot of scrolling, haha!

I’d also like to share some of my students’ blogs from that project. Their writing still gives me goosebumps and will serve as wonderful models for my class this year.

Leefern R Skipberi

Harlow Lilywalk

Daniel Giunter

Leigh Walk-lily

Ruchit Seeaster 

Finally, I’d like to share the storify of the #HG2212 tweets carefully curated by my friend @missjessm. I am so very grateful that she did as it has given me a lasting record of the experience. Here it is: Bianca does Hunger Games

KEEP YOUR EYES OUT FOR THE NEXT … #HG2313

4 projects and 26 poems for Year 10 students

I spent about three hours on twitter today annoying people into sharing their favourite poems and poems for teenagers. Why? Well, I’ve put my hand up to write a unit of work for Year 10 on poetry. I’m happy to do it because for the last three years I’ve had great success with a poetry project that was originally based on the ideas of Dean Groom. It was my first ever proper time using project-learning with my classes … you can read about it here. The Cyborg Poetry project morphed into the very popular Emo Project. You can read about that project here.

For this unit of work I’ll be combining both projects. The Cyborg mini-project goes for 2 weeks and will be like an extended hook for the longer project to follow. I’ve modified the longer project to allow for greater teacher/student choice. Why? Because the unit of work needs to be ‘taught’ by five different teachers. Everyone has their own strengths and interests, so I figure I’ll make it as open as possible. I’ve come up with four potential driving questions which have slightly different content connected to them. I have also given a bit of freedom when it comes to the product and the presentation. Let’s face it, some teachers are going to feel more confident just getting their students to write an essay to be submitted to the teacher. That’s fine. I’m not into forcing adult humans into doing something they don’t want to do. On the other hand, I want to give them the option to try something new if they feel confident to take a risk. So here’s the project outlines that I’ve created for the FOUR options. I’ll be doing the ‘PUNKs and EMOs’ option.

I’ve also compiled a list of 26 poems suitable for the students to engage with as part of these projects – thanks to my Twitter mates for their suggestions! The poems are basically those that can be loosely classified under the categories of ‘emo poetry’ (focusing on things like loss, love and the human condition) or ‘punk poetry’ (focusing on things like injustice, prejudice and a dissatisfaction with society). I’ll let you decide which poems fit in which category, haha, enjoy!

Robert Frost:

-      Mending Wall

-      Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

-      Fire and Ice

John Foulcher:

-      For the Fire

-      Land’s End

Sylvia Plath:

-      Kindness

-      I am Vertical

W.H. Auden:

-      Unknown Citizen

William Shakespeare:

-      My Mistress Eyes

Philip Larkin:

-      This Be The Verse

-      Aubade

Charles Bukowski:

-      Alone With Everyone

-      A Smile to Remember

Taylor Mali:

-      Totally Like Whatever, You Know?

-       How Falling in Love is Like Owning a Dog

Sarah Kay:

-      Poppy

-      Witness

Mark Grist:

-      Lump

-      Head of Progress

Maya Angelou:

-      Alone

-      Still I Rise

-      I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Carol Ann Duffy:

-      Education for Leisure

Dylan Thomas:

-      Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night

W.B. Yeats

-      Sailing to Byzantium

T.S. Eliot:

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Year 8 PBL: Tim Burton Project

For pretty much most of the last term of 2012, my Year 8 students were thinking about director Tim Burton and his distinctive style. I’ve taught the ‘Tim Burton as Auteur’ unit heaps of times with students but this is the first time that I made a proper project out of it. Every year the Burton unit (focusing on distinctive style) leads into the Year 8 RockFest project – where the whole year group works together for three weeks to plan and run the annual rock concert held in the last week of term. The link between the two has been tenuous – basically students try to make their RockFest ‘distinctive’.

This year I wanted the link between the two projects to be more significant – so basically I just mushed them together somewhat accidentally. Ultimately RockFest became ‘Tim Burton’ themed – colours, posters, music etc was all influenced by his style. Each Year 8 class was allocated a particular role in the planning and running of RockFest. We had five teams: Catering, Management, Entertainment, Publicity and Creative Teams. I also tried to create a ‘layer’ of PBL for the other teachers by suggesting a series of activities for their students to complete. You can see it all on this PDF: RockFest 2012 You can also watch the video I created to launch RockFest here: Year 8 RockFest Mash-up.

The other classes studied Tim Burton’s films before they began work on the RockFest project. My class knew that the Tim Burton project was integral to their contribution to RockFest – they were actually creating part of the day’s entertainment. That put a lot of pressure on my students and many were very resistant to the idea of their films being shown to the whole school – my response was always, ‘Make a great film and be proud of it.’ The argument goes that sometimes stakes have to be high for students to commit. (Sounds like Mr Gove, hey?) My students committed, but they were lacking in some key skills and knowledge about film-making (that they tried desperately to get but far too late into the project) and this resulted in films that they weren’t that proud of. But we’ll get to that later.

Here is a rough outline of how our Tim Burton project ran:

1. Project launch: I read my class some of Burton’s poems and we watched some of his short animations on YouTube. We discussed our initial responses to the art of Burton. I posed the driving question: ‘How can we make a short film that will impress auteur Tim Burton?’ and handed out the project outline: 2. Need to know: Students used a KWL table and class discussions to establish what they ‘need to know’ to successfully complete the project. Immediately they were intrigued by the word ‘auteur’. The ‘W’ column was filled with lots of inquiry questions such as ‘How do you edit a short film?’ We used a project calendar to plan the next few weeks of the project. This was displayed at the back of the classroom.

3. Significant content: Students identified that they needed to learn a bit about Tim Burton as a person, so we read some information about him and I gave them a 10 question quiz. They also felt they needed to watch films by Burton to understand his distinctive style and discover what he clearly enjoys in a film. They had identified a need to know about film techniques (editing, shots, angles, movement, sound) and watching the films would help them find out about these. We watched four films by Burton: Vincent, Edward Scissorhands, The Corpse Bride and A Nightmare Before Christmas. Whilst watching the film, students in their teams were allocated an aspect of the film (characters, lighting, sound, camera work) to take notes about. They used a baby lotus (Baby Lotus Scissorhands) to record their information and then shared this with the rest of the class using the jigsaw strategy. At the end of watching the films, the class wrote a collaborative essay answering the question: What makes the films of Tim Burton distinctive? This took far too long. I need to be much more firm in my expectations for each lesson. I worked hard with this class to teach them the minutiae of quality writing – we focused on sentence structure and paragraph structure. Hard work, time-consuming but totally worth it. Oh, and at this stage we also managed to Skype with a class in New Zealand who were studying Burton’s Edward Scissorhands. My students learnt about Burton’s dark romantic comedy style from this conversation.

4.a. Applying the content: The next stage was the planning of the films. Students had been given their teams right at the beginning of the project and worked in them every lesson during the ‘investigate’ stage of the project. This is a sneaky way of having a seating arrangement as well, haha. In teams, students brainstormed ideas for their short film. I definitely need to steal some strategies from the Design Thinking guys for this stage of the project, like the iterative thing where kids generate heaps of ideas and then settle for one. We kinda did this but not in a visible way. It should be visible. They should be aware of the process they are using at this creative stage. We used a lot of A3 paper and textas for this process. At the end each group had a film synopsis that they could justify as being something that would impress Burton – they focused on emulating his type of characters, themes, music, genre, symbols, lighting and camera style.

4.b. Planning: The next part was script-writing and story-boarding. I feel passionately that students need to learn this process when film-making. It can be really painful for students to work through the process because it is time-consuming but ideally they need to understand that film-making is a team-sport (usually) and one person can not do the whole job. There is a great piece of software you can use for scriptwriting, Celtx, which is on the DER laptops but Year 8 don’t have access to it so we just did it by hand. I showed them a sample script that I downloaded from this site: Silent Love. We read through it as a class and discussed the features of layout and content. Students then were given a few lessons in the computer lab to write their scripts. This was a really challenging activity for them as they kept wanting to write blockbusters when they only needed a very basic narrative. Some kept writing short stories despite my insistence that they were to emulate the script model given. A BIG learning curve for my students!

4.c. Storyboarding. Another really frustrating activity for my students but really important. Once again I showed a model storyboard to students and we chatted about its features and why they were included. I actually discovered the creative talents of a few of my students – amazing artists/cartoonists and they were joyous at being praised for this skill in English. I enjoyed sitting with each team and quizzing them on their use of film techniques for each frame: What can we see? Why? What can we hear? Why? How should we feel at this point? What film techniques are helping us to feel this way? Why? Whilst they found this process annoying (‘Can’t we just film now miss? I know what it should look like in my head!’), I could see that they were learning through doing – they were learning the metalanguage of film as well as how meaning is constructed in film. Awesome.

4.d. Filming. By this time of the term I had my wonderful prac student Peter with me. He gave a great impromptu lesson on the importance of production management – make lists for everything! We only have pretty dodgy flipcams that chew through batteries fast, so filming is hard. Also, tudents spent ages on set construction because they chose to do claymation and sock puppets … make sure you factor time in for this OR require students to construct these at home. Some students didn’t even manage to get to filming because they spent so long with their storyboarding and set construction. Some students did get to filming but never managed to get to editing. Other filmed but did so badly – shaky/unfocused camera, bad/lost storyboard or missing members were some problems encountered. Finally, some filmed successfully – typically the cohesive, well-organised teams.

4.e. Editing. Thank goodness for Peter! I don’t know how we would have managed without him – he brought 6 macbook pros to school for students to use for editing. He sat with them during lunchtimes so they could record voice-overs and make music using GarageBand. Really, this part of projects is hard because it is the pointy end – the teams who completed their films did so about ten minutes before they were due to be presented at RockFest! I’ve used Adobe Premier and MovieMaker to edit films, but without a doubt iMovie is the BEST editing software for students. It’s unfortunate that most public schools don’t have access to it.

5. Presentation. Only four out of seven films were completed as part of this project and shown to the whole school. This might seem like a failure to some, but if you had seen the hands-on learning that was occurring in my classroom or listened to the discussions of my students about what they learnt during the project, you would know that it wasn’t a failure at all. There is a lot that could be improved with how this project came about, but in light of the fact that kids were absent all over the place, it was the end of the year and we are seriously lacking in film-making resources, I reckon it was awesome. Below are three of the films that were ‘completed’.