Using ‘Think, Puzzle, Explore’ for student blogging

My last blog posts asked for people to share their formative assessment ideas with me. I received a really great suggestion from my Twitter mate, Kim Pericles. She suggested using a ‘Think/Puzzle/Explore’ table in favour of a Know/Wonder/Learn table. I’d heard of it before, but this time it really captured my interest – funny how that happens, hey? I think it is awesome as a formative assessment tool and I will be using it in my classroom a lot this year. Oh, and for those of you who might think I’m hating on the KWL, I’m not – I used that more for prior-knowledge testing and generating student sub-questions for projects and then at the end of a phase of learning/project for reflection of learning. KWL FTW, I recko, haha.

Anyway, I started writing an edmodo post for my students about blogging and found myself using the ‘think, puzzle, explore’ idea to help them guide their blog posts. Here’s what I came up with:

What will you blog about?

There are three main types of blog posts that I would like you to consider writing each week (or after each lesson even!) … they can be loosely categorised by the verbs ‘thinking’, ‘puzzling’, ‘exploring’.

THINKING POSTS:

This is where you write about your thoughts on a topic, lesson, text, aspect of the project, etc. These posts are where you confidently show off your own knowledge and understanding! Be proud, share what you’ve discovered! Get excited! These posts are the passion-fuelled type where you can’t stop blabbering about something cool that you’ve discovered. Try to include links and videos and quotes from sources (like your text) to help you readers develop their understanding of your ideas. Backing up your arguments with evidence is a really good habit to get into!   

 PUZZLING POSTS:

Let’s face it, learning new stuff is really hard. Often we fail more than we succeed but through this process of trial and error we discover cool new things! These blog posts are the ones you write when you’re pissed off – when you just feel like it’s all too crazy hard and you wanna quit. You write these posts because something is puzzling you and you need to share that with someone, somewhere. Sharing is caring. Someone might just have the answer and reassure you! It’s better out than in, right?

 EXPLORING POSTS:

English poses a range of baffling questions (you’ll be asking yourself many of these – see the ‘puzzling post’) and delves deeply into humanity’s biggest dilemmas. That’s what makes this subject so awesome! These posts are the place where you ask questions – big, complex, challenging questions. These posts might be classified as tangential – this is a kinda smart-sounding word that means ‘random’. There’s always something that you want to know more about: a character or a scene in a text or the composer of a text or the latest piece of bizarre philosophy/psychology your teacher has tried to introduce. Use these blog posts to be curious; ramble on about what fascinates you …

PBL + Me = How?

In response to my original post PBL + Me = Why? my edmodo colleague Mr Rowley asked:

Not really sure where to begin. How do you get it rolling?

It’s a good question! Mr Rowley is actually playing around with the idea of a Flipped Classroom too and was thinking the two could work well together. This is something lots of teachers are starting to do – making connections between teaching approaches to enhance their effect on student learning and engagement.

Here’s my messy response. I’ll fix it up a bit later.

It takes quite a bit of planning for your first project … start with thinking about what you students can create or do to demonstrate their learning – this would be your content/skills/habits of mind/standards. Then start thinking about a driving question that would immediately engage your students and help guide them throughout the process to creating the product and presenting to a specific audience.

The flipped classroom and PBL go together well because the individual stuff (the content focus, you typical teacher-centred instruction) occurs at home and the team-work occurs in class. Of course PBL (and I’m assuming the flipped classroom) would still feature whole class interactive instruction … just less often.

I tend to think in terms of a process and a product as the ‘assignments’ (process 1: investigation/plan, Process 2: Draft of product Product: object created and/or presentation of learning/object). This means they’re being assessed formatively twice and summatively once. Each process/product sees the students engaging with the driving question. You can also award ‘points’ (like a gamification thing that lead to edmodo badges) for positive project behaviours – I use Habits of Mind for this.

Giving Macbeth a real-world audience

Not that long ago I wrote a post called ‘Assessment: out with the old, in with the new‘. This post had me recounting how I am trying to update the assessment tasks in our faculty one at a time … each task I am trying to make that little bit more ‘real’ without causing too much of a stir amongst my colleagues. I will be running a PBL project with my Year 10 class as they navigate their way through Shakespeare’s Macbeth. This across-the-board assessment task will function as the culminating product for this project. The premise of the task is that our students will be entering a design competition in which each entrant must submit a potential poster design for an upcoming production of Macbeth. My original assessment sheet looked good to me, but when my colleague ran it by her partner (who happens to be a graphic designer) it was pointed out to me that the assessment didn’t really look like a real design brief.

Authenticity is a key element to PBL, so I wanted to do all I could to ensure the task reflects what students would encounter if this was a REAL competition and not just some teacher-created faux one. Luckily my colleague sent me through a design competition information flyer and I used this to re-sculpt my assessment task. When I showed the task to another colleague (who hadn’t seen the original) she was all excited that Bell Shakespeare was running a competition that matched exactly our assessment task. She asked me what the prizes were and I told her with a smirk on my face that I hadn’t decided yet – she actually believed the assessment was a legitimate competition! Stoked! BUT she wasn’t all that stoked when she discovered my fraud and suggested I remove Bell Shakespeare’s name from the document lest I be sued by them. Humph! I was slightly annoyed but since I want to be an advocate for correct procedure regarding copyright, I dutifully went to the computer and created a mock theatre company and logo. (I used http://cooltext.com/ which was pretty user-friendly!)

So here it is … quite a few hours of my life, but worth it I think. Well, that is until I see it scrunched up on the classroom floor.

 

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I’m pretty excited about this task because I managed to sneak in some tips on planning and chunking down the task. These stages will be what my students use to plan their project – I hope the other teachers in my faculty use it in a similar way. All I have to do now is allocate my students their groups and discuss some formative tasks to ensure they’re on the path to success.