The inaugural #OZPBLCHAT was awesome – thanks!

On Monday evening, despite feeling far from 100%, I moderated the very first #OZPBLCHAT. I was a bit nervous that not many people would join but the turn-out was awesome … it was so busy in the chat, in fact, that I could barely read any replies to my questions! I guess that would explain the picture below:Yup – the very first #OZPBLCHAT was trending in Australia and it was even showing above #qanda … OK, maybe just for a bit, lol. I was in awe of the great ideas and questions shared and asked by my fellow tweeters. It makes me feel happy knowing that there are so many teachers ready to give up an hour of their time to chat about a different way of teaching – yeah, it’s not the only way of teaching (I hope I made that clear) but is one worth giving a go. I’m not going to go into detail about what was discussed during the chat because I want the tweets to speak for themselves. I have to say a big thank you to my dedicated hubby @waginski who spent most of the chat retweeting awesome tweets and then spent a couple of hours on Tuesday putting together the storify of the best tweets. If you don’t know what a storify is, it’s just a selection of key tweets put into a sort of chronological narrative. You can read part one of the chat here and part two here.

Oh, and for those of you who couldn’t make it, these were the focus questions for the chat. Feel free to add your comments or further questions below:

Q1: What do you KNOW about PBL?

Q2: What do you WANT to know about PBL?

Q3: Why would/should you give PBL a go?

Q4: What have you LEARNT this chat?

 

Book published – achievement unlocked!

Ever since my Year 12 Extension students presented me with a hardcover copy of a book we wrote collaboratively as a class, I’ve wanted to have a go at publishing more student work in this way. And I just did it! To get a hardcover copy is a bit pricey from Blurb ($74 delivered for one copy!) but I paid for it because I was excited and having the book in your hands is so much more awesome than just flicking through an eBook. I did, however pay the $10 to make it an ePub book as well which you can download for free using the link below. I’m sure there are cheaper options and someone out there will let me know 🙂

The last project Year 10 worked on was the ‘Wild at Heart’ project and if you click on this link you can see the finished product – a whole bunch of wonderful, creative, insightful personal essays … published for the world to read! We’ll be putting our class hardcover copy in the library after we all have a look at it. I just hope it arrives before Year 10 leave!

 

 

PBL: using a mash-up video for an ‘entry event’.

I spent far too many hours on my mac last night creating a video to launch our final Year 8 project for the year, RockFest. Each year, Year 8 plan and run the annual RockFest. This is the third year that we’ve run this project and each year it is pretty fun but quite chaotic. This year to dampen the chaos (but hopefully not the collaborative fun), I have given each Year 8 class a title and responsibility – catering team, publicity team, management team, creative team and technical team. This year’s theme is ‘Tim Burton’ … so the whole event will reflect his distinctive style. I made the video below for the entry event today, but we didn’t launch the project because we forgot Year 8 had scripture, oops. I’m pretty stoked with the outcome of the film … think it captures Burton’s style well even if there isn’t any real focus on rock, lol.

Come join us for a chat … an #OZPBLCHAT!

I’ve been tinkering away at project-learning in my classroom since October, 2010. A month or so before that my friend Dean Groom introduced me to this new way of doing things … I imagine he could sense how frustrated I was with trying to integrate technology into my classroom with little purpose or direction. Anyway, if you’ve ever read another post on this blog you’ll know that the rest is history. I’ve stuck with PBL through the failures and the successes, the tantrums and the celebrations. Why? Either I’m just a stubborn git or this project-learning thing has some merit. I’m happy to argue that both are true.

Mid-way through last year I decided to undertake a Master of Education because I felt so passionately about PBL – I wanted to get the data to back up my belief that technology is integrated meaningfully into the classroom only when we use an appropriate pedagogy such as PBL. I wanted to get the data so I could SPREAD THE WORD about the awesomeness of PBL. I wanted all teachers in Australia to give PBL a go and see the impact it will have on them and their students. But guess what? I didn’t need the MEd to do it – people didn’t want ‘research’ data … they wanted to see how it works from a teacher’s perspective, they wanted to see the pit-falls and the joys, they wanted to see that it’s worth doing again and again. And now … there’s HEAPS of interest in PBL!! Yay Australia!!

OK … to get to the point of this post. Due to the massive surge in interest in PBL (and not only tentative interest but people and faculties and even whole schools committing to doing PBL now and very soon!) I have decided that there’s a need for a weekly (or fortnightly depending on the time of term, lol) PBL chat. There’s already #pblchat which is moderated by the beautiful Theresa Shafer of the New Tech Network, but it’s mostly for the US and thus focuses on their standards and Common Core etc. We need an AUSTRALIAN PBL chat! Why? Because we have a new Australian Curriculum that’s being implemented soon and it is SCREAMING for project-learning … so we’re going to have a chat. When? Mondays from 9pm until you all get bored or leave to watch #qanda.

Typically twitter chats are democratic … in that the participants get to select the topic. I’m going to change that. I’m going to go all authoritarian and determine the topics for the rest of the term. How come? Because there isn’t that long to go until the end of the year and I figure there are some key elements of PBL that just need to be covered … namely, BIE’s 8 elements of PBL. So below is a suggested outline of weekly topics for the next 5 weeks. I would, however, love your suggestions for focus questions for each topic – post ‘em as a comment if you’ve got ‘em. These 5 topics take us until the end of term (public school term, that is, haha) and after that we can become democratic e.g. let’s have a holiday and resume the chat when we’re all rested and eager to start a new school year.

Oh, and if you’re not on twitter and don’t want to be, don’t worry! I’ll be collecting all of the best tweets using storify and adding them to a weekly wrap-up blog post 🙂

Monday 19^th November: The what and the why.

–       What is this PBL thing?

–       Why should I care?

Monday 26^th November: Significant Content & Student Voice and Choice

Monday 3^rd December: Driving Question & Need to know

Monday 10^th December: In-depth Inquiry & 21^st century skills

Monday 17^th December: Revision and Reflection & Presentation

My top three cool learning moments (from last week)

Today I felt like writing. I didn’t feel like writing the overdue chapters for the latest edu book I’m writing. It’s not the creative type of writing I felt like doing. I enjoy writing this blog because I am free from the gaze of the editor. Maybe I need to have an editor in my mind to focus or censor me … I guess Freud would say that I have my Super-Ego, but sometimes I think it lets some crazy stuff slip through … or is that the Ego that chooses to let the stuff slip through? Only I’m not conscious of it, right? Oh I digress … sorry.

So I didn’t know what to blog about and (of course) I asked Twitter. My new Kiwi mate Christine Wells suggested this: ‘Maybe a blog on your top 3 cool learning moments?’ I tell you what, she’s a fountain of great ideas, that one! So this is my post about three cool learning moments from last week.

Cool learning moment 1: Monday … period 6. Year 8 have been watching Tim Burton films in order to discover what makes his style distinctive and thus earn the title ‘auteur’. It’s part of our current project. I’m pretty sure I posted that on here a little while ago. Anyway, as a way of summarising what they have discovered, I got them to write a collaborative essay. Basically each team of three is responsible for writing one paragraph of the essay – that’s one paragraph per team. These paragraphs will all be smooshed together to make a collaborative class essay that I will post outside our classroom for the world (or at least passing students) to see. Teaching paragraph writing to students is hard and that’s why I set them an attainable, collaborative goal.

On Monday afternoon last week, Year 8 were tired. Despite this I had my mission – to teach how to write a great statement to begin a paragraph – and I was determined to achieve it. After about fifteen minutes of instruction/discussion (e.g. what is a subject, object, verb; what is a clause, a dependent clause, an independent clause) my students got to have a go on their own. Each team had three different pieces of coloured paper on which they needed to write the subject/verb/object of their statement addressing a question (e.g. What is distinctive about the characters in Tim Burton’s films?). The result? Well it was mixed. Learning the ‘parts’ of a sentence had confused the ‘natural’ writers and had empowered the struggling writers. My learning? We all need to have a basic understanding of the building blocks of language, even if writing comes naturally to us. My mission? To spend more time discussing the parts of language with my students to empower them all.

Cool learning moment 2: On Wednesday I had the pleasure of hosting an English teacher from another school. She was visiting because she wanted to ‘see PBL in action’. I was terrified when I read her request via email … I’ve never had anyone watch me ‘do’ PBL. I talk a lot about it – on my blog, on twitter, at presentations, during workshops – but is it all talk? I kinda felt like it was and the impending visit was making me belly-sick. Luckily Jessica is a gorgeous, calm, lovely person and made me feel at ease straight away. She came into my Year 9 class and my Year 10 class. I introduced her as Jessica – it’s my dream for my students to call me Bianca. I hate titles. They are silly. Anyway, knowing her first name seemed to calm my students too. Both lessons went really well and I was stoked that they weren’t staged lessons … they were real lessons. Students were still silly with me, I said good bye to a student leaving and I just felt comfortable.

Chatting afterwards to Jessica about the lessons, she was really positive and enthusiastic about my approach. She said she was surprised by how structured my lessons were but also by how self-directed and engaged my students were. Even the ones pretending to shoot each other in a mock duel knew what we were doing for the project and could explain what this lesson was for, what the last one was for and where the project was heading. That was pretty cool – their awareness of why they were learning and what they were learning … even the seemingly boring basic stuff is purposeful in PBL. My learning? The best things I learnt from this experience was the growth of my students’ understanding of PBL (one student had told Jessica at first he thought I wasn’t doing my job properly but later he realised how important it is to control his own learning) and how much I know about this crazy PBL stuff. My mission? Keep in touch with Jessica and open my classroom to other teachers who want to visit.

Cool learning moment 3: If you’re one of the people who has read my feedback post from a few weeks ago, you’ll know that I’ve made a big shift away from quantitative feedback to qualitative feedback/feedforward. Recently students had their yearly examinations. For the writing component I used a checklist – a series of criteria written as questions and a yes/no column for ticks. E.g. Did the essayist establish a personal voice? Yes/No. I also used code annotations (read the post and this will make sense). That was the only feedback/feedforward given. No numbers. When I gave back the papers to my students, they were desperate to know their ‘percentage’ … and I directed them to the criteria checklist and told them to read through the feedback and then allocate themselves some ‘medals’ (what they did well) and set some ‘missions’ (what they need to improve on’). Then I told them that was all they needed … our focus in English is on learning, not on catergorising each other as a number or rank. One girl asked, ‘What do I tell my mum when she asks how I went in English?’ and I said, ‘Show her your medals and missions. If she doesn’t understand, tell her to call me.’ I haven’t had a call yet, but maybe I’ll get one this week. We’ll see. My learning? Students really need to be ‘unschooled’ … they are programmed from Year 7 to expect numbers as feedback and they will align themselves (and their fragile egos) to these numbers. Scary stuff. My mission? Start using this feedback/feedforward method at the beginning of the year.

How can using edmodo help you to be a ‘quality teacher’?

Below is a copy of a speech that I wrote for a keynote (my first ever, finally a woman and a teacher gets be a keynote … sorta) on edmodo and the Quality Teaching Framework. It is similar in style to how I write blogs, but of course it is a speech, so there is a bit more rhetoric 😉

In the early months of 2009, there were rumblings in my school about technology … it was coming, there was nothing we could do to stop it, so we better be prepared. Yup, Kevin ’07 was delivering his promise to provide every student in Australia with their own computer – it was to be a digital education revolution. My school, like all of your schools probably, knew that we needed to be prepared for this momentous change to education. So we did what all schools do in times of change, we set up committees. I remember distinctly my head teacher telling me to choose the policy team. He knew that this role would involve a few painful, tedious and frustrating meetings nutting out the school’s policy for using the laptops, and then the job would be over. I remember him distinctly telling me to avoid the teaching and learning committee – he knew very well that the job of that group would never be complete. Always being a little rebellious at heart, I opted to ignore his advice and put my hand up to join the DER teaching and learning team.  And you know what? He was completely right. Whilst the ‘team’ is now just ‘me’, the job is far from complete. In fact, it never will be because learning is forever, right? I know that sounds corny, but I truly believe it to be true.

 

So the revolution hit and whilst we thought we teachers would be washed away by the tidal wave of technology, we weren’t. We’re still here. Well, maybe we lost a few but I’m confident they were the 55 year olds who had the old Super, those bastards. But let’s get back on track, shall we? One of the first missions I set myself was to find a better way than email to share resources with students. How innovative am I? The truth is, however, that was our priority. In 2009, I had been teaching English at the same school for four years. I liked my students, but I was bored. They weren’t bored – not most of the time because I like to crack jokes and muck around … I’m a bit of a clown around teenagers, you see. Mostly I spent time making pretty worksheets and getting students to fill them in and glue them in their books. DER and the Lenovos meant that my pretty worksheets could be completed digitally … I just needed a way to get the worksheet to the students. Originally DER consultants suggested a range of strategies – USB, Bluetooth, email and worst of all, Moodle.

 

I’m just going to take a moment here to warn those moodlers out there that I am not a moodle fan. Why? Because I went through four days of moodle training and all I got was a headache and a massive textbook of instructions. As an English teacher, I simply wasn’t interested in learning how to do basic html coding to make my moodle site look pretty. I wanted something simple and practical. I wanted something teachers could manage themselves without relying on the ‘IT guy’. So moodle, sadly, just didn’t cut the mustard.

Luckily I am a nerd and opted to participate in a MacICT video conference looking at Web 2.0 tools. Ah, Web 2.0 tools. That phrase is almost quaint to me now … so many memories of 2009. But seriously, during the VC the presenter mentioned edmodo, I went home and checked it out and the rest is history. I like history, so I’m going to give you a quick history of edmodo and me. I promise I’ll get to the topic of this talk at some point in the next 50 minutes. When I first started using edmodo in 2009 there were less than 500,000 users. There were no quizzes, no communities, no folders, no connections feature and no badges. Mostly we had the post, alert and file upload option. Back then, that was all we needed … simpler times, hey? After my first few months of using edmodo, I became a bit of a fangrrrl. I was their number one champion in Australia. I tweeted about it, I blogged about it, I presented about it. I even had the CEO ring me up at home to talk about what I saw in edmodo’s future – what a trip for a young teacher! After the first year I had helped shape edmodo to be something a little bit different … instead of simply being a virtual classroom, it became a professional network for teachers. And, to be honest, it kinda became a big part of my life. As edmodo evolved through the input of thousands of teachers just like me, it became a very big part of my classroom. I feel like I’ve grown up with edmodo – they now have over 10 million users worldwide – which is all kinds of crazy. It’s true to say that because of edmodo, I have grown as a person and as an educator.

 

That’s a really odd statement to make about an online tool, isn’t it? Earlier this year when I was trying to figure out why edmodo is so central to my practice, I realized that it ticks the boxes of all of the elements of Quality Teaching. Did I see a few people sit up a bit straighter then? Wipe the snoozy sand out of their eyes? Yes! You’re right – I am finally getting to my topic! I told you I’d get there … it’s just that I’m an English teacher and I love narratives. Storytelling is a massive part of my teaching style. So I must warn you – there are more stories to come. If you were after a PPT slideshow and a ‘how to guide’ for edmodo, you probably should sneak out now and see if you can scab a left-over muffin from morning tea.

As I’m sure you all know, the quality teaching model has three core dimensions – intellectual quality, quality learning environment and significance – and under each dimension is a series of elements. What I aim to do in the remainder of this talk is to share with you stories about how each of these quality teaching elements can be met using edmodo. You heard right folks – EVERY element … don’t say I didn’t warn you, OK? Feel free to run to the coffee … I won’t be offended, I promise!  Oh, wait … before you run off I think you should stay for the next 5 minutes and 30 seconds. I have a video of my students I want you to watch. They are very sweet kids. I had planned to bring them with me today but my executive said the couldn’t come. They have their end of year exams and being in Year 10, those exams as seen as important. I won’t share with you my feelings on the matter – I’ve had complaints about my swearing at previous talks I’ve given, so I’ll spare you.

(WATCH VIDEO – 6 mins approx)

The first dimension I’m going to cover is intellectual quality … doesn’t it sound fun? This dimension has six elements, all pretty important ones because if you don’t meet them in your teaching, you’re pretty much wasting your students’ time. For real.

Deep knowledge

The knowledge being addressed is focused on a small number of key concepts and ideas within topics, subjects or KLAs, and on the relationships between and among concepts. In layman’s terms, this means don’t try to cover too much content in too short a time period. It’s a no-brainer, but somehow we manage to forget it in the rush of things. Keeping focused for students is done best when they’re organised. Edmodo has a folders feature where the teacher can add a range of rich, engaging and useful resources for students to use relating to a specific topic. I like to create just two folders per project/unit of work in which we house all of the important resources students will need. Using your key concepts as the names of your folders helps to keep your students focused on what is central to their learning.

 Deep understanding

Students demonstrate a profound and meaningful understanding of central ideas and the relationships between and among those central ideas. One of my favourite edmodo activities is the backchannel. It’s kinda stolen from an idea of Darcy Moore and mashed up with the idea of a twitter backchannel during a conference or presentation. Basically you give your students a text to engage with – like a film being viewed or a book or article being read aloud – and you have them make notes and ask thinking questions via edmodo. In edmodo posts come up in real-time, so students can interact whilst the viewing/listening is taking place. Trust me, kids are great at this – they’re all over multitasking. I often set a series of initial posts for students, with simple words as headings for their posts – like ‘characters’, ‘music’ or ‘challenging ideas’. Under these posts students add their replies – like I said before, usually these are observations made during the viewing/listening. Later students spend time reading through the posts and responding to ideas of their peers that they find fascinating or troubling. Stealing another idea from Mr Moore, I like to have students participate in silent discussions – using edmodo for the discussion platform enables more students to have a voice and for them to demonstrate their understanding of the ideas being discussed.

Problematic knowledge

Students are encouraged to address multiple perspectives and/or solutions and to recognise that knowledge has been constructed and therefore is open to question. Being an English teacher, this is one of my favourite elements of quality teaching. I don’t think it happens enough in most classrooms – students seriously need to spent time debating, considering contrary views to their own and questioning the ideas of the teacher. Often students are very uncomfortable doing these things in the traditional classroom environment … they have been conditioned to accept that the teacher is right, or if she is not, then you can’t actually say so in class. A really creative way of engaging students in this type of learning behaviour is to create character accounts in edmodo. The character can be an historical figure, an imaginary mad mathematician or a fictional character from a text being studied in class. The role of the character is to ask challenging questions of the students, and for the students to ask challenging questions of the character. This frees students from feeling as though they may be ridiculed for their interpretation of events, and allows them to express themselves more fully.

 Higher-order thinking

Students are regularly engaged in thinking that requires them to organise, reorganise, apply, analyse, synthesise and evaluate knowledge and information. I wonder if this is an element of quality teaching that is met often … clearly it links well with our beloved Blooms Taxonomy, but can it seriously be covered by students working on questions on a worksheet with information sourced from the web? Probably not. I’m a big fan of project-based learning and therefore have my students working in small groups quite a bit. Edmodo has a small group feature where students can communicate freely just to the members of their group. I love being able to see my students move through the stages of a project via the comments and posts they make in their small groups. That early stage of confusion and frustration through to those glorious moments of insight and the euphoria of bringing their learning together in some tangible form. These moments of visible learning are actually priceless for a quality teacher.

 Metalanguage

Lessons explicitly name and analyse knowledge as a specialist language (metalanguage), and provide frequent commentary on language use and the various contexts of differing language uses. Just like with other online learning environments, edmodo provides its users with a quiz feature. Quizzes can be multiple choice, short answer or fill in the blank and they are super easy to make. I love using these for formative assessment stuff – a bit of pre and post testing to check understanding once a week or a key points in a project. Nearly always I’m using it to check understanding of metalanguage – we use a lot of it in English … metaphors, simile, juxtaposition. Quizzes in edmodo are also cool because you can resend them again and again – that means mastery learning is crazy easy to facilitate for your students.

Substantive communication

Students are regularly engaged in sustained conversations about the concepts and ideas they are encountering. These conversations can be manifest in oral, written or artistic forms. Edmodo really is just one big sustained conversation … that’s what kids love about it. You heard my students on the video – they love being in contact with each other and with their teachers. Believe it or not, students actually LOVE to learn … it’s just our boring, crap way of teaching that makes them think they hate learning, haha. I’m often asked by teachers first using edmodo, how do I generate discussion? My answer is always Monty Python and YouTube. Jump on to YouTube, type in Monty Python and watch any video that comes up then tell me you’re not laughing. Sharing funny, quirky, interesting short videos in edmodo via the embed feature always results in a discussion amongst your students. This can be a class activity – post a video with a couple of discussion questions and tell students to reply below. It’s always worked for me. If Monty Python fails, try a Minecraft parody video … it really brings the cool kids out of the woodwork.

I can’t decide if the next dimension of quality teaching is my favourite one … I think it is but really they are all so good. Don’t roll your eyes; I’m being serious, haha. Having a quality learning environment really has been shown to have a significant impact on learning. In regards to technology, if you’re just pointing students to a series of random websites to ‘research’ content, then you’re not using technology to foster a quality learning environment.

Explicit quality criteria

Students are provided with explicit criteria for the quality of work they are to produce and those criteria are a regular reference point for the development and assessment of student work. The assignments feature in edmodo has been thoughtfully designed. You can add a title to the assignment, add a written description, add links, videos, documents and interactive embeds like games, flashcards or slideshows. I use assignments for class-work, homework and for major projects. Once students submit their work you can use the annotate feature and give feedback, then students can resubmit their work once it has been revised. There is a feature where you can track student progress in the form of grades and badges that reflect successful completion of tasks. My favourite thing to do is create criteria with students in class and then post this to edmodo as the criteria they should use whilst completing a task. It helps them understand the skills and content they need to master.

Engagement

Most students, most of the time, are seriously engaged in the lesson or assessment activity, rather than going through the motions. Students display sustained interest and attention. Engagement and edmodo is a no brainer. There are heaps of ways that edmodo can be used creatively to engage students in their learning. I already mentioned the use of characters as a way of creating interest in question asking and answering. A few fun features of edmodo that students really like are the badges, playing embedded flash games and connecting with students from around the world. I’ll touch more on that in a minute.

 High expectations

High expectations of all students are communicated, and conceptual risk taking is encouraged and rewarded. The fact that edmodo is primarily an synchronous platform – meaning that the communication and interaction happens in real time – means that the teacher and students can be involved in a highly effective feedback loop. Basically a system of feedback and feedforward can occur 24/7. Peer assessment is beautiful in edmodo – the teacher often needs to establish guidelines for the form that peer-assessment will take, but often this type of feedback will occur naturally with peers encouraging one another via replies and comments. I have had great success with the star/star/wish feedback protocol, where students post their draft work or completed work to edmodo and their peers add a reply with two things they loved (stars) and one thing they think needs improving (a wish). Edmodo makes this feedback loop continuous and easy.

Social support

There is strong positive support for learning and mutual respect among teachers and students and others assisting students’ learning. The classroom is free of negative personal comment or put-downs. It is a teacher’s responsibility to establish really clear expectations for behaviour within the face to face and online learning spaces. This is best done by negotiating expectations with students. I really like to use the Habits of Mind for this. I am also an advocate for a class-created edmodo policy or user-agreement which students and their parents sign before using edmodo. In my experience – and from the comments you saw from my students – edmodo is a supportive, collaborative environment free from the sort of ugliness that often can accompany social media. Students know that in edmodo there is no private messaging and that everything is visible to the teacher – edmodo really is like social networking with training wheels … and don’t our kids need that?

Students’ self-regulation

Students demonstrate autonomy and initiative so that minimal attention to the disciplining and regulation of student behaviour is required. The cool thing about edmodo is that it has evolved over time through the feedback of real working teachers. This means it has heaps of cool features that we’ve always wanted. The best features to support student autonomy are the calendar where all events, assignments and alerts are automatically embedded, the students back-pack that allows unlimited cloud storage therefore no more lost USBs or forgotten assignments! So often the bahviour that we deem disruptive is the result of disorganization and I truly think edmodo goes some ways to solve some of this for students.

Student direction

Students exercise some direction over the selection of activities related to their learning and the means and manner by which these activities will be done. I like to use the polls feature to give students a choice in their learning. Polls are super easy to use and the kids love them. Before class starts (or even the day before) you can put up a poll asking students what activities or texts or whatever they would like to engage with in the next lesson. This might mean a bit of adjustment to what you had planned, but who cares? We live in a democracy, right? Another way of giving students a bit more direction over their learning is to post a range of different activities for them to select from … you can embed games, videos, quizzes, links to websites, all sorts of documents. I like to post those cool Blooms/Gardener matrixes to edmodo and have students select an activity from each column.

 Significance

Ah, significance. We’re nearly there – at the end of this enormously long and boring talk! What is the point of all this learning, Miss? Why do I need to know this? Will this be on the test? We’ve all heard these questions buzzing in our ears and all we really want to do is slap the kid and say, ‘Just do it cos I told you too.’ But we know that both unethical and illegal. Mostly it’s unprofessional because it is our job to either make the significance of content and skills easily understood, or support our students in discovering their own reasons for its significance.

Background knowledge

Lessons regularly and explicitly build from students’ background knowledge, in terms of prior school knowledge as well as other aspects of their personal lives. Prior knowledge testing is easy with polls and quizzes in edmodo – or even better, hold a class discussion in edmodo about the topic about to be studied to generate a clear picture of students’ background knowledge.

Cultural knowledge

Lessons regularly incorporate the cultural knowledge of diverse social groupings (such as economic class, gender, ethnicity, race, sexuality, disability, language and religion). In the video one of my students referred to connecting with students from San Francisco via edmodo. This took place as part of our study of The Catcher in the Rye. I posted to the Language Arts teacher community in edmodo that I was wanting to connect my class with students from the USA – to give them a perspective of American culture. Now as a DEC teacher there are a lot of road-blocks that I often hit – one of those is Skype. I know it’s possible to Skype in a DEC school, but it’s never managed to work for me. Another constraint to connecting in real time is time difference. The solution we had was filming 3 minute videos responding to questions about each other’s culture and then posting these to edmodo. Under every video our students posted comments … we had a shared edmodo group for the project. It was heaps of fun and our students learnt a lot – well, maybe my students are still to remember that the Latino students from the Bay area are not, in fact, Mexicans.

Knowledge integration

Lessons regularly demonstrate links between and within subjects and key learning areas. There is great potential for edmodo to be the hub for cross-KLA projects. I haven’t been successful with this in my school yet, but I have plans to get it going soon. The premise is having students in different classes (like Year 10 English and Year 7 multimedia) working together on the one project – like creating a film – and they communicate via a shared edmodo group. Would be so awesome.

Inclusivity

Lessons include and publicly value the participation of all students across the social and cultural backgrounds represented in the classroom. As you saw in the video, not all students love technology, but all students can use edmodo – it’s so easy. I like that edmodo is not image centred, it is text centred and therefore the pressure to ‘look’ a certain way really isn’t there. My experience is that students are very welcoming, accepting and supportive within edmodo – it becomes a place where everyone has a voice. That’s pretty cool.

Connectedness

Lesson activities rely on the application of school knowledge in real-life contexts or problems, and provide opportunities for students to share their work with audiences beyond the classroom and school. Right now my Year 10 class are working on their English Composition Project. I’ve made finding and communicating with a mentor throughout the project a requirement. Currently I have 15 superstar educators mentoring my students via the small group feature in edmodo. It is amazing to observe the dialogue between my students and this brilliant, generous people. The edmodo teacher community is huge, I urge you to connect via teacher community groups. Take a risk and invite teachers from somewhere exotic into your virtual classroom – one of my students has a Columbian mentor who is a 5^th grade teacher in Texas. That is just awesome.

Narrative

Lessons employ narrative accounts as either (or both) a process or content of lessons to enrich student understanding. Two of my students referred to a ‘game’ that we played via edmodo that involved death and alliances. Basically with the help of my friend Dean Groom, I used edmodo groups to create a fictional world for my students to ‘play’ in … they literally became tributes in the Hunger Games and immersed themselves in this imaginative world almost constantly for two weeks. Narrative is powerful for learning … don’t discount it even if you’re not an English teacher.

 

Wanted: MORE mentors for students working on their ECP

If you read my last blog post, you will know what this post is about. I’m not going to rewrite that post, so just go read it here.

After an AMAZING response to my previous request for mentors (all students had a mentor within 24 hours of the post being published!), some more of my students have asked if I can find them mentors. These students have spent some time looking on their own, but haven’t been successful – I think they now know the power of having a strong online network!

So below is a list of the topics my students are focusing on, and if you’re keen to mentor one, just post a comment below with your preferred topic and I will arrange for you to join our edmodo group. Thanks so much in advance – it’s a great opportunity for all involved!

Student 13: short story (form); What makes a short story interesting? (concept)

Student 14: critical response (form); Purpose of dreams (concept)

Student 15: personal essay (form); What’s the appeal of Ellen Hopkins’ ‘Crank’ trilogy? (concept)

Student 16: personal essay (form); the philosophy of success (concept)

Student 17: personal essay (form); Are serial killers born or created? (concept)

Student 18: feature article (form); Inspiring people from the medical field e.g. Chris O’brien (concept)

Feedback, feed-forward, peer-assessment and project-based learning

Last year when I began my Masters of Ed, my lecturer told me that I should read about ‘feedback’. She encouraged me to look at the work of Black and Wiliam (Inside the Black Box being their most well known and eloquent paper on feedback and assessment), Hattie (his book Visible Learning on the effect sizes of a variety of teaching methods revealed ‘feedback’ has the most significant impact on learning) and Petty (who used the research of Hattie and made it practical for the classroom in his book ‘Evidence Based Teaching’). I think I’ll always be grateful for her suggestions as they opened a world of ideas for me regarding assessment, feedback and project-based learning.

One of the biggest criticisms of project-based learning is that it is a constructivist pedagogy and constructivism has been shown to have some flaws. Pretty significant flaws as well, the biggest being that ultimately students don’t learn as well using these approaches as they do with a teacher-centred pedagogy like ‘whole class interactive teaching’ which gets one of the highest effect sizes according to Hattie. Project-based learning shouldn’t be lumped in to the same category as other ‘inquiry’ learning approaches, or even problem-based learning, because project-based learning is a method that has been refined and strengthened over many years of practical teacher research – trial and error. The popular BIE method of PBL has a strong structure and relies heavily on formative assessment to track student learning and progress. Research into project-based learning (PBL) “has found that students who engage in this approach benefit from gains in factual learning that are equivalent or superior to those of students who engage in traditional forms of instruction” (Barron and Darling-Hammond, 2008, p. 2).(One must also keep in mind that Hattie’s data is drawn from a meta-analysis of standardized test data … that is, the research data he is analysing is actually from the tests we hate.)

So the focus here then, is on assessment again. Barron’s (1998) study of project-based learning using a longitudinal case study of 5^th graders found that, given timely feedback as part of their PBL experience, students took “advantage of the opportunity to revise” (p. 304). Moreover, Barron concluded that an “emphasis on formative assessment and revision” (p. 305) is central to PBL. And I have to agree with him. So, enough with the wanky academic quotes – let’s get to the real classroom practice stuff. How does quality feedback work in the classroom? Well there’s more than one way to skin a cat but I’m just going to show you my way … er, not how to skin a cat of course – that was a metaphor.

My students have been working on some written responses to texts as part of their lastest projects. Sounds thrilling, huh? But we can’t confuse project-based learning with shiny products that draw a crowd and make them go ‘ahhh’. Nope, project-based learning is just as applicable to fun stuff like film reviews and essays … lucky kids, hey? Year 8 have been writing a film review of the 1999 version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Year 9 have been writing personal essay about Romeo and Juliet answering the question, ‘Can we learn from tragedy?’ and Year 10 have also been writing personal essay but focusing on the question, ‘Are humans wild at heart?’ All of these text forms are new to my students – personal essays being quite distinct from your regular old English essay – so it’s a big learning curve for them. Quality feedback is essential and quality feedback is rich, personal feedback.

I’ll admit that I’ve been reading quite a lot about feedback/formative assessment lately as I was preparing to write a thesis proposal for my Masters of Ed (I’ve decided to quit it now, for those of you playing along at home, haha) and this had a major influence on my view of the role that feedback plays in PBL. An article that I particularly enjoyed reading (no, really – I actually enjoyed reading this academic article, crazy, huh?) literally walked me through the process of introducing peer-assessment into the English classroom. I took the opportunity to implement the strategy (with Bianca mods, of course) with my students and it’s been awesome. I have also been influenced by the focus on feedback in two other ‘hip’ student-centred pedagogies – DT (design thinking) and GBL (games based learning). Both have a strong focus on feedback as a ‘loop’, creatively referred to as a ‘feedback loop’. Now this feedback can be both positive and negative – something that teachers are quite familiar with. But what is different about feedback in DT and GBL is that it is constant throughout the project/mission. This is something that is central to quality PBL as well. How do I know? Because it is one of the 8 PBL essentials as outlined by BIE – revision and reflection. It might just be one that many teachers overlook, resulting in what my mate Ewan McIntosh refers to as ‘low order PBL’. It’s basically just the usual teaching approach with a project thrown in at the end with a preference for product over process.

My approach to PBL is all about the process. It makes it slower, messier and sometimes ‘look’ less successful than those cool videos you see of successful PBL projects on YouTube, but that’s OK with me because my focus is learning … and the process is the learning, right? The scariest thing for teachers when implementing peer-assessment is the time that it takes to ‘perfect’. Students simply don’t have the skill-set to effectively assess the work of themselves or their peers. They need to be taught how to do this … they need support and modelling. They need to be fully involved in the process, but most of all they need to be given time. Time? It’s the one thing most teachers feel they don’t have enough of … but we have to let go of our focus on content and reclaim the higher ground and TEACH SKILLS! Luckily for us English teachers in NSW, we have this built directly into our new K-10 English syllabus. How epic is that? I think my favourite bit of the new syllabus is Outcome 9 (I’ve just linked to the Stage 4 Outcome 9) … it’s cool. We also have three tiers of assessment, with ‘assessment as learning‘ being relevant to this post and self/peer-assessment (yeah, I’ll get to explaining it … I’m sure you’ve scrolled ahead anyway!).

I stole my scaffold for peer and self-assessment from Geoff Petty. I think he’s great because he shares so many wonderful resources for free online. Petty argues that too much of the feedback we give students in BACKWARD looking and often this feedback is quantitative (numerical e.g. 7/10; 70%) but even qualitative feedback (words e.g. ‘You didn’t begin your sentences with a capital letter.’) more often than not looks backwards at what WAS done or, typically, WASN’T done. Petty advocates for a method of feedback that is both backwards and forwards looking … and to do that he uses the ‘goals, medals, missions‘ protocol. It’s really neat because the language is accessible to all age groups and it is non-threatening. Essentially the ‘goals’ are the criteria for the product (be it a short film, an essay or a presentation) and the ‘medals’ are what has been achieved (this is the backward looking stuff) and always takes the form of positive statements, e.g. ‘Your introduction is strong.’ The ‘missions’ are the important part of the protocol – this is ‘feed-forward’ as it is looking at what the student needs to work on to improve the product.

When I introduced the idea of ‘feedback’ and ‘feed-forward’ to my students, it took a little while for them to understand it. So I used a real-world example. Say you’re 5 years old and your dad and teenage brother take you to the park to teach you how to ride your bike without training wheels. Your dad gives you a push, you pedal for a bit and then fall into a bush. Your brother calls out, ‘Er, you loser! You fell into the bush!’ and your dad stands there holding up a sign with the number 3 on it. That is all the feedback you receive – one is qualitative and one is quantitative. (Yeah, I might be using those terms in the wrong context, but it helps me make sense of the two in my head.) What is your response? You kick your bike and you storm off. Screw bike-riding, it’s too hard and you suck at it – the feedback of your loved-ones told you so! But what if the imaginary dad did something different. What if he gave a medal for what the child did (the feedback), saying something like, ‘You managed to stay upright for 2 metres’? What if he then gave his child a mission (feed-forward), saying something like, ‘Next time I want you to pedal a bit faster and I want you to keep your weight in the middle and avoid leaning to the right.’? Sounds like what every dad would do, right? Because this is ‘real-world’ feedback. But it’s not classroom world feedback and my students understood that analogy.

First things first … I don’t call this peer-assessment. I call it peer-feedback. The word assessment is scary and doesn’t reflect the learning that is inherent in this process, rather it focuses more on judgement. I like to get my students to develop the criteria for a product/presentation with me. We write it up on the board, negotiate how to express it and then I add it to the checklist proforma you see below. I make sure that I phrase the criteria as questions and get them to avoid using the word ‘student’ if possible, preferring to refer to students as writers, essayists, reviewers, filmmakers etc. This distances the students from feeling like it is a personal criticism being given. What I’ve discovered is that students need to provide evidence for their feedback – if they only have to check boxes, they can easily do this randomly and without thought. If you look at the example below, you’ll see that beside each point in the criteria (the ‘goals’) has a number beside it. This number is a kind of ‘code’ that students use to annotate the work being ‘assessed’. I encourage students to add a cross or tick beside the number so the writer can identify if they have or haven’t met that criteria in a specific place. I tell students that they must resist writing corrections on the work (such as spelling and punctuation) as we want to encourage thoughtful revision and independence. We don’t want students that need teachers to rewrite their work for them. Students are also required to give written feedback in the form of medals and missions – these must be written in sentences and use the language of the criteria. So I had Year 8 students writing comments such as, ‘The writer uses paragraphs and evidence very well.’ (medal) and, ‘The writer could improve his/her spelling and punctuation.’ (mission). OK, enough reading for you … check it out! I hope I’ve done this feedback method justice … it really was effective with my students. Feel free to use the method and the resources shared but don’t forget to acknowledge/credit Petty and me … that’s our only currency in our cool open-access, open-source world, OK?

Oh, and I realise that this is a system more geared to written work … you’ll just have to watch this space for how my students and I apply this style of peer-feedback to documentaries and short films later this year. We’ll find a way ‘cos we know how important feedback is to learning.

 

Today was an awesome day.

Today was such a great day. It was one of those days where you’re just like, “Yes, this is why I’m a teacher!” If you follow me on twitter (poor you) then you’ll know that I can be a bit of a negative nelly sometimes. I’m all about balance, so I will share with you my brilliant day.

It all started with Year 9. Before I even entered the classroom, I was gloating to my colleagues about how awesome my class is. The first five minutes of the lesson involved me talking about my new reading glasses (I don’t normally wear glasses) and laughing at myself as usual. It was only after my silliness that the new student was brought to my attention – oops! Guess he learned about his teacher pretty quickly, haha. Having an new student gave me the opportunity to test my students’ understanding of PBL. They passed the test with flying colors, happily explaining that a driving question guides their learning and keeps them focus during a project; that they work in teams to master important real-world skills and that they usually share their work with people outside of the classroom to make learning genuine.

Today was the day I introduced their new project. It’s such a cool project, I’m pretty excited about it too. The cool thing though is that they’re excited too! The driving question is action-oriented which means it’s more concrete than our last philosophical question. They straight-up started asking a thousand questions about the project which is just what I want … I just don’t give many/any answers. The project involves them connecting with Year 2 students via edmodo to generate ideas for their fantasy stories and my class were full of questions about the process of writing in collaboration with younger students. Some of my favourite questions related to reading ability of 8 year olds, how to write a story that caters for the interests of both genders and what the students’ prior experience of fantasy might be.

On the project outline I left an important space blank – the habits of mind and ISTE NETS to be addressed during the project. I gave my students a print off of all HOM and ISTE NETS. As I read through each list, students circled three HOM/NETS they felt they would need to master to succeed with the project. Then we went through everyone’s selections and negotiated which three most agreed upon to select. This was a really cool step in the project introduction that I’ve not done before – normally I pick them for students. It generated solid discussions about the project & what it required of the students skill wise. I’m going to post up the selected HOM/NETS on the wall so they can keep them visible & in mind. At the end of the lesson we created a list of fantasy texts they know, focusing on novels, films and video games. Yup, video games. There was a core group of students who were thrilled that we were valuing video games as a form. One student was like, ‘Miss, you mean I can bring Skyrim in and play it during class?’ and I was like, ‘Yeah.’ Haha. They get to select their own fantasy text to analyse and many were already getting amped about all the different games they could choose from. You can see their list of texts at the end of this post.

Year 8 was the period after lunch and usually they are pretty lively and unfocused. Today was project intro day for them as well … and this time it was a success! They were super excited about the project even if they were a bit anxious about the ‘presentation’ aspect of it. Intentionally I put a word in the driving question that I knew my students would not know – ‘auteur’. This generated curiosity straight away … they wanted to know what this thing was. I told them they had to find out, and if they did I’d give them a prize. Well, within 30 seconds as student had the answer – he’d used his phone to google it and I got him to read the definition out and I wrote it on the board. The class were pretty chuffed with their classmate was so smart to think of using his phone!

Once again, the project-outline stimulated some great questions from my students – they wanted to know so much, simply because they felt they needed to know it in order to complete the project. I love that part of PBL … students having ‘need to knows’ right from the get go. We even managed to have a pretty comprehensive discussion about semi-colons … based entirely on a student inquiry! As with Year 9, we went though the HOM and ISTE NETS – Year 8 chose differently to Year 9 which I think is great because their projects are different and this tells me that they were really thinking about what is needed to succeed. I ended the lesson by reading some of Tim Burton’s poetry and some of Roald Dhal’s poetry from Dirty Beasts. My students were fascinated by the darkness and quirkiness of Burton’s poetry … hooked ’em already!

And Year 10 … well there are just cool kids. Yesterday was project launch day for them but today they were still buzzing about it. Their project is so awesome – it gives them complete creative and critical control. The driving question for the project as a whole is ‘What does it take to make it?’ and you can see their ideas in the image below this paragraph. This project is student voice & choice on steroids! We read through the extra project information and I told them that I was going to do the project as well – why not? I wanted to show them that whilst I think it is a really challenging project, that I am willing to give it a go. I’m going to write a story and try and get it published … I’ve got seven weeks, just like my students! My students have already come up with awesome driving questions for their ECP (English Composition Project): 1. Why people obsessed with reality television? 2. Is Jazz a dying genre? Great questions, huh?

I’ll share the project outlines and resources and stuff in the next couple of days … I’m excited about all three projects. I think that’s a record for me – being excited about three junior classes in Term 4. PBL must sure be something special if it can excite a teacher at this time of the year! 😉

Presenting on PBL (again).

I feel like I’m a one string ukelele … boring and annoying with many strings and even worse with just one. Once again I find myself presenting on PBL at a conference in Sydney. I wonder how many people have walked away from one of my 60 minute sessions and actually taken the time to create and implement a project. Surely by now no-one needs to hear me bang on about this particular pedagogy again? It makes me super self-conscious to be presenting on PBL to English teachers at the annual AATE conference next week. (Ah, not to mention the epic line-up of presenters and speakers!)  What if some of the attendees had been at one of my other presentations, or they’ve read my blog? Won’t they be all like, ‘Um, isn’t this what you told us 12 months ago?’

I really liked the advice that a twitter friend gave me today when I lamented my nerves on twitter. She said, ‘People need to hear why it is so important in our world today and see the relevance before they feel confident to apply it.’ And she’s write. Thanks Ashley. The last time I presented on PBL to my English teacher colleagues, I focused mostly on the ‘how’ of PBL and a little bit on the ‘what’, but I didn’t touch on ‘why’. I guess that was because I wanted to run a hands-on workshop and actually had teachers move chairs around and stuff, which was fun but I don’t know if anyone seriously took on this new approach to teaching English. As I said to Ashley, ‘I don’t want someone saying ‘you should do this’ without telling me why & how.’ That’s going to be my goal for this presentation … why and how.

Here is my presentation outline:

This session will give insight into the nature of Project Based Learning (PBL) and how this inquiry method of teaching can be used to enhance student engagement and learning outcomes in the English classroom. PBL, enhanced by digital technologies, promotes skills in collaboration, problem-solving and critical and creative thinking, all general capabilities in the Australian Curriculum. In PBL projects, students use texts as a springboard for their investigation into real-world problems and then share their discoveries with an authentic audience. Bianca will discuss her classroom experiences with PBL and her research, which is a case study looking at the relationship between PBL, multiliteracies, feedback and ICT in the English classroom. Participants will be introduced to a range of strategies and tools for implementing and running successful projects with their classes, as well as gaining insight into the power of being connected to a global PBL community.

What a mouthful, huh? I promised to cover a bit too much in an hour and fifteen minutes, hey? Interestingly, the direction of my research (if it ever happens) has changed since I put in my EOI for the conference. I’ve had 6 months experience working at state office, immersing myself in the new NSW English K-10 syllabus … and as such my interest is in what it has to say about assessment and how teachers can implement these varied assessment practices using a PBL-style approach to teaching and learning. I’m still super interested in digital technologies and multiliteracies, but a new way to approach learning in the English classroom. Cos, you know, assessment is actually about learning – whodathunkit? 😉

Tonight I am going to actually ‘make’ my presentation for the AATE conference and when it’s done I’ll share it here. I guess by ‘make’, I just mean get a rough scaffold, sift through my expanding bag of project resources and then put it into some kind of thrilling slideshow format – urgh. Or maybe I’ll just go old-skool and write a speech with no pretty things to distract a bored attendee? Not sure yet. Anyway, I’ll post below the skeleton I have so far for my presentation just because posting here always makes me feel like I’m being productive but really it’s just a very public way of procrastinating.

1. What is PBL?

2. How can PBL be used to enhance student engagement in English?

3. How can PBL be used to enhance learning outcomes in English?

4. What digital technologies can support PBL?

5. PBL and collaboration.

6. PBL and problem-solving.

7. PBL and creative thinking.

8. PBL and critical thinking.

9. PBL, the Australian Curriculum and assessment.

10. Texts as springboards for investigation into real-world problems.

11. Students as composers for an authentic audience.

12. My own classroom experiences with PBL.

13. My research – a case study.

14. Connecting to a global PBL community.