PBL: an appeal to the ego

I’ve only had a few hours sleep, so this post might seem rambling, jumbled and incoherent … oh, wait – that’s my usual writing style. And why have I only had a few hours sleep? After all, it’s the school holidays – I should really be enjoyed too much sleep, right? Well tomorrow I have to run a workshop on PBL and you know me, a little bit lax on the time-management skills and thus frequently leaving things to the last minute. But I don’t want this post to be about my poor organisational skills – that would be really egotistical and self-indulgent. Hang on again – what’s the title of this post? Ah, yes – ego! OK. Let’s get started then.

The other day one of my colleagues shared a video on my facebook wall. It cracked me up for two reasons. One, because it told me how well my colleague knows me and two, because the video is so accurate (and really funny!). I’ll let you watch the video before I continue with trying to make some kind of point about ‘ego’.

Watching that video a few days before you have to run a 75 minute workshop is both good and bad. Good for the attendees, bad for the speaker. Everyone has been to a session like this – most likely multiple times. You might have even given a session like this. Actually, many teachers probably give presentations like this multiple times in one day. You know what I mean – this is your class, or has been your class, right? It’s probably ironic (and not even intended hipster ironic) that I am going to show this video at the very beginning of my PBL workshop. There are two reasons for it. One, it is a humorous representation of why teacher-centred learning is an unhealthy addiction. And two, I want to use it to say that this is NOT how I will be running my workshop.

But here is the really irony … I stayed up until 4am this morning so I could finish a video that I was making for my presentation. You see, I have all of this great information on PBL that I wrote-up as part of my literature review for my draft research proposal and I really want to share it with the teachers attending my workshop. I know as a teacher that I feel more secure about giving a new teaching method a go if there is some kind of research to back it up. It’s old skool to think that way, but so be it – lots of people think that way too. My problem was how to share this information (mostly quotes from researchers) without reading it from a PowerPoint slide. I asked my husband, Lee, what he likes in a presentation and he said ‘less talking, more visuals’. That’s probably a typical response to that question. So I thought making a video in iMovie would work and I stayed up until 4am making that video.

I know I’m tired cos I haven’t got to my point yet, have I? Basically what I want to say is this: preparing for this 75 minute workshop gave me a deeper understanding of what’s so good about PBL. It’s immersion. It’s ego. There is a reason why that guy in the video is so proud of the video he made – because he made it. Project-learning is ego-driven. The beginning stage of the project is the investigation – this requires the individual to become immersed in the questions and content related to the project. For me, I was thinking ‘How am I going to get all of my knowledge and experience of PBL across to these teachers in an engaging and effective manner?’ and ‘How can I generate the same level of passion for project-learning that I have?’ I looked through all of my previous presentation materials, I read my blog posts about my class projects, I read my draft research proposal. I wrote lots of lists and notes about what to include and when.

Then I moved on to the product stage – making a video. This video isn’t meant to last the whole workshop, it’s just another mode of communicating important ideas with the teachers. During the making of the video I had to ask technical questions on twitter and search them on google. Communicating. I had to think about copyright, so I used FlickrCC to get images and Jamendo for the music. Problem-solving. I had to think carefully about the types of images and music to include, as well as the coloured backgrounds and style of font. Creative thinking. During this process I was so driven to complete the project. It was 10.30pm when I decided to make the film and 4am when I finished. What forced me to keep working long into the night? I want to say passion. I know that’s part of the answer. But the real driver was ego. Even though my eyelids were scratching my eyeballs and my back was bent like a crowbar, I kept working. I would not sleep until the video was uploaded to YouTube. Why? Because I was desperate to share it with my twitter colleagues. Sheer ego. This, for Orwell, was the key driver for most writers: Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. (Why I Write, 1946)

Ego is at the guts of PBL. And that’s a great thing. Just like sheer egoism is a key motive for teachers to share their ideas and experiences with teaching via a blog or twitter or a conference presentation, so too is the product/presentation element of PBL a key motive for students to keep working tirelessly on their projects. Ego, I believe, isn’t a dirty word. I do hope my fellow PBL educators aren’t offended by this brazen reflection on PBL. I think we should embrace this appeal to ego as an important element of PBL’s success with students.

I finally finished my video, and I really am proud of it. Of course I am well aware of the intense irony of the situation – I will most likely end up looking just like the guy in the video about failing to communicate. I will stand there with a goofy, proud look on my face as my audience watches the video I created. They will be bored … after all, it’s just words on a screen coupled with some pictures and music. It’s not effective learning. Oh well, it made me feel good completing it and it now feels awesome sharing it with you on my blog.

Year 9 Passion-driven project … using social media to have a real world impact!

At the end of the year, classes for students become a mish-mash of videos, find-a-words and visits to the skip bin. It’s inevitable because both teachers and students are tired and over-it. As an English teacher, I often keep film studies until this time of the year – it means I can justify movie-watching for three weeks 😉

But this year I’ve been teaching the Extension Year 9 class and felt the pressure to ‘keep teaching’ right until the very end. It wasn’t so hard for me though, because my students have been working on projects all year. These guys are my other ‘experiment’ class and they were well-versed in Project-Based Learning. At the beginning of the term they connected with a school in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania via edmodo as part of our ‘We ❤ Blogging’ project. This was a passion-driven project that you can read about here. This was quite a successful project and I wanted to encourage my students to continue learning through their passions.

Inspired by friend Neil Fara and his ProjectREAL, I allowed my students greater choice and voice in their final project. The project was called ‘Cause We Care’ – a pun I thought particularly witty, since the Driving Question was ‘How can we raise awareness in our local community about a charity or cause we feel passionately about?’ Whilst I did develop the driving question the students were responsible for the following: deciding on team members and team name, selecting a charity/cause to focus on, their investigation sources and mode of sharing findings (focus questions can be on this document: Cause We Care), the products to demonstrate research, raise awareness and legitimate contribution to cause/charity, their presentation of learning, including sharing learning with experts, defending ideas and celebrating their chosen charity, the Habits of Mind to master for the duration of the project and the outcomes from the Stage 5 English Syllabus they will master during the project ( I gave them a list of the 11 outcomes and the related dot-points, was an eye-opening experience for them!).

It was a really fun last few weeks of term. Watching the students get excited about the charities/causes they felt passionate about and sharing these with the class was great. The causes/charities chosen were Beyond Blue, Youth Beyond Blue, Endangered Species, Breast Cancer Council, Autism and Human Trafficking. Even better was seeing the variety of methods they had chosen to share their passion with others. Groups decided to create awareness through a variety of media and activities such as creating YouTube clips, viral Facebook status updates, websites, picturebooks and posters as well as selling charity-associated merchandise, writing articles to the local newspaper and tweeting politicians.

Throughout the project students ensured they kept to their project calendar to get their investigations and products completed before the final presentation date. To reinforce the importance of planning and reflecting, each lesson I randomly selected students from the groups to give a 30 second impromptu speech on their lesson goals and their learning. This really helped the students stay focused in class. To be honest, project learning is messy at the best of times, so there were periods where there was lots of laughing and discussion, and other times where students were all eyes glued to screen and working away quietly. That’s PBL, and I like it that way.

The final presentations of learning happened on the very last day of school for 2011. It was a testament to the commitment of these students that they gave 100% to their presentations despite knowing that their peers in other classes were playing hangman or celebrity heads, lol. Each group spoke with confidence and passion about their charity/cause and demonstrated a depth of knowledge about the issue relating to their focus charity/cause and why we should care about it and how we can all make a difference. It was a wonderful lesson and (even though I pretty much never cry) I had a little tear in my eye, pleased that the future is in the hands of these passionate, concerned, wise, caring young people.

Below are some of the products created by my students. One wonderful group of girls even managed to get an article about their cause – human trafficking – in the local newspaper. The girls took it upon themselves to email the editor of the newspaper, asking for an article they had written to be published. The pleasing and surprising result was a journalist and photographer coming to the school to speak with the girls. They were so wonderfully vibrant and intelligent in their responses to questions – it was a very proud teacher moment. The morning the article was published lead to a chorus of joyous cries as they celebrated the impact their learning has had on the ‘real world’. The girls have since been contacted by an organisation that rescues trafficked children in Vietnam, Blue Dragon’s Children Foundation, which wishes to work with the girls in the future. My favourite statement from one of the girls was, ‘Wow, miss. We did it. We really have made a difference and we can do even more, right?’. Pretty sweet for the last day of school for 2011!

I am thrilled that taking risks in my classroom has yielded such beautiful results for these students … and I’ve gotta give thanks to Year 9 for trusting my craziness.

A picturebook about autism, created using StoryBird:

Tommy

Article in newspaper about students’ project to generate awareness of human trafficking:

Girls tackle trafficking.

A depression awareness mash-up on YouTube.

Photos of student presentations of learning: Cause We Care, 20122.

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10 things Year 10 taught me about learning in 2011.

Last Friday I said goodbye to my Year 10 class. It was a sad goodbye for me as I can honestly say that teaching this class has been one of my greatest pleasures this year. It is with this class that I indulged my interest in Project Based Learning. I joked with them that they were my guinea pigs, and more than once I panicked a little thinking that my pedagogical experimentation might have negative consequences on their learning … if not this year with me, but in other classes in the future. It is a bit cruel to sorta train them to learn a specific way, to approach learning in a new way, to expect more from their learning, knowing that I won’t be teaching them next year and that my style is a little bit, uh, unconventional.

During our last lesson I asked them to do me a final favour. To write me a letter. To tell me, in their own way, in their own voice, how I did as a teacher. To evaluate my teaching. The letters took them about ten minutes to write and then we ate junk food and played handball. It was a great lesson. My favourite part was us joking about how to justify playing handball instead of ‘learning’ in the classroom – we had just finished watching Dead Poet’s Society, so we decided that we would tell passing teachers they were revising poetic devices as they played. Each time they hit the ball, they had to call out a poetic device ala Mr Keating and his football-kicking, Shakespeare quoting students. Hilarious.

Reading through their letters was a wonderful experience, not simply because they said some moving things about their time in my class, but because they taught me some things about learning.

Year 10 taught me …

1. Engagement is the key to learning. I guess we all knew this anyway but I felt joy seeing the word ‘fun’ recurring in the letters my students wrote to me. I don’t know how high on the priority list ‘fun’ is for many teachers.

2. Quality teachers are an essential ingredient to mastery of content and skills. An enthusiastic and dedicated teacher is required for PBL to ‘work’. A passionate teacher makes learning engaging. Using humour to teach and manage behaviour is appreciated – yelling and a tone of superiority are not. Respect is earned – for both teachers and students.

3. Variety of learning experiences challenges and engages students. Students should be given the opportunity to work on independent projects as well as group projects. There should be a blend of student-centred and teacher-centred learning.

4. Students prefer a structured lesson as this helps them understand the learning goals and expectations for that lesson. Make learning visible – write it on the whiteboard or project it on your IWB. Make students accountable for planning as well – daily, weekly and project plans help students feel confident as they know what is expected of them. Even the arrangement of the classroom furniture helps structure learning expectations and outcomes – my students cheered my use of the cave, wateringhole and campfire metaphors.

5. Teaching needs to be visible. My students thanked me for being enthusiastic and dedicated. They saw how hard I was working to help them learn – but I didn’t try to make them feel guilty for my hard work or expect them to praise me. I openly discussed my role as a teacher, my ideas about teaching and learning and gave students the opportunity to give me feedback on my teaching throughout the year.

6. Group work might be challenging but it teaches students how to cooperate, listen and contribute ideas. My students found group work really hard at the beginning of they year – lots of trial and error to find the right way to ‘do’ group work. We experimented with small groups, gender groups, large groups, friend groups and ability groups.

7. Project lengths should vary depending on the content and skills to be mastered. The five week unit is so arbitrary it frustrates both the teacher and the students. This year I was confined to a pre-established assessment schedule and we all felt this made some projects too rushed and others too drawn out. Projects need to be both well-planned and flexible to account for a variety of interruptions, delays and exciting real-world twists.

8. Assessments should be engaging (fun) and creative, giving room for students choice and voice. My students all commented that the assessment tasks completed this year were enjoyable – why? Because the assessments were the projects … they worked together in class to master a set of skills and content and then demonstrated this mastery through products and presentations. They got to choose what they made and how they presented it and to who. There was minimal ‘night before’ completing of assessments.

9. Projects need to have effectively timed ‘teacher/expert instruction’ built-in. Teacher instructions need to be really clear, accessible for all students and understanding must be checked before moving on with task/project. This is especially important for using technology or more challenging products like extended writing compositions.

10. Students like being given a voice and listening to the ideas of their peers. Too often the primary voice in the classroom is that of the teacher. This year we spent a lot of time listening to each other’s ideas on all sorts of topics. We did this using different strategies like: circle time, Socratic circles, debates, fish bowl, silent edmodo discussions and small group waterhole chats.

Final note: Year 10 for many teachers and students is about the School Certificate – an external examination run by the Board of Studies. It is essentially a literacy exam comprised of a series of multiple choice questions, short answer questions and two written responses. I am pleased to say that despite the fact that my class was highly unconventional with minimal ‘teacher teaching’ time, no ‘teaching to the test’ and significant blocks of student-centred project work, all of my class did very well in the exams. They didn’t let the exam determine their learning, but they pwned the exam anyway. I am so proud of them. They are beautiful young people.

Thanks Year 10 🙂

Academic research: is it worth it?

I started my Masters of Education (research) half-way through this year. It has been a tumultuous ride … my ideas about education, research, my future have been given a good spanking courtesy of my lecturer, my supervisor and my independent reading. I have grown as a thinker, I know that much for sure. But what will the end result be for people other than me?

I went into this post-graduate study with the dreams of researching PBL and being able to get real data that would indicate whether this pedagogy is worth the hard yards – for the students and the teachers. I wanted to have some real evidence to support or refute what I have been doing in my classroom (and banging on about on this blog) for the last 15 months. I wanted to contribute something meaningful to my profession and make an impact on how teachers teach. But you know what? After 6 months of talking, reading, writing, crying, stressing, arguing and giving in and getting on with it, I’ve discovered that the contribution I can make as a researcher is pretty damn small. And by small I mean drop in the ocean. It’s not like I thought that I’d revolutionise education by writing a 20,000 word research paper on PBL. I truly didn’t. And it’s not like I didn’t know that most education research – despite the thousands of hours of work and the absolute heartache given over to an idea – makes a very, very small difference to how teachers teach. But what hurts the most it the realisation that this Masters is only going to impact me. It’s a thing you do to get ‘qualified’ … it’s a horrible, painful process designed to test me and see if I’ve got what it takes to be a researcher and/or an academic. It’s like the HSC on steroids.

You can read the progression of my thesis proposal here. It’s morphed like crazy from a naive idea of a non-researcher to the more realistic questions of a researcher-in-training. I worked so hard on that final draft thesis proposal that it almost broke me. That’s not one of my trademark hyperbolic statements either. And guess what? I had a meeting with my supervisor (who is a great guy, BTW) last Wednesday and he helped me get to the realisation that my proposal needs to go. The focus, the question, the design … all of it. Gone. Basically I was being too ambitious for a Masters student. It’s impossible to get all the data I wanted to and then work with it meaningfully to answer the questions I had proposed. So instead, I’m going to be writing a case study of one class in one school. It could even by my school – he said that’d be great. It won’t be focused on PBL. It’ll be focused on technology use for formative assessment using aspects of PBL. Oh, and I won’t worry about the multiliteracies stuff – that’s a 16 year old paper – and besides, literacy is implied in the study because I’m focusing on English teaching anyway. Finally, I should probably use a modification of an Action Research design.

Why have these decisions made me lose my research convictions? Because I do this in my classroom all of the time. I study MY classroom and write ‘rich descriptions’ of my lessons on this blog frequently. Sharing my experiences with PBL, technology, assessment, teaching English in the 21st century here seems – to me – to have as much, if not more, impact than writing a 20,000 word dissertation that *might* get published in an education journal. Oh, and those journals mostly aren’t read by my target audience – real, actual, not fake or full of shit, working teachers. I just don’t see how me learning how to collect ‘data’ and analyse said ‘data’ then write up my ‘discoveries’ is going to benefit anyone but me. Why would it help me? Well completing an MEd (research) is a stepping stone to a career as an academic … if that’s a path I wish to pursue. But that was never my intentions. Of course I have thought about where I want to be professionally in 5 years and still at Davo hasn’t featured high on that list … the possibility of teaching budding teachers is kinda cool. And yeah, I definitely fantasied about being called Dr Hewes or even better, Professor Hewes. But being a researcher … what impact does that have on us, the teachers? It seems to take FOREVER for any research-based ideas about education to actually gain traction in the classroom. I just don’t know if that’s the path I should take.

I guess I should conclude by making it clear that I am not saying I make a massive difference writing this blog. But if I counted all of the words I have written about my teaching practice in blog posts, and then add all of the words you have written in comments about your teaching practice, well … I reckon that’d be well over 20,000 words. And I reckon, just maybe, those words have or will have more impact than the 20,000 I’ll be writing for my dissertation.

References:

Hewes, B. (2011). Her Brain. Sydney: WordPress.

Get outside and learn: geocaching with students

About four months ago my husband, Lee, took our two boys for a walk close to The Cascades – a walking track near my school that happens to be part of the Garigal National Park. On the walk they crossed a small stream and the boys started looking for tadpoles. Lee was impressed with the place for two reasons. One, he loves geocaching and was thinking that this would be the perfect place to lodge a new cache. And two, the place inspired a natural curiosity in our boys – they were very keen to know where the water came from, why some tadpoles had legs and some didn’t, why dogs weren’t allowed down there etc. He came home from the walk excited by the vision of geocaching and education coming together to create uber engaging lessons for primary students. Must admit, my hubby would have made a great teacher.

After lots of conversations about how I could maybe bring Lee’s idea to my teaching, I finally implemented his vision on Monday and it was great!

Year 12 English students must study the Area of Study: Belonging. It’s the very first thing we English teachers are meant to teach our new Year 12 students for the HSC. It’s a nice idea, having students think, read, discuss and write about what it means to belong. They’re at the perfect age to consider the factors that impact an individual’s failure to belong. Problem is this part of the HSC – like so much of it – becomes meaningless when aligned with an essay-based assessment task and/or the end of year examinations. I want my kids to engage in their world and develop a meaningful response to the question ‘What does it mean to belong?’ (this is the driving question for our study). Lee’s idea about geocaching with students to help them develop a better appreciation for their local environment seemed the perfect opportunity to (re)connect with my students in their community.

So what did I do? I took them outside. Below is a rough outline of my ‘mini-project’ which I think can be adapted for other subjects/multiple subjects too:

1. Teacher established five ‘caches’ – one large and four mini caches – in a natural setting within walking distance of the school. The large cache contained trinkets for each class member, a log-book, a pen and four slips of paper each with a separate set of coordinates leading students to a mini-cache. Each mini-cache contained a log-book, pen and laminated card of activities (task-card). You can see the activities included on our task card outlined in a blog post here.

2. Teacher met with students at the beginning of The Cascades track. Teacher overview of task, explaining geocaching and allocating a team leader to control the GPS. Class had previously been divided into ‘teams’ in preparation for this mini-project. As a class, students navigated their way to the large cache using GPS.

3. Students found the large cache and each student selected a trinket and added name to the log-book. Each team collected ONE slip of paper with coordinates to a mini-cache.

4. Teams of students worked together to find their mini-cache. Students used free GPS apps downloaded onto smartphones. Would be great if the school had a collection of GPS devices to share amongst the teams but the apps were pretty reliable.

5. Upon finding the mini-cache, students logged their find in the log-book (date, time and students’ signatures) and removed the laminated task card. Students worked as a team to complete the tasks. Most students completed them old-skool with pen and paper but in an ideal world 3G enabled mobile devices would be used to record responses to tasks and upload them to edmodo. 6. Once majority of tasks completed (some required further work at home or back in the classroom), students returned the caches to their original hiding spots.

7. Whole class regrouped for a post-activity debrief and chat about their experience finding the cache. We then went for a bit of a walk to take more photographs and see what was around. Then students returned to school.

8. Teams uploaded their completed tasks to the edmodo. This is where we are now – students still finishing the tasks and getting them online.

9. (to be completed – still a dream) Each team’s completed tasks will be compiled as a blog post titled ‘(team name), The Cascades’. A QR code to this blog post will be added to the corresponding ‘mini-cache’ so that future cachers – or muggles making an accidental ‘find’ – can access the students’ descriptions of the location.

10. (to be completed – still a dream) The class will select their best pieces to use as the basis of a collaborative website (using a free weebly) that will be presented to students from other schools in the state and internationally. Our class has connected with a school in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Knox Grammar, Wahroonga.

11. (to be completed – still a dream) The caches will be registered on geocaching.com using the class group name. The classes will be responsible for writing a description for each cache – this is part of the geocaching game. We will continue to track the caches to see who finds them and what objects have been left.

The students all reported back that they really enjoyed this experience. Only four of the seventeen students in my class had ever been to this walking track even though it was only ten minutes walk from our school. They were surprised that such a beautiful, natural place was nestled within the suburban surrounds. A number of the students asked if we could do something like this activity again – they liked getting out of the class to learn. I have written a blog post for our class blog that showcases some of the completed students work so far. You can see it here.

I’m currently HSC marking and had the good fortune of being in a group with a fellow tweeter – @glennymac. He was keen to have his boys take part in this task and whilst he didn’t include the geocaching aspect he did get his students out of the classroom and into the local natural environment to complete the activities. His experience was equally positive and I hope he will write a guest blog post for me about it soon. I am very much in debt to his professionalism and organisation skills, as he put together a great document that outlines the learning objectives for this ‘mini-project’. I’ve added it below. He works at a private school and I work at a public school and we thought this might be a nice bridge between these two often separate spheres of learning. I’m really looking forward to connecting our students and having them share their reflections on their local environment and how this activity has helped them to appreciate belonging (or not belonging) to a community, a place, the wider world, a group and to nature.

(If you’re looking for a more directed guide on geocaching you could check out this link here, but I don’t recommend watching the first video – the guy’s accent is SO annoying!)

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Why English teachers should care about project-based learning: multiliteracies, assessment for learning and digital technologies.

Introduction

There is impetus for pedagogical change in the English classroom. Bull and Anstey (2010, p.6) observed that, ‘literacy teaching and learning should respond to the rapid changes in literacy arising from increasing globalization, technology and social diversity.’ This transforming social, cultural and technological landscape necessarily brings with it a new set of opportunities and challenges for secondary English teachers. Three such challenges include the purposeful integration of digital technologies into the classroom, the use of assessment for learning practices and the emergence of new literacies. The reshaping of traditional teacher-centred pedagogy to a more student-centred, inquiry-based pedagogy may assist Australian secondary English classroom with meeting these new challenges. One alternative pedagogy that may provide teachers with a scaffold to integrate digital technologies, assessment for learning practices and multiliteracies into the English classroom is PBL.  The researcher will adopt an interpretive approach in an attempt to address a gap in research into student-centred and inquiry based pedagogies in English classrooms in Australia, specifically project-based pedagogies and the changes made to assessment practices, digital technology usage and teaching of multiliteracies when these pedagogies are implemented.

This study is designed to answer three questions:

• How are digital technologies used when project-based learning is introduced into the Australian secondary English classroom?
• What changes are made to assessment practices when project-based learning is introduced into the Australian secondary English classroom?
• What literacies are taught when project-based learning is introduced into the Australian secondary English classroom?

Literature Review

The researcher is a practicing educator and this study draws on broader learning theories of constructivism, engagement, assessment and literacy. Central to these perspectives are cooperative learning, activity theory, situated practice, structural alignment and formative assessment however this study will focus on project-based learning, digital technologies, multiliteracies and assessment for learning.

Founded in Constructivist theory, project-based learning (PBL) “involves completing complex tasks that typically result in a realistic product, event or presentation to an audience” (Barron and Darling-Hammond, 2008, p. 2). This pedagogy engages students in relevant, real-world problems that require them to attain and strengthen skills essential for success in the 21st century – collaboration, communication, creativity, digital citizenship – as well as understanding positive ‘habits of mind’ (Costa, 2007). Furthermore, research into project-based learning “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 challenge facing secondary English teachers in Australia which this study will consider is the use of digital technologies in the classroom. The 2009 implementation of the Digital Education Revolution 1-1 laptop initiative presented English teachers with a need to consider when, how and why digital technologies could be incorporated into their teaching practice. Moreover the current NSW Stage 4/5 syllabus (2003, p. 4) and the Draft Australian Curriculum: English (2011, p. 11) both stipulate that teachers are required to help students to become productive, creative and confident users of technology. Ravitz (2010) conducted a study into the relationship between online technologies and the implementation of PBL in small schools across the United States and found that PBL “helps teachers integrate technology by providing reasons for its use” (p. 10) however there is a need for a greater understanding of the influence project based learning has on the use of technology in the classroom (Ravitz, 2010).

A second challenge faced by secondary English teachers in Australia is the nature of assessment. Often the primary assessment in English is summative despite evidence that assessment for learning practices have ‘more impact on learning than any other general factor’ (Petty, 2006). The Rationale of the NSW English Stage 4/5 Syllabus (2003, p. 7) and draft Australian Curriculum: English (2011, p. 6) both advocate assessment for learning practices including peer and self-assessment.  In their seminal paper, Black and William (1998) conclude that the introduction of effective assessment for learning  “will require significant changes in classroom practice” (p. 141) because “instruction and formative assessment are indivisible” (p. 143). Importantly Black and William propose that “what is needed is a classroom culture of questioning and deep thinking, in which pupils learn from shared discussions with teachers and peers” (p. 146). These features are key elements of PBL which has been shown to “have documented positive changes for teachers and students in motivation, attitude toward learning, and skills, including work habits, critical thinking skills and problem-solving” (Barron and Darling-Hammond, p. 4, 2008). Barron’s (1998) longitudinal case study of 5^th graders concluded that an “emphasis on formative assessment and revision” (p. 305) is central to PBL.

The third challenge facing English teachers today is the necessity to teach new media and new literacies. Traditionally English in Australia has been viewed as a teacher-centred discipline with a heavy focus on linguistic literacy – reading and writing. However the introduction of multimodal and multimedia texts into the Australian Curriculum: English (2011, p. 1) reshapes our understanding of literacies. A three-year ethnographic study by Mizuko et al (2008) describes how “new media allow for a degree of freedom and autonomy for youth that is less apparent in a classroom setting (p. 2)”. The term multiliteracies was coined by the New London Group in response to emerging media and is defined as ‘a new approach to literacy teaching … (that) … overcomes the limitations of traditional approaches” (New London Group, 1996, p. 1) Being multiliterate requires fluency in five semiotic systems: linguistic, visual, gestural, spatial and audio (Bull and Anstey, 2010, p. 4). AEnglish teachers are now responsible for the teaching of multiliteracies, inviting another challenge for teachers because “literacy must address the impact of new communication technologies, and the texts delivered by them” (Bull and Anstey, 2010, p. 6). PBL may present teachers with the framework for engaging students with multiliterate practices.

Meeting the demands of changing literacy needs, curriculum changes and the federal 1-1 initiative forces secondary English teachers in Australia to reconsider their pedagogy.

Methodology

Introduction

This exploratory study will use a mixed method research strategy to address the research questions and provide a rich description of a specific pedagogy – PBL.  A survey of Australian secondary English teachers in the form of an online questionnaire will ask teachers about technology usage in their classroom, types of pedagogies used and types of assessment practices used. This survey will include both closed and open-ended questions. The population for the study will be secondary English teachers within New South Wales including teachers from government, independent and Catholic schools – all members of the NSW English Teacher Association.

The study will also include two class case studies – both classes will be using project-based learning pedagogies. Drawn from these two classes will be two teacher case studies and eight student case studies.  See Figure 1 for visualisation of study and Figure 2 for factors that will be the focus of each case study.

Figure 1

Participants/Sample

The population for this study is a sub-set of Australian secondary English teachers. The sample of this population will be drawn using a mixed sampling method – purposive sampling and cluster sampling.

The survey sample will attempt to be representative of the population. This sample will be drawn using a probability sampling method – cluster sampling. The sample will be members of the NSW English Teachers Association. A random selection of the 2000 members will be emailed a link to the online questionnaire. It is not anticipated that all recipients will complete the questionnaire. The number of teachers in the survey will depend on the number of responses to the online questionnaire. Ideally N = 100 teachers.

The strength of the random sampling method for the survey is cost (Neuman, 2006) and that it only selects members who are secondary English teachers. The weakness is that the population members are only from NSW and do not represent the total population of secondary English teachers in Australia. These teachers are also all members of a professional association and this could result in cluster effects. This will impact the validity of the data and its representativeness. This survey aims to give the researcher a general picture of teaching pedagogies, the use of digital technologies, assessment practices and the teaching of multiliteracies in the Australian secondary English classroom.

The case study research sites will be two Australian high schools in the Sydney region. The case study samples (two teachers and eight students from each class) will be drawn using a non-probability sampling method – purposive sampling.  This sampling method will allow for the selection of “unique cases that are especially informative” (Neuman 2006, p. 222) based on the survey data. Participants for the teacher case studies will not be matched in regards to SES, gender or teaching experience as this study is descriptive and does not aim to be representative. Moreover it is anticipated that it will be difficult to identify many English teachers using project-based pedagogies, resulting in a small sample pool from which to select participants for the case study. The student case studies will be drawn from the participating classes via a random sampling method using a random number generator. Ideally student case studies will include a balance of male and female, SES, achievement levels and age as well as a range in attitudes towards English. For these embedded case studies N=10 (n1 = 2 n2 = 8 ) N= number of participants.

The strength of the purposive sampling is that it will ensure the participants are actively using project-based pedagogies in the classroom. The weakness of this approach is that it is not a representative sample of the population – Australian secondary English teachers. However these case studies do not aim to be representative of the entire population (Yin, 1989). The case studies aim to be a rich description of a particular pedagogy in practice and its impact on the use of digital technologies, assessment practices and the teaching of literacies.  The strength of the sampling method for this study derives from its use of a combination of random and purposive sampling methods.

Data Collection 

This proposed mixed methodology study includes four data-collection methods. The quantitative survey will collect data from an online questionnaire. The qualitative embedded case studies will collect data from interviews, observation and document content analysis. All of these data collection methods will allow for the operationalisation of the central concepts of the study. These concepts are outlined in the table Figure 2. This table also outlines the content of interviews, questionnaire, observation protocols and document analysis codes.

Concept	Content of interview questions, questionnaire items, observations protocols and document analysis
digital technology use	type of technology used, how often technology is used, duration of technology use, purpose of technology
assessment practices	amount of feedback given during class, mode of feedback delivery, type of feedback given (verbal, whole class, individual student, physical – ticks on page, written comment, positive or negative feedback, quality of feedback), teacher and students’ discussion of feedback, types of assessment used in and out of class
teaching of multiliteracies	types of texts incorporated into each lesson, explicit literacies taught, types of literacy practices used, lesson materials
pedagogies	types of pedagogies used, most common pedagogy used, when specific pedagogies are used, attitudes towards student-centred pedagogies, frequency of student-centred pedagogy used, attitude towards PBL, knowledge of PBL

Figure 2

An online questionnaire survey is planned for NSW English Teacher Association members. The data from this questionnaire will be stored in an online survey tool, most likely www.surveymonkey.com. The quantitative data from this questionnaire will provide information on the usage of digital technologies in the Australian secondary English classroom, the pedagogies adopted when using technology, the types of assessment and feedback strategies used and what types of literacies are supported and explicitly taught in the secondary English classroom. Participants will be asked between 15 and 20 questions taking no more than 15 minutes to complete.

This structured data collection process will draw many of the questionnaire items from a survey created by Ravitz, Hixson, English and Mergendoller (2011) as well as older studies including the TALIS Teaching and Learning International Survey (2009). Items will be re-written based on relevance of items to the study’s central concepts. The survey will ask about the frequency of 5-8 practices specifically pertaining to teaching practices, assessment practices, the teaching of literacy and the use of technology using Lickert scale-style responses.

A qualitative approach to data collection will be taken for the embedded case studies.  A variety of data will be collected including interviews with teachers and students, observation of teachers and students in classroom, interviews with teachers and students, examination of a variety of educational documents and artifacts used by each teacher including programs, lesson plans, student work samples and teaching resources.

‘The interactions that make up interviews are dynamic, not static, forms of social interaction’ (Freebody, 2003, p. 137) and require attention to what is said, how it is said and why it is said. The role of the researcher is semi-participatory as the interviews will be semi-structured in nature. This structure allows for the possibility that ‘the issues guiding the research in the first place need to be adapted … in light of the statements of interviewees’ (Freebody, 2003, p. 133). Interviews with teachers will include 6-10 questions with probes and last one hour in length. Interviews with students will include 3-4 questions with probes and last up to 30 minutes in length. The data for the interviews will be recorded by audio recording device and transcribed so that they can later be analysed and illustrated quotations can be extracted for inclusion in the final research report. Interview questions will be drawn from those used by Grant (2009) and the ‘Inside the Classroom Teacher Interview Protocol’ (2000). Questions may also need to be re-written based on relevance of questions to project-based learning, assessment, literacies and digital technologies.

The role of the researcher in the observations is semi-participatory and will involve observing three 50 minutes lessons of each case study class. This observation will be of both teachers and students. The data collection process is structured and semi-structured as the researcher will record data using an observation schedule (structured) but allow for brief supporting field notes (semi-structured). The observation protocol will be designed using items from pre-existing protocols including the ‘Classroom Observation Instrument’ created by Grant (2009) and ‘Inside the Classroom Observation and Analytic Protocol’ (Horizon Research inc, 2000). Observation will focus on four things for the teacher: pedagogy, use of technology; use of feedback and range of literate practices used. For students observation will focus on: use of technology; reception/expectation of feedback and engagement in a range of literate practices used.

Finally, data will be collected using specific coding dimensions from document content analysis including a variety of educational documents and artifacts used by each teacher including programs, lesson plans, student work samples and teaching resources. The content analysis data will be recorded using frequency and manifest coding. This coding would look for: types and amount of technology used or referred to in documents; teacher, peer or self-feedback in the form of ticks, crosses, stars, stickers, stamps and written comments types of literacies used or referred to in documents.

Ethical Considerations

According to Drew, Hardman and Hosp (2008) ‘a basic ethical principal for qualitative researchers is this: Do not tamper with the natural setting under study’ (p. 70) because this type of research ‘involves data that are recorded in narrative descriptions, not numbers.’ (p. 70). Ethics within a school setting will require a consideration of consent, privacy and observation. This study anticipates that informed voluntary consent for observation will be sought from the teacher participants. Substitute consent for observation as well as informed voluntary consent will be required for student participants in the form of parental permission. Privacy issues will be minimal for all participants as the sensitivity of the information being shared is low and the setting – a classroom – is a shared public space. As a further means to protect students’ privacy, pseudonyms will be used for student participants.

Analysis

Data analysis ‘allows the qualitative researcher to move from the description of an historical event or social setting to a more general interpretation’ (Neuman, 2003, p. 467). This study will involve an analysis of both numerical and non-numerical data. Coding of data from questionnaire, interviews, observations and document content analysis will attempt to identify recurrent patterns. This will involve both open coding focusing on surface (manifest) and latent (semantic) codes and moving on to axial coding to “conceptualise and reduce the data” (Strauss, A & Corbin, J, 1988, p. 12) and identify relationships between recurring themes. Similarly, descriptive statistics will be used for all data collected to determine apparent distinctions and similarities. The appropriate inferential statistical analyses (T-tests) will aim to determine the statistical significance of differences. Furthermore, correlation statistical analysis will be used for anticipated associations between items on the questionnaire.

Grounded theory and content analysis approaches to data analysis are the most appropriate for this study “because they are likely to offer insight, enhance understanding and provide a meaningful guide to action (Strauss, A & Corbin, J, 1988, p.  12). Both require constant comparative analysis of data. During the proposed case studies ‘data collection and analysis processes tend to be concurrent’ (Thorne, 2008) whereas analysis will come after data collection with the survey. The process of data analysis for both will include collection, entry, cleaning and analysis.

Methodological limitations

The strength of this study is the design of its research strategy involving both qualitative and quantitative data, ensuring a picture of the wider population and a richer description of teacher practice in the form of case studies. Limitations to this study include its limited generalisability however supportable generalizations about assessment practices, digital technology use and the teaching of multiliteracies when project-based learning is introduced will attempt to be drawn. It is hoped that this study will provide Australian secondary English teachers with insight into the ways in which student-centred, inquiry-based pedagogies such as project-based learning may provide them with a framework for the meaningful integration of digital technologies, assessment for learning and the teaching of multiliteracies in their classrooms.

Timetable

It is anticipated that collecting and analyzing data as well as the writing of the final report will take between twelve and eighteen months.

TIME PERIOD	ACTIVITY
December 2011 – January 2012 (ongoing)	Literature review
January, 2012	Seek ethics approval
February – April, 2012	Data Collection
May – June, 2012	Data Entry
July – August, 2012	Data Cleaning
September – December, 2012	Data Analysis
January – March, 2013	Writing up findings

Figure 3

Budget

BUDGET ITEM		EXPENDITURE
Equipment		$500
Travel		$1000
Printing		$300
Casual teacher cover		$2000
Accommodation		$400
Miscellaneous		$250
	TOTAL	$4500

     Figure 4

Dissemination of Results

The findings of the study will be disseminated in several ways. Firstly a report of findings will be provided to the schools participating in the study. Secondly a thesis will be completed documenting the results of the study. Finally the results of this study will be presented at the Australian Association for English Teachers annual conference in 2013 and International Society for Technology in Education conference in 2013. A journal article will be submitted for publication in both the Australian Association for English Teachers and English Teachers Association journals.

References:

Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (2011). Australian Curriculum English. Retrieved October 26, 2011, from http://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/English/Rationale

Barron, B. (1998). Doing with understanding: lessons from research on problem and project based learning. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 7, 271-311.

Barron, B. & Darling-Hammond, L. (2008). Teaching for meaningful learning: A review of research on inquiry-based and cooperative learning. In L. Darling-Hammond, Barron, B., Pearson, D., Schoenfeld, A., Stage, E., Zimmerman, T., Cervetti, G. & Tison, J. (Ed.), Powerful Learning: What We Know About Teaching for Understanding (pp. 11-70). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Black, P. William, D. (1998). Inside the black box: Raising standards through classroom assessment. The Phi Delta Kappan 80(2), 139-148.

Bull, G. Anstey, M. (2010). Redefining Literacy and Text. Evolving pedagogies: reading and writing in a multimodal world Carlton South, Vic: Education Services Australia.

Cazden, C., Cope, B., Fairclough, N., Gee, J. P., Kress, M., Luke, A., Luke, C., Michaels, S. & Nakata, M. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: designing social futures. Harvard Educational Review, 66(1), 60-92.

Department of Education and Communities, (2003). English Years 7-10 Syllabus.   Retrieved October 26, 2011, from http://www.boardofstudies.nsw.edu.au/syllabus_sc/english.html

Corbin, J. M. & Anslem, L. S. (2008). Basics of qualitative research: techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory (3 ed.). Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications.

Costa, A. & Kallick, B. (2001). Describing 16 habits of mind.   Retrieved September 18, 2011, from http://www.habits-of-mind.net

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. (2009). Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) – Teacher Questionnaire Retrieved October 15, 2011, from http://www.oecd.org/findDocument/0,3770,en_2649_39263231_1_119826_1_1_1,00.html

Drew, C. J., Hardman, M. L. & Hosp, J. L. (2008). Designing and conducting research in education. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications.

Freebody, P. (2003). Qualitative research in education: interaction and practice. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications.

Grant, M. (2009). Understanding projects in project-based learning: A student’s perspective. Annual Meetings of the American Educational Research Association. Retrieved October 10, 2011, from http://www.bie.org/research/study/students_perspective

Horizon Research Incorporated. (2000). Inside the Classroom Teacher Interview Protocol.   Retrieved October 15 2011, from http://www.horizon-research.com/instruments/hri_instrument.php?inst_id=17

Horizon Research Incorporated. (2000). Inside the Classroom Observation Analytic Protocol.   Retrieved October 15, 2011, from http://www.horizon-research.com/instruments/hri_instrument.php?inst_id=14

Mizuko, I., Horst, H. A., Bittanti, M., Boyd, D., Herr-Stephenson, B., Lange, P. G., Pascoe, C. J., & Robinson, L. (2008). Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Reports on Digital Media and Learning, November 2008.

Neuman, W. L. (2006). Social research methods: qualitative and quantitative approaches. Boston: Pearson.

The Council of Chief State School Officers (2011). Formative Assessment and Next-Generation Assessment Systems: Are We Losing an Opportunity?   Retrieved September 10, 2011, from http://www.ccsso.org/Resources/Publications/Formative_Assessment_and_Next-Generation_Assessment_Systems.html

Petty, G. (2006). Evidence based teaching: a practical approach. Cheltenham: Nelson Thornes.

Ravitz, J., Hixson, N., English, M., & Mergendoller, J. (2011). Using project based learning to teach 21st century skills: Findings from a statewide initiative. Proposal version of paper to be presented at Annual Meetings of the American Educational Research Association. Vancouver, BC. April, 2011.   Retrieved October 4, 2011, from http://www.bie.org/research/study/PBL_21CS_WV

Ravitz, J. (2010). Assessing the impact of online technologies on PBL use in US high schools. Paper presented at the Annual Meetings of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology.

Thornburg, D. (2001). Campfires in cyberspace: primordial metaphors for learning in the 21st century. Ed at a Distance, 15(6), 1-8.

Thorne, S. (2000). Data analysis in qualitative research. Evidence Based Nursing, 3(68-70).

Yin, R. (1989). Case Study Methodology. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.

Belonging assessment task, 2012

I’ve been threatening to write this post for some time now. For weeks I’ve been doing that annoying thing where you tweet, ‘I’m working on something epic. It’s going to be great. I just gotta finish it’ then three days later, ‘This task I’m doing is going to kill me, it’s so massive but I hope it’s worth it.’ Then when it’s complete you walk around the staffroom saying things like, ‘Wow, I’m glad that’s done. It took me ages. Hours and hours in fact.’

I’m sure you’ve all had those moments, where you’ve had a demon task that you just gotta complete … as Orwell would say, you are ‘driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.’ This has been my experience of this task. Apart from my research proposal (which I have also bothered people by telling them how hard I’m working, whine, gripe, and generally trying to get them to tell me how awesome they think I am cos I work so hard, yada yada) I haven’t been focused on anything else so intently in the last two months.

This task is a vision of what I think (at this point in time) is what a quality assessment looks like for the HSC. You have already seen my Advanced English Module B task (if not see it here) and I know I banged on about that for a while. But here is our new Area of Study assessment task – it accounts for 30% of the HSC in-school assessment mark.

I was really inspired by the work of Geoff Petty and the learning effect-tables of John Hattie. I wanted to create a task that gave students a ‘built-in’ learning success scaffold. This is why the check-lists, criteria/rubrics, mind-map and plans are included. The ‘portfolio’ is to be completed over a term and a bit. The ‘chunking’ of the task has kinda been done for the students.

I have been increasingly concerned with the teaching approach to HSC English that focuses solely on the final external examinations. I am hearing rumours that teachers are not setting assessment tasks that actually assess students’ abilities to represent, listen and speak. I’m sure I’ve blogged about this before as well, so I’ll spare you my tirade … or ‘grudge’ as my new English teacher friends like to refer to it. To counter this trend 9one that I am highly critical of) and to create a task that we believe is in the spirit of our syllabus, we have given our students the opportunity to represent their understanding of belonging in any form they choose. I love this task and am very excited to see the results.

As my friend Glen McLachlan said today, this assessment requires a significant amount of ‘unlearning’ and ‘learning’ for both teachers and students. I will post something else about Glen’s (gentle and constructive) criticism of my approach to creating this task a little later. For now, here is the task:

View this document on Scribd

Assignment 6: Draft thesis proposal

Why English teachers should care about project-based learning:

integrating multiliteracies, assessment for learning and digital technologies.

Introduction

There is impetus for pedagogical change in the English classroom. This impetus stems from our rapidly changing world as observed by Bull and Anstey (2010, p.6), ‘literacy teaching and learning should respond to the rapid changes in literacy arising from increasing globalization, technology and social diversity.’ This transforming social, cultural and technological landscape necessarily influences the responsibilities of the secondary English teacher in Australia and brings with it a set of new challenges. Three of these challenges are the purposeful integration of digital technologies into the classroom, the nature of assessment and the necessity to teach multiliteracies. It can be argued that these challenges may be successfully overcome by the reshaping of traditional teacher-centred pedagogy to a more student-centred and inquiry based pedagogy in the Australian secondary English classroom. In fact, this impetus towards pedagogical change is reflected in the federal government’s Digital Education Revolution (DER) and (surprisingly for some) the new Australian Curriculum: English.

Literature Review

Theoretical Framework

The researcher is a practicing educator and thus this study draws on broader learning theories of constructivism, engagement, assessment and literacy which are key drivers in education. Central to these perspectives are cooperative learning, activity theory, situated practice, structural alignment and formative assessment however this study will focus on project based-learning, digital technologies, multiliteracies and assessment for learning.

This cross-sectional study aims to provide a descriptive account of how technology usage, assessment for learning practices and the teaching of multiliteracies in the English classroom change when project-based pedagogies are used. This researcher posits that project based learning will provide teachers with the impetus and framework to successfully and purposefully integrate digital technologies, assessment for learning (feedback) and the explicit teaching of mutltiliteracties in the secondary English classroom.

Project-based learning is a pedagogy that engages students in relevant, real-world problems that require them to attain and strengthen skills essential for success in the 21st century – collaboration, communication, creativity, digital citizenship – as well as understanding positive ‘habits of mind’ (Costa, 2007). Founded in Constructivist theory, Project Based Learning “involves completing complex tasks that typically result in a realistic product, event or presentation to an audience” (Barron and Darling-Hammond, 2008, p. 2).   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).

Since the implementation of DER, English teachers have been faced with the challenge of when, how and why to introduce digital technologies into their lessons. Moreover the current NSW Stage 4/5 syllabus (2003, p. 4) and the Draft Australian Curriculum: English (2011, p. 11) both stipulate that teachers are required to help students to become productive, creative and confident users of technology. The types of digital technologies that are beginning to be seen in educational settings and that will be the focus of this study include a combination of fixed (televisions, IWBs, computer lab) and mobile technologies (ipads, ipods, mobile phones) as well as the software and web-based tools teachers and students access.    Digital technologies that teachers and students bring into the English classroom should be meaningfully integrated into learning activities. Ravitz (2010) conducted a study into the relationship between online technologies and the implementation of PBL in small schools across the United States and found that PBL “helps teachers integrate technology by providing reasons for its use” (p. 10) however there is a need for a greater understanding of the influence project based learning has on the use of technology in the classroom (Ravitz, 2010).

A second challenge faced by secondary English teachers in Australia is the nature of assessment. Often the primary assessment in English is summative despite evidence that formative or assessment for learning practices have ‘more impact on learning than any other general factor’ (Petty, 2006). The Rationale of the NSW English Stage 4/5 Syllabus (2003, p. 7) and Australian Curriculum: English (2011, p. 6) both advocate assessment for learning practices including peer and self-assessment.  In their seminal paper, Black and William (1998) conclude that the introduction of effective assessment for learning  “will require significant changes in classroom practice” (p. 141) because “instruction and formative assessment are indivisible” (p. 143). Importantly Black and William propose that “what is needed is a classroom culture of questioning and deep thinking, in which pupils learn from shared discussions with teachers and peers” (p. 146). These features are key elements of project-based pedagogies which have been shown to “have documented positive changes for teachers and students in motivation, attitude toward learning, and skills, including work habits, critical thinking skills and problem-solving” (Barron and Darling-Hammond, p. 4, 2008) Barron’s (1998) study of project and problem-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.

The final challenge facing English teachers today is the necessity to teach multiliteracies. The term multiliteracies was coined by the New London Group and is defined as ‘a new approach to literacy teaching … (that) … overcomes the limitations of traditional approaches by emphasizing how negotiating the multiple lingustic and cultural differences in our society is central to the pragmatics of the working, civic, and private lives of students” (New London Group, 1996, p. 1) A three-year ethnographic study by Ito et al (2008) describes how “new media allow for a degree of freedom and autonomy for youth that is less apparent in a classroom setting (p. 2)” and conclude that “the diversity in forms of literacy (accessed by young people) means it is problematic to develop a standardised set of benchmarks to measure” (p. 2) multiliteracies. Traditionally English in Australia has been viewed as a teacher-centred discipline with a heavy focus on linguistic literacy – reading and writing. However the introduction of multimodal and multimedia texts into the Australian Curriculum: English (2011, p. 1) reshapes our understanding of subject English. English teachers are now responsible for the teaching of multiliteracies, inviting another challenge for teachers because “literacy must address the impact of new communication technologies, and the texts delivered by them.” (Bull and Anstey, 2010, p. 6)

Meeting the demands of changing literacy needs, curriculum changes and the federal 1-1 initiative forces secondary English teachers in Australia to reconsider their pedagogy. Here, again, one alternative pedagogy that may provide teachers with a scaffold to integrate digital technologies and multiliteracies into the English classroom is project-based learning (PBL).  The researcher will adopt an interpretive approach in an attempt to address the gap in research into student-centred and inquiry based pedagogies in English classrooms in Australia, specifically project-based pedagogies and the changes made to assessment practices, digital technology usage and teaching of multiliteracies when these pedagogies are implemented.

Methodology

Research Strategy

Research Questions

This study is designed to answer three questions:

• What changes are made to digital technology usage when project-based pedagogies are introduced into the Australian secondary English classroom?
• What changes are made to assessment practices when project-based pedagogies are introduced into the Australian secondary English classroom?
• What changes are made to the teaching of multiliteracies when project-based pedagogies are introduced into the Australian secondary English classroom?

Hypothesis:

This researcher posits that project based learning will provide teachers with the impetus and framework to successfully and purposefully integrate digital technologies, assessment for learning (feedback) and the teaching of mutltiliteracties in the secondary English classroom.

Introduction:

This exploratory study will use a mixed method research strategy to address the research questions and provide a rich description of a specific pedagogy.  A survey of Australian secondary English teachers in the form of an online questionnaire will ask questions about their usage and implementation of technology in their classroom, how often – if at all – they include student-centred, project-based pedagogies in their classroom and what types of assessment are used. This survey will include both closed and open-ended questions. The population for the study will be secondary English teachers within New South Wales with a wide demographic including teachers from government, independent and Catholic schools – all members of the NSW English Teacher Association.

The study will include two class case studies drawn from two different teaching contexts (government, independent and Catholic schools and/or different SES) that are implementing project-based pedagogies in their classrooms. Drawn from these two classes will be two teacher case studies and eight student case studies.  See Figure 2 for factors that will be the focus of each case study.

Figure 1

Participants/Sample

The population for this study is teachers of secondary English in Australia. The sample of this population will be drawn using a mixed sampling method – purposive sampling and cluster sampling.

The survey sample will attempt to be representative of the population. This sample will be drawn using a probability sampling method – cluster sampling. The sample will be members of the NSW English Teachers Association. A random selection of the 2000 members will be emailed a link to the online questionnaire. It is not anticipated that all recipients will complete the questionnaire. The number of teachers in the survey will depend on the number of responses to the online questionnaire. Ideally N = 200 teachers.

The strength of the random sampling method for the survey is cost (Neuman, 2006) that it only selects members who are secondary English teachers. The weakness is that the population members are only from NSW – a small proportion of the total population – and do not represent the total population of secondary English teachers in Australia. These teachers are also all members of an association and this could result in cluster effects such as similar teaching approaches, access to similar resources and ideas about English teaching and possibly a greater willingness to use technology in the classroom than the average English teacher in Australia. This will impact the validity of the data and its representativeness. This survey aims to give the researcher a general picture of: teaching pedagogies, the use of digital technologies, assessment practices and the teaching of literacies in the Australian secondary English classroom.

The research sites will be two purposively selected Australian high schools, most likely public schools in the Sydney region. These will be drawn from the data collected from the survey of ETA members. The case study samples (two teachers and eight students from each class) will be drawn using a non-probability sampling method – purposive sampling.  This sampling method will allow for the selection “unique cases that are especially informative” (Neuman 2006, p. 222) based on the survey data. Participants for the teacher case studies will not be matched in regards to SES, gender or teaching experience as this study is descriptive and does not aim to be representative. Moreover it is anticipated that it will be difficult to identify many English teachers using project-based pedagogies, resulting in a small sample pool from which to select participants for the case study. The student case studies will be drawn from the participating classes using a random sampling method using a random number generator. Ideally student case studies will include a balance of male and female, SES and age however there will be range in attitudes towards English and achievement levels. For these embedded case studies N=10 (n1 = 2 n2 = 8) N= number of participants. In this study the participants will include two secondary English teachers and four students from each teacher’s class.

The strength of the purposive sampling is that it will ensure the participants are teachers and students who are actively using project-based pedagogies in the classroom. This will allow the researcher to observe and measure in what ways project-based pedagogies change the use of digital technologies, assessment practices and the teaching of literacies. The weakness of this approach is that it is not a representative sample of the population – Australian secondary English teachers. However these case studies do not aim to be representative of the entire population (Yin, 1989). The case studies aim to be a rich description of a particular pedagogy in practice and its impact on the use of digital technologies, assessment practices and the teaching of literacies.

The strength of the sampling method for this study derives from its use of a combination of random and purposive sampling methods.

Data Collection

This proposed mixed methodology study includes four data-collection methods. The quantitative survey will collect data from an online questionnaire. The qualitative embedded case studies will collect data from interviews, observation document content analysis. All of these data collection methods will allow for the operationalisation of the central concepts of the study. These concepts are outlined in the table Figure 2. This table also outlines the content of interviews, questionnaire, observation protocols and document analysis codes.

Concept	Content of interview questions, questionnaire items, observations protocols and document analysis
change	I would concentrate on if/how much time was spent in class and in planning targeting each concept below
digital technology use	type of technology used, how often technology is used, duration if technology used, purpose of technology
assessment practices	amount of feedback given during class, mode of feedback delivery, type of feedback given (verbal, whole class, individual student, physical – ticks on page, written comment, positive or negative feedback, quality of feedback), teacher and students’ discussion of feedback, types of assessment used in and out of class
teaching of multiliteracies	types of texts incorporated into each lesson, explicit literacies taught, types of literacy practices used, lesson materials
pedagogies	types of pedagogies used, most common pedagogy used, when specific pedagogies are used, attitudes towards student-centred pedagogies, frequence of student-centred pedagogy used, attitude towards PBL, knowledge of PBL

Figure 2

The researcher will be semi-participatory for the observations and interviews in regards to using question probes to develop questions and data based on participant answers. The researcher will be a non-participant in the questionnaire and content analysis.

An online questionnaire survey is planned for NSW English Teacher Association members. The data from this questionnaire will be stored in the online survey tool, most likely www.surveymonkey.com. The quantitative data from this questionnaire will provide information on the usage of digital technologies in the Australian secondary English classroom, the pedagogies adopted when using technology, the types of assessment and feedback strategies used and what types of literacies are supported and explicitly taught in the secondary English classroom. This will allow for a picture of the population from which the case studies will be drawn and have the benefit of allowing allow for representativeness which will help argue for generalisability of results. Participants will be asked between 15 and 20 questions taking no more than 15 minutes to complete.

This structured data collection process will draw many of the questionnaire items from a survey created by Ravitz, Hixson, English and Mergendoller (2011) as well as older studies including the TALIS Teaching and Learning International Survey (2008). Items will be re-written based on relevance of items to project-based learning, assessment, literacies and digital technologies.  The survey will ask about the frequency of 5-8 practices specifically pertaining to teaching practices, assessment practices, the teaching of literacy and the use of technology using Lickart scale-style responses.

A qualitative approach to data collection will be taken for the embedded case studies.  A variety of data will be collected including interviews with teachers and students, observation of teachers and students in classroom, interviews with students, examination of a variety of educational documents and artifacts used by each teacher including programs, lesson plans, student work samples and teaching resources.

‘The interactions that make up interviews are dynamic, not static, forms of social interaction’ (Freebody, 2003, p. 137) and require attention to what is said, how it is said and why it is said. The role of the researcher is semi-participatory as the interviews will be semi-structured in nature.  Question probes will be used to develop questions and data based on participant answers.  This structure allows for the possibility that ‘the issues guiding the research in the first place need to be adapted … in light of the statements of interviewees. (Freebody, 2003, p. 133) Interviews with teachers will include 6-10 questions with probes and last one hour in length. Interviews with students will include 3-4 questions with probes and last up to 30 minutes in length. This data collection process is semi-structured as the questions and probes will be pre-written however the researched may alter questions and/or probes to gain further details or (re)focus participant more on ideas central to study. The data for the interviews will be recorded by audio recording device and transcribed so that they can later be analysed and illustrated quotations can be extracted for inclusion in the final research report. Interview questions will be drawn from those used by Grant (2009) and the ‘Inside the Classroom Teacher Interview Protocol’ (2000). Questions may also need to be re-written based on relevance of questions to project-based learning, assessment, literacies and digital technologies.

The role of the researcher in the observations is semi-participatory and will involve observing three 50 minutes lessons of each case study class. This observation will be of both teachers and students. The data collection process is structured and semi-structured as the researcher will use an observation schedule (structured) but allow for brief supporting field notes (semi-structured). Observation will focus on four things for the teacher: pedagogy, use of technology; use of feedback and range of literate practices used. For students observation will focus on: use of technology; reception/expectation of feedback and range of literate practices used.

The data for the observation will be recorded on the observation schedule (a collection of ticked boxes) as well as brief unstructured written observation notes. The observation protocol will be designed using items from pre-existing protocols including the ‘Classroom Observation Instrument’ created by the National Science Federation, Grant (2009) and ‘Inside the Classroom Observation and Analytic Protocol’ (Horizon Research inc, 2000).

Finally, data will be collected from document content analysis including a variety of educational documents and artifacts used by each teacher including programs, lesson plans, student work samples and teaching resources. This data collection is structured as the researcher will use specific coding dimensions. The content analysis data will be recorded using frequency and manifest coding. This coding would look for: types and amount of technology used or referred to in documents; teacher, peer or self-feedback in the form of ticks, crosses, stars, stickers, stamps and written commentst; types of literacies used or referred to in documents.

Ethical Issues

According to Drew, Hardman and Hosp (2008) ‘a basic ethical principal for qualitative researchers is this: Do not tamper with the natural setting under study’ (p. 70) because this type of research ‘involves data that are recorded in narrative descriptions, not numbers.’ (p. 70). Ethics within a school setting will require a consideration of consent, privacy and observation. This study anticipates that informed voluntary consent for observation will be sought from the teacher participants. Substitute consent for observation as well as informed voluntary consent will be required for student participants in the form of parental permission. Privacy issues will be minimal for all participants as the sensitivity of the information being shared is low and the setting – a classroom – is a shared public space. As a further means to protect students’ privacy, pseudonyms will be used for student participants.

Analysis

Data analysis ‘allows the qualitative researcher to move from the description of an historical event or social setting to a more general interpretation’ (Neuman, 2003, p. 467). As outlined in the introduction to this proposal, the researcher is an educator who brings with her a theoretical sensitivity relating to constructivism, engagement, assessment, cooperative learning, and situated practice. This sensitivity will inform the analysis strategies employed. In an attempt to assure reliability, this study will involve an analysis of both numerical and non-numerical data.

Coding of data from questionnaire, interviews, observations and document content analysis will attempt to identify recurrent patterns. This will involve both open coding focusing on surface (manifest) and latent (semantic) codes and moving on to axial coding to “conceptualise and reduce the data” (Strauss, A & Corbin, J, 1988, p. 12) identify relationships between recurring themes. Similarly, descriptive statistics will be used for all data collected to determine apparent distinctions and similarities within the data. The appropriate inferential statistical analyses (T-tests) will aim to determine the statistical significance of these differences. Furthermore, correlation statistical analysis will be used for anticipated associations between items on the questionnaire.

Grounded theory and content analysis approaches to data analysis are the most appropriate for this study “because they are likely to offer insight, enhance understanding and provide a meaningful guide to action (Strauss, A & Corbin, J, 1988, p.  12). Both require constant comparative analysis of data. During the proposed case studies ‘data collection and analysis processes tend to be concurrent’ (Thorne, 2008) whereas analysis will come after data collection with the survey. The process of data analysis for both will include collection, entry, cleaning and analysis.

Methodological limitations

The strength of this study is the design of its research strategy involving both qualitative and quantitative data, ensuring a picture of the wider population and a richer description of teacher practice in the form of case studies. This design also strengthens the reliability of the data. There are certain limitations to this study including its limited generalisability to the population of Australian secondary English teachers. However supportable generalizations about the changes made to assessment practices, digital technology use and the teaching of multiliteracies when project-based learning is introduced will attempt to be drawn. It is hoped that this study will provide Australian secondary English teachers with insight into the ways in which student-centred, inquiry-based pedagogies such as project-based learning may provide them with a framework  for the meaningful integration of digital technologies and the teaching of multiliteracies in their classrooms. It is also hoped that PBL will give teachers the impetus to implement greater use of feedback strategies in the form of assessment for learning.

Timetable

It is anticipated that collecting and analyzing data as well as the writing of the final report will take between twelve and eighteen months. The time period during which each activity will be performed and the amount of time each will likely require are as follows:

TIME PERIOD	ACTIVITY
December 2011 – January 2012 (ongoing)	Literature review
February – April, 2012	Data collection
May – June, 2012	Data Entry
July – August, 2012	Data Cleaning
September – December, 2012	Data Analysis
January – March, 2012	Writing up findings

Figure 3

Budget

BUDGET ITEM		EXPENDITURE
Equipment		$500
Travel		$1000
Printing		$300
Casual teacher cover		$2000
Accommodation		$400
Miscellaneous		$250
	TOTAL	$4500

     Figure 4

Dissemination of Results

The findings of the study will be disseminated in several ways. Firstly a report of findings will be provided to the schools participating in the study. Secondly a thesis will be completed documenting the results of the study. Finally the results of this study will be presented at the Australian Association for English Teachers annual conference in 2013 and International Society for Technology in Education conference in 2013 and a journal article will be submitted for publication in both the Australian Association for English Teachers and English Teachers Association journals.

References:

Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (2011). Australian Curriculum English. Retrieved October 26, 2011, from http://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/English/Rationale

Balakrishnan, M., Rossafri, M., Fong-Soon, F. & Rozhan, M. I.  (2009). Technology application in project-based learning. Journal of Communication and Computer 6(12), 78-84.

Barab, S. A., Gresalfi, M. & Arici, A. (2009). Why Educators Should Care About Games. Educational Leadership 67(1), 76-80.

Barron, B. (1998). Doing with understanding: lessons from research on problem and project based learning. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 7, 271-311.

Barron, B. & Darling-Hammond, L. (2008). Teaching for meaningful learning: A review of research on inquiry-based and cooperative learning. In L. Darling-Hammond, Barron, B., Pearson, D., Schoenfeld, A., Stage, E., Zimmerman, T., Cervetti, G. & Tison, J. (Ed.), Powerful Learning: What We Know About Teaching for Understanding (pp. 11-70). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Black, P. William, D. (1998). Inside the black box: Raising standards through classroom assessment. The Phi Delta Kappan 80(2), 139-148.

Bradley-Levine, J., Berghoff, B., Seybold, J., Sever, R., Blackwell, S. & Smiley, A. (2010). Paper presented at Annual Meetings of the American Educational Research Association.  Denver, CO.  April, 2010. Retrieved October 3, 2011, from http://www.bie.org/research/study/teachers_and_administrators_need_to_know

Bull, G. Anstey, M. (2010). Redefining Literacy and Text. Evolving pedagogies: reading and writing in a multimodal world Carlton South, Vic: Education Services Australia.

Cazden, C., Cope, B., Fairclough, N., Gee, J. P., Kress, M., Luke, A., Luke, C., Michaels, S. & Nakata, M. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: designing social futures’. Harvard Educational Review, 66(1), 60-92.

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Department of Education and Communities, (2003). English Years 7-10 Syllabus.   Retrieved October 26, 2011, from http://www.boardofstudies.nsw.edu.au/syllabus_sc/english.html

Corbin, J. M. & Anslem, L. S. (2008). Basics of qualitative research: techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory (3 ed.). Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications.

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Cusack, C. (2011). Project-Based Learning | Edutopia. K-12 Education & Learning Innovations with Proven Strategies that Work Retrieved September 10, 2011, from http://www.edutopia.org/project-based-learning

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. (2009). Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) – Teacher Questionnaire Retrieved October 15, 2011, from http://www.oecd.org/findDocument/0,3770,en_2649_39263231_1_119826_1_1_1,00.html

Drew, C. J., Hardman, M. L. & Hosp, J. L. (2008). Designing and conducting research in education. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications.

Freebody, P. (2003). Qualitative research in education: interaction and practice. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications.

Grant, M. (2009). Understanding projects in project-based learning: A student’s perspective. Annual Meetings of the American Educational Research Association. Retrieved October 10, 2011, from http://www.bie.org/research/study/students_perspective

Hattie, J. (2009). Visible learning: a synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement. New York: Routledge.

Horizon Research Incorporated. (2000). Inside the Classroom Teacher Interview Protocol.   Retrieved October 15 2011, from http://www.horizon-research.com/instruments/hri_instrument.php?inst_id=17

Horizon Research Incorporated. (2000). Inside the Classroom Observation Analytic Protocol.   Retrieved October 15, 2011, from http://www.horizon-research.com/instruments/hri_instrument.php?inst_id=14

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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.

Introduction and Literature Review … too long.

This study draws on broader learning theories of social constructivism, engagement, assessment and literacy which are key drivers in education. Central to these perspectives are cooperative learning, activity theory, situated practice, structural alignment and formative assessment however this study will focus on project based-learning, digital technologies, multiliteracies and assessment for learning.

This study aims to explore how technology usage, assessment for learning practices and the teaching of multiliteracies in the English classroom change when project-based pedagogies are used. This researcher posits that project based learning will provide teachers with the impetus and framework to successfully and purposefully integrate digital technologies, assessment for learning (feedback) and the explicit teaching of mutltiliteracties in the secondary English classroom.

Project-based learning is a pedagogy that engages students in relevant, real-world problems that require them to attain and strengthen skills essential for success in the 21st century – collaboration, communication, creativity, digital citizenship – as well as understanding positive ‘habits of mind’ (Costa, 2007). Founded in Constructivist theory, Project Based Learning “involves completing complex tasks that typically result in a realistic product, event or presentation to an audience” (Barron and Darling-Hammond, 2008, p. 2). 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).

Since the implementation of DER, English teachers have been faced with the challenge of when, how and why to introduce digital technologies into their lessons. Moreover the current NSW Stage 4/5 syllabus (2003, p. 4) and the Draft Australian Curriculum: English (2011, p. 11) both stipulate that teachers are required to help students to become productive, creative and confident users of technology. The types of digital technologies that are beginning to be seen in educational settings and that will be the focus of this study include a combination of fixed (televisions, IWBs, computer lab) and mobile technologies (ipads, ipods, mobile phones) as well as the software and web-based tools teachers and students access.    Digital technologies that teachers and students bring into the English classroom should be meaningfully integrated into learning activities. Ravitz (2010) conducted a study into the relationship between online technologies and the implementation of PBL in small schools across the United States and found that PBL “helps teachers integrate technology by providing reasons for its use” (p. 10) however there is a need for a greater understanding of the influence project based learning has on the use of technology in the classroom is needed (Ravitz, 2010).

A second challenge faced by secondary English teachers in Australia is the nature of assessment. Often the primary assessment in English is summative despite evidence that formative or assessment for learning practices have ‘more impact on learning than any other general factor’ (Petty, 2006). The Rationale of the NSW English Stage 4/5 Syllabus (2003, p. 7) and Australian Curriculum: English (2011, p. 6) both advocate assessment for learning practices including peer and self-assessment.  In their seminal paper, Black and William (1998) conclude that the introduction of effective assessment for learning  “will require significant changes in classroom practice” (p. 141) because “instruction and formative assessment are indivisible” (p. 143). Importantly Black and William conclude that “what is needed is a classroom culture of questioning and deep thinking, in which pupils learn from shared discussions with teachers and peers” (p. 146). These features are key elements of project-based pedagogies which have been shown to “have documented positive changes for teachers and students in motivation, attitude toward learning, and skills, including work habits, critical thinking skills and problem-solving” (Barron and Darling-Hammond, p. 4 ???) Barron’s (1998) study of project and problem-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). Barron concluded that an “emphasis on formative assessment and revision” (p. 305) is central to PBL.

The final challenge facing English teachers today is the necessity to teach multiliteracies. The term multiliteracies was coined by of the New London Group and is defined as ‘a new approach to literacy teaching … (that) … overcomes the limitations of traditional approaches by emphasizing how negotiating the multiple lingustic and cultural differences in our society is central to the pragmatics of the working, civic, and private lives of students” (New London Group, 1996, p. 1) A three-year ethnographic study by Ito et al (2008) describes how “new media allow for a degree of freedom and autonomy for youth that is less apparent in a classroom setting (p. 2)” and conclude that “the diversity in forms of literacy (accessed by young people) means it is problematic to develop a standardised set of benchmarks to measure” (p. 2) multiliteracies. Traditionally English in Australia has been viewed as a teacher-centred discipline with a heavy focus on linguistic literacy – reading and writing. However the introduction of multimodal and multimedia texts into the Australian Curriculum: English (2011, p. 1) reshapes our understanding of subject English. English teachers are now responsible for the teaching of multiliteracies, inviting another challenge for teachers because “literacy must address the impact of new communication technologies, and the texts delivered by them.” (Bull and Anstey, 2010, p. 6)

Meeting the demands of changing literacy needs, curriculum changes and the federal 1-1 initiative forces secondary English teachers in Australia to reconsider their pedagogy. Here, again, one alternative pedagogy that may provide teachers with a scaffold to integrate digital technologies and multiliteracies into the English classroom is project based learning (PBL).  The aim of this study is to address the gap in research into student-centred and inquiry based pedagogies in English classrooms in Australia, specifically project-based pedagogies and the changes made to assessment practices, digital technology usage and teaching of multiliteracies when these pedagogies are implemented.