When The End Creates the Beginning

From Planning Meeting

Last post I talked about keeping the end in mind. And I mentioned that we need to keep our standards in mind if having highly accredited schools is our true end product. This should be considered a follow on piece to the last post.

When we left our fearless teachers they had looked at the standards and they had come up with roles for their students, potential products, and a possible driving question.

I think it's important to remember that this is their first full-blown project. So when we met this week I had set my expectations fairly low. I wanted them to have thought about an entry event, their calendar, possible real-world connections, and maybe an outline of a rubric.

The information they brought to me included the student roles, the end products, and a driving question. As you can see in the image at the top, they are having students be historians with either a Federalist or an Anti-Federalist bent. They are going to have each student produce either a rap, a poem, or a prologue to a book. Each group will produce a cover  for the collections of raps or poems, or a cover for the book that the epilogue will be a part of. And, their audience will be 5th grade students in our feeder schools. 5th grade and 8th grade are assessed years for U.S. History.

Let's take a quick look at the standards they are attempting to cover:  
            8.15C: Identify colonial grievances listed in the Declaration of Independence and explain how those grievances were addressed in the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights.  
           8.15D: Analyze how the U.S. Constitution reflects the principles of limited government, republicanism, checks and balances, federalism, separation of powers, popular sovereignty, and individual rights.

When we start doing project ideation we want to always have these standards in the back of our minds. When the students are creating their products we need to see them Identifying grievances and Explaining how these were addressed. And they need to Analyze parts of the constitution.  These are the things we want our rubric(s) to address and our products, as well. We want to be totally overt with what it is we want our students to learn.

As we started the planning one of the major items to create was the entry event. The teachers had decided to create a letter from our former principal, and now assistant superintendent, who was very personable and well liked by our 8th grade class.  I, offhandedly, said "it's too bad he wasn't here to do a video request." Not 15 minutes later I saw him walk into the office. I asked; He accepted; The video was shot: Entry event completed.

Other items they worked on that day included: identifying groups and laying out the calendar with content and with student products. The project kicked off. Teachers are happy and students are engaged.  Next post I'll look at how the middle of the project is progressing. What ways are the teachers scaffolding content? What formative assessments are they doing? What obstacles have they had to overcome? Stay tuned...

Keeping the End in Mind

Courtesy http://www.flickr.com/commons/

If you have been trained by the Buck Institute for Education (BIE) or by the New Tech Network (NTN), or by another group that might have been originally trained by BIE or NTN, then you are familiar with the phrase "begin with the end in mind."  You also might have heard this if you have watched Edutopia videos or read their blog posts on PBL.

When you ask someone what that expression means, you may hear different answers. Is it the product you want your students to create?  Is it the knowledge the students have to explain to an audience?  Or, is it that you want your students to successfully pass a state driven standardized test?

More and more it is the latter.  If you are at a normal school in a normal district in the USA, then the pressure of performing well on the state's standardized test can be overwhelming.  And when you decide that you want to start teaching with PBL as your mode of instruction, you will hear from someone asking the question, "But will this help students perform at a higher level on the test?"

I like to think that the end goal needs to be that students are achieving a deeper understanding of the standards that are going to be assessed on the test. In other words, have the standards be the "End" that we keep in mind. Let's look at an example of this thinking from an 8th grade U.S. History course. This is a state tested course in Texas.  I recently met with our 8th grade teachers to start planning for a project.

The two standards they wanted to focus on for this project were (Texas) 8.15C and 8.15D.  8.15C states: Identify colonial grievances listed in the Declaration of Independence and explain how those grievances were addressed in the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights.  8.15D states: Analyze how the U.S. Constitution reflects the principles of limited government, republicanism, checks and balances, federalism, separation of powers, popular sovereignty, and individual rights.

In addition to the content we like our teachers to examine certain 21st Century Skills. In our district these skills include Critical Thinking, Communication, Collaboration, Digital Citizenship, and Work Ethic. I want our teachers to focus on one or two of these skills when they plan a project. So, our two teachers decided that they wanted to focus on Critical Thinking and Collaboration for this project.

The next step was to look at what role they wanted the students to take. A quick brainstorm gave us the following possible roles: writer/poet, historian, federalist, citizen, and delegate. Then we started looking at how the verbs in the standards, the role the students will play, and the 21st century skill work together for project planning.

Now we were ready for the final step: Using the 21st Century Skills to look at the standards. For example, I suggested the following sentence stem: How do federalists think critically about convincing the public about (something)? The teachers added the following question - "How have (or will) lives change(d) because of this?"

Suddenly our brainstorming for project ideation was really flowing. We could visualize the students in the role of colonial people. We could see them interacting and conversing about this huge change that was coming. Once the teachers could visualize what they wanted their students to experience during the project the rest fell into place.

Beginning with the end in mind can mean different things to different people. I want our teachers totally focused on the standards we are told to teach. That should not hamper the project planning and should not limit the scope of our projects.  Instead, the standards should be a catalyst for discussion and project planning.