Umm...That's Not Exactly PBL

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Have you ever had a teacher tell you a plan for an activity she was going to run in her class and she emphasized the fact that she loves "doing PBL?" This "project," that will last 3 days, is having the students demonstrate what they have learned in her 6th grade math class over the last 2 weeks.

Do you (a) tell her "that's not a project!"; or, (b) ask her "why are you wasting your student's time?"; or (c) tell her that she has great ideas and you'd like to help her plan for a more meaningful PBL unit.  Hopefully, through discussion, all three of those answers come up.

This evening I saw a link to a "pbl" where the students were to calculate the volume of a soda can and then redesign a new can that would hold the same volume of soda.  This is a standard activity and certainly is better than having students work 20 problems on volumes of a cylinder.  I even used that same thing as a 6th grade math teacher back in 1995.  I could easily have said (to this teacher), "Honey, that is NOT PBL! (while wagging my index finger)

So how should we, as fellow educators, handle this when we see it? Where do we take the conversation to make it truly meaningful for our co-teacher? We start by asking her to think about who might want to redesign a soda can.  Why would they want to redesign it? How would they redesign it? Now we tell her to imagine the students being the designers.  How would these designers be asked to make a change to the standard soda can? Then we tell her that she's thinking like a PBL teacher, now.

I worry, as more and more teachers become "experts" in PBL, that they will start squashing ideas and activities that other teachers want to do in their classroom.  Some of these activities can make great idea starters for a pbl unit.  Instead of squashing the ideas we need to be encouraging these teachers to use their ideas as jumping off points to greater things.  Some of these activities are great as scaffolding pieces for the middle of the project, for example.

Take the time to help your fellow teachers learn how to build inquiry into their lessons.  Help them teach their students to become better questioners.  Be gentle with their (the teachers) egos.  You want to help them not shut them down.  It is your (our) duty to help fellow teachers be the best that they can be so that our students can be the best that they can be.

Where Do I Find Project Ideas?

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I'm just not a creative person.  I never had a big imagination.  I can never think of great ideas.  How do you come up with these project ideas?

I hear this all of the time from people new to PBL.  They really think that there will be a dearth of ideas and they will struggle when it comes to planning a PBL unit.  In fact, when you have standards that you are trying to plan from there will be ideas.

Standards are the key.  Until you have taught at least one school year with standards based PBL then I do not recommend creating a project followed by adding standards to it.  And, even then, the majority of your PBL units should be standards based.

There are several reasons I could list for this but the main two reasons are, first,  that by starting with the standards teachers guarantee that they have thought about the curriculum and, second, this is where the ideas are going to come from.

Teachers have been creating problems in mathematics, labs in science, writing themes in English, and the same type of things in every other course since we have had teachers.  The idea here is that teachers are good about taking standards and creating tasks for students to do in the classroom.  With PBL, teachers take that up a notch and they add an inquiry based atmosphere to the classroom.  That's really all it is to this stuff.

For example, I had to teach parallel lines with a transversal in geometry class.  I just happened to see an article about the rice business in South Texas and the canals that are used.  Suddenly I envisioned parallel canals with crossing canals.  So to take that to the next step I had the students design barges to carry rice through the canal system.  They got to be creative and design barges and these barges had to be able to turn a certain number of degrees so they could navigate from any canal to any other canal.

Another example: my co-teacher and I had seen where a teacher had created pieces of art with her algebra classes using basic algebraic functions.  We had to teach the idea of functions and suddenly we had a project where students had to take parent functions and create artwork.

In each of these examples there was a need to teach certain standards and the project idea came from that requirement.  Here is a post I wrote a year ago that talks about getting started.  It is one of a four part series on jumping into PBL for the new year.  Feel free to read that series if you are thinking about getting started in this process.   You can do it and, with the standards as your guide, you will have project ideas to work from.

Thoughts on Co-Teaching a Class

At our school this year we are experimenting with ways to improve the educational experience of our math students. This experiment deals with two math teachers teaching the subjects of Algebra and Geometry to the same group of 9th graders. The students, as of right now, will stay with these two teachers until they have completed the state mandated mathematics objectives for both subjects. The hope, and expectation, placed on this experiment is a deeper understanding of the foundational math skills required of all students taking 4 years of mathematics in high school. This will, in turn, improve the results of our students when they take the state mandated tests at the end of the year.

What I haven't told you is that this experiment is going on in my classroom and my co-teacher and I are the teachers mentioned above. So, we have completed almost three weeks of school and here are my early observations:

1. Planning is now something that is done with two perspectives. That may sound obvious but how many times have you said, "oh, I forgot about that." Now, one of us is bound to have thought through a particular angle that might have been missed by a single teacher. Also, I am finding that we are able to plan much farther out in the calendar. We will get together, for example, tomorrow and go through the basic nuts and bolts for the next three weeks of our second project while evaluating the end of our first project which wraps up this coming week.

2. Grading can now be done more expeditiously. As a matter of fact we are finding that I really like grading tests and quizzes (which is a very long process because I go through every problem for every student to see their work and evaluate their thought process), and my co-teacher doesn't mind doing the daily homework, classwork grading (things I hate to do and which would always end up piling up on my desk). This may change after a while, but for now, I think we're both happy.

3. We are starting to have an almost husband/wife relationship in front of the students. What I mean by this is that we play off each other's thoughts, we do the whole "good cop/bad cop" thing, and we feel comfortable poking fun at each other. This has led to times when one of us is not feeling like dealing with a certain situation in class and the other naturally steps in to take control of the task at hand. We have also caught students asking one of us for permission, not getting it, and then coming over and asking the other one of us for permission; a classic child/parent scenario.

4. Our pairing is especially good because of our age, and experience, difference. My co-teacher is in her 2nd full year as a teacher, is working on her Master's in Math Education, and is recognized by our district and the University of Texas' UTEACH program as an exceptionally gifted teacher. I've been teaching since 1992 and have taught in a variety of situations. Her hard driving, go-get-em approach is nicely tempered with my even-handed, seasoned approach to teaching. Between the two of us we are able to find a sensible middle ground in all that we do.

Working with another teacher in "your classroom" can be a bit disconcerting, at first. There needs to be a willingness by both teachers to collaborate on all decisions. As with all good teams, egos must be put aside so that progress can happen. Because, the progress we are really talking about is the progress of our students. The state, superintendent, principal, and parents don't care which teacher does what in the classroom as long as the students are successful. And, that is what we are seeing in OUR classroom. Learning is happening and I'm excited about the possibilities.