On Thursday, I will be facilitating a collaborative session for teachers on Project-Based Learning, which, to be fair, is a topic that I have never considered comprehensively. I’ve never been asked to define it. I’ve never been asked to explain it and, quite frankly, until the organizer of EdCamp Mid-Michigan approached me to facilitate the session, I never considered myself a practitioner of it. I just tried to design lessons that were engaging and built authentic, lasting learning.
But, this EdCamp facilitator, who’s name is Tara, has known me for quite a while. We did our undergrad together. We did our Masters work together. She’s been on an interview committee that almost hired me. She’s aware of my shtick. Maybe she wants me to facilitate this through the lens of how I work. If that’s the case, then this takes on an extra degree of difficulty because I still feel like I have a lot of development left to do before people start emulating my approach.
Besides that, my approach isn’t really that complicated. For any activity I consider offering to the students, I simply try to ask a couple of questions.
1. What can I do to maximize engagement? (I’ve seen plenty of ideas that I have had flop simply because the students aren’t drawn in.)
2. What can I do to facilitate collaboration? (The most effective use of class time that I ever see is when a group of students are effectively working together to solve a problem.)
3. What can I do to create a problem that will provide a variety of ways to solve it? (If there is only one real method to solve it, then as soon as one student gets it, the “collaboration” will become that student communicating “the way to solve it” to everyone else. My favorite evidence of this is when I hear a few “I don’t get how they did it, but this is how we did it and the answer came out pretty close to the same.”)
4. What can I do to make sure that the solution(s) are approaching effective learning outcomes? (While it can be interesting to occasionally have a group find a way to solve (or estimate a solution to) a problem effectively in ways that circumvent my desired learning outcomes, if I am continually putting together problems that don’t push the curriculum the community is trusting me to teach, then my students will be missing something.)
My favorite examples of this process working well are The Lake Superior Problem, The Pencil Sharpener Problem, The Wedding Cake Problem, and the Speedometer Problem. In each case, engagement and collaboration were high. Multiple solutions were present and most of the solution techniques required the students to make sense of mathematical procedures that could be correct or could be incorrect. “Why this formula is better than that other one.” Or “neither of our answers are perfect, this this one is better because this process has less of a margin for error.” Stuff like that. These conversations provide great opportunities to move beyond the memorization of a formula and to push toward sense-making of how that formula is used effectively.
While I’m not sure if this is “by-the-book” project-based learning, I have seen improvements in my students’ learning through the lesson design process I described above. Does anyone have any advice for me? Questions for me to think about? Corrections? Obvious holes in my logic? I appreciate this community because of your willingness to share, so feel free to do so.