Who has time for PBL when you have standardized tests to prep for?

Free Giant Macro Pencil and Pink Eraser Creative Commons 

This is a common pushback from teachers who are hesitant to make the change to an inquiry driven instructional practice. Considering test prep may be all they have ever known in their educational careers, it would seem like an odd shift to make. It might also come across as scary to many. Andrew Miller, Buck Institute for Education national faculty member, shares this great bit of advice in a recent Edutopia blog post:

Power Standards/Learning Targets

Whether individually or through facilitated professional development, teachers spend a lot of time unpacking the standardized tests and the targeted standards and learning on which they’re based. When you design a PBL project, make sure it hits those frequently targeted standards or learnings. If you know a specific book or genre is a frequent testing target in the AP English Literature exam, use the PBL project to go in-depth on that content. If you know Linear Equations are tested the most often or weighted more in the state test, then use PBL to ensure that students walk away not only knowing their linear equations inside out, but also being able to think critically and make relevant connections.

Be sure to check out the rest of his great post here. There is also another great article he wrote called “Dispelling some misunderstandings about PBL.”

PBL: What does the Research say?

So, maybe you’re one of those people who prefers to know the facts firsthand instead of just taking someone’s word for it. We’ve long said that PBL would improve our students’ outcomes, but you’re just not ready to go there yet. Well, maybe this bit of research will give you the push you need to make the shift. Read the post in its entirety. There’s a lot of good data there to make you wish you had been doing PBL all along. The slides below are just a teaser for what it shared at the linked blog post.

Playing With Presentation Options

Photo Credit: Matthew Fang

Students are not born with an innate ability to select a format for publishing their learning. They need to see alternatives. They need time to play with those options to find what best fits different themes, genres, and intentions. This is part of the process of learning.

My friend Richard Byrne wrote a great blog post on five different video projects you can do with your classes. Take a look and see what will fit for your classroom. You always have help if you need it to implement any of these ideas.

2 Minute Assessments

Seriously. How much can you assess in just two minutes? How much valuable feedback can you glean in that short a time. Well, quite a bit as it turns out. And, it’s pretty painless to do.

2 minute assessment preview
(click on the picture to get a larger version if desired)

There are a number of ways you can pull this off. Create a bulletin board near the exit of the room in the four square pattern and leave stacks of sticky notes all over the room for kids to anonymously fill out and post.

Or…

Paint your door in a high gloss white paint and use dry erase markers to turn it into the four square pattern where kids can place the sticky notes on the way out the door. This allows you to utilize the door for other collaborative, creative, educational uses.

I wish I knew the original source for this (if you know please leave a comment) so I can give full attribution, but it is just another great idea I picked up following the #PBLchat on Twitter on Tuesday nights. I believe the Twitter user I got it form was Andrew Miller of BIE fame.

Bloom’s as a Butterfly

As you know, Bloom’s was updated a few years back. This nice little poster from Learning Today does a great job or reminding you of the layers of Bloom”s as they get deeper and deeper into true levels of understanding. Where do your assignments fall into this chart?

The Blooming Butterfly poster by Learning Today is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

History….the greatest story never told…just Xeroxed

A colleague on Twitter shared this comment recently:

My son is learning about some of the coolest events in U.S. History and it’s all via worksheets.

That is a pretty sad, but telling statement. A subject where kids continually decry, “Why should we care about what happened in the past?” Instead of letting them discover why they should care, they might end up getting worksheeted to death.

Another colleague on Twitter replied with this:

Wow. Simply, wow. This would be my syllabus every single year. Think of how much great history could come from the mouths of students who discovered what they missed and why it was important to them. Nobody is telling them what they have to know. They are discovering it on their own. Then they’re sharing it with the world.

Essential questions. Driving Questions. Inquiry. History can be the greatest story ever told.

Then again, you might get some really industrious student who wants to put his/her own (modern media) spin on history, like this:

 

Hmm. Entry Event, anyone?