When do we assess learning in a PBL classroom?

Assessment of student learning is an on-going process, from formal feedback during the teachers’ project planning and preparation, to observations during the launch event, to individual conversations with every student, and all throughout the project.

And in order to do this, we must move our minds from thinking only about pencil/paper tests. While it can include those, true assessment of learning is much deeper than that.

Teachers move like hunter-gatherer nomads, searching for each morsel of mastery that the ripe student mind has produced. We’re constantly looking, digging, and searching for evidence of learning in whatever form it presents itself. We assess content knowledge. We assess skills development. We assess their growth as human beings in this world.

So when do we assess?

The answer is we assess every single moment we are with our students.

For more specific examples, check out my LiveBinder called Beyond Multiple Guess: Rubric and Assessment Options for PBL. It is positively full of ideas for your PBL classroom!

Listen, I get it. We all want our tweens and teens to be better readers. Better writers. Better thinkers. So we ask them to write in our classes. We teach them to “write across the curriculum.” We teach them the strategies that good writers use. They practice writing all kinds of writing styles. They write and write. Yet so many struggle with their basic writing skills. So we provide remedial support. We take them back to even more basic skills building. We spend an extra hour a day breaking down all the tiny components it takes to be a good writer.

And do they become better writers? Some do. Many just learn to hate writing, hate school, and solidly label themselves as “stupid.”

And we do the same with reading. We do the same with math.

And we have hundreds of PhD’s who are developing more ways to do it with more intensity. With more fidelity. And we have thousands of consultants writing books and manuals about how to do that to your kids, today, in 5 easy steps.

I’m sorry if I don’t really have the faith that those strategies will work so well.

I wonder…

I wonder if we stopped with the microscopes and needling and the … whatever else you want to label it …
I wonder if we went back to something way more simplistic. More basic. And this is going to sound dumb, I’m sure.

I wonder if instead of having kids practice writing/reading/math, if we could instead get them to be writers. To be readers. To be math.

*duh. That’s what all that other stuff is for*

But no, seriously. What if kids saw themselves as Hemmingway…as Vonnegut…as King…as Wilde…as Woolfe…Rowling…Card…Collins…Meyer (yeah, of Twilight fame…you may not like her style, but if a kid does, maybe it’s not for us to judge).

Sure, maybe the lifestyles of those writers may not be exactly the ones we want our kids to emulate, but the reality is, we don’t want to be copycats of others. We want to be our own best version of ourselves, right?

But to begin to imagine ourselves as a writer? To consider how a writer might live? To think about how their day is scheduled? Kids would no longer be students, per se, but instead, writers. To learn to seek, see, find, and develop inspiration. And I’m not talking about holding a Writer’s Workshop here, although that’s a great start. Let’s take it further.

What would a day/week/month/year in the life of a mathematician look like? An engineer? A statistician? An entrepreneur? What conditions would have to exist for kids to not “do math” but to BE one of these people? To pretend? To imagine? To become?

What would it be like to not just learn about science, but to actually BE a geologist? A botanist? An agricultural breeder? A biomedical engineer? A bio informatics scientist?

I want my tweens and teens to play at these careers now. To decide which mantle might fit them best. Maybe we’re talking about re-thinking schools in the most radical way…creating mini apprenticeships? But certainly we can begin with regular and sustained job shadows. Sure, maybe we don’t have all those careers in our locality. Maybe as a teacher, I don’t know how to help kids replicate all of the higher-level careers.

I can’t say I know how to make this all happen. But I wonder if we might start with writing. Helping kids to BE writers.

I was sent this question the other day from a young man who used to attend classes virtually at my school and who is now in his own teacher ed prep program. As I was constructing a response, I figured it might make a nice post. So here you go!

Question:
Ginger, If you have the time, what were some of the strategies you used to catch your students “doing something right”.

First of all, I love this topic. So much of our time as educators is spent “correcting” kids or helping them to do better, which pre-supposes they’re doing something wrong. No, I believe to the very core of my soul that if we want kids to do better, we have to start from and build on the foundation we want to grow. We need to build on the foundation of kids doing Right.

So in response to that question above, I submit 10 ways we would catch kids doing Right:

Answer:

1.  I intentionally looked for it.
2. I put them into situations where they got to work in their strengths. In their learning styles.
3. I asked them to do work that they loved or were excited in.
4. We laughed and had fun. A LOT.
5. We created an environment of caring and sharing between students and students-staff.
6. I asked parents what their kids were good at. What they liked. What they wanted.
7. I asked kids what they were good at. What they liked. What they wanted.
8. We always celebrated doing the Right thing.
9. We made it ok to be weird (Everyone is somebody else’s weirdo. You think you’re normal? How weird is that?!), so it was a safe environment to be someone they might not normally be. To try new things.
10. I intentionally looked for it. (I put that twice because it’s doubly important, especially for those kids who NEED us to catch them doing right.)

What did I miss? What needs revised?

So you want your students to master your class content faster?

Here’s my proposal:
Have less drill and practice (I’m looking at you, worksheet wranglers and you, test-preppers).

Instead, we will create higher personal stakes for the students and I’m not talking grades or staying after school/in from recess.

You see, It all comes down to personal motivation. Grades and GPA are simply not motivation enough for many to do well on the worksheets. And even less motivation to truly understand and master the content. Grades/GPA, and punishments motivate kids to hate school.

“What would motivate them to want to master this skill?”

Start your curriculum mapping and lesson planning with that simple question and you’ll begin to be a true educator because your students will truly be learning.

What’s more exciting than daydreaming about finding buried treasure on ancient shipwrecks?


What if we asked students to imagine themselves discovering the secrets held inside ancient Greek and Roman shipwrecks? Imagine hunting for them, deep in the murky depths of the Black Sea as the lights from our high-tech, submersible, underwater vehicles sweep left and right across the sea floor. Imagine what it would be like if we not only found them, but when we uncovered them, we actually found them completely intact, precisely as they looked when the ships went down. All the cargo still in the ship’s hold. All the sailors still aboard.

You see, that’s possible because of two amazing phenomena that happen in the Black Sea: the sea floor is a unique gelatinous substance that envelops anything of substantial weight that falls down to it; the water of the Black Sea is anoxic at a certain depth, which does not support the organisms that would normally consume the wood or other carbon-based materials that fall to the bottom of other bodies of water.

The potential to find complete shipwrecks in this environment is extremely high.

If an explorer could get into these waters, which were politically difficult to navigate for much of the 20th Century, what might we find? What would those ships have been carrying? What secrets of history are held in timeless suspension? Currently, Robert Ballard, the man who found the Titanic and the HL Hunley, is working hard to uncover and share these portals to history with today’s world.

…biology, history, geography, politics, chemistry, engineering, mathematics, archaeology, research, writing…

These are all topics ripe for exploration as students are asked to learn about the Ancient Merchant Ships of the Black Sea.

“We are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers
And sitting by desolate streams;--
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.”

Arthur O’Shaugnessy (Ode – Music and Moonlight (1874)

Today’s free LifePractice PBL recipe card is the “Martian Colony” where students are asked to design a plan for a Martian colony. Kids’ brains go into imagination overdrive as we weave in space science, engineering, biology, atmospheric sciences, technology, math, and yes, even pioneering history, if you’d like! Read stories from early imagineer, Ray Bradbury! Read actual primary documents from NASA about what Mars is really like!

Ask your young imagineers to write expository or technical explanations for the people left behind on Earth. Ask them to let their brains go wild with narrative writing. Create new space-level Jacques Cousteaus, as the kids take you through their new Martian landscape with a video story, complete with a soundscape soundtrack!

Build it big…big enough to fill an entire gymnasium!

Build it table-top size so the gravity of earth creates no boundaries!

Use a green screen technology to bring in the Martian landscape!

This is a wonderful project for beginning space science to the most complex engineering classes you offer.

Let YOUR imagination go wild with Martian Colony, a LifePractice PBL card, free to you, just today!

It’s time again! Today only, we’re giving away another LifePractice PBL card, this time from one of my favorite sets, Set 6.

The card is called, Pandemic! where students are challenged to predict and stop the world’s next catastrophic disease.

I’m excited about this card because, like all great Project Based Learning, it’s rooted in reality. We will have another large-scale pandemic; in fact, some say that there are small-scale beginnings occurring right now in several places in the world.

I’ve shown this card to Science teachers who are excited to use it to help kids understand bacteria and viruses. I’ve seen Math teachers giddy (yes, giddy) with the real-life application of statistics and number-crunching that is involved here. I’ve even, as recently as today, had High School Geography teachers jumping at the chance to use this project to hook kids into looking deeper into the climate and living conditions across continents.

These teachers are just beginning to see that once kids get hooked into this Pandemic! project, there are many ways to have the learning progress.

Will students create room-sized models of cells to see how the pathogen will affect humans and animals? Will they be creating real Public Service Announcements to help people learn how to protect themselves? Is is a great way to learn Geography or is it an engaging way to learn Health and Wellness? It is Science or is it English Language Arts? The answer to all those questions is YES!

The truth is this PBL recipe card (and all the rest of our 49 LifePractice PBL recipe cards) is a perfect way to plant seeds in your mind about how to engage your kids in learning. To help our kids to not just be students sitting in the classroom, but in becoming active participants in their own education, and active participants in our world. It’s more than school. It’s LifePractice Learning.

Let us know how you incorporated these ideas to hook your kids deeper into learning!

Recently, digging through older versions of our LifePractice PBL cards, I found a list of PBL guiding tips from a couple years ago that were never published. These were labeled as “foundation of PBL” but they seem to be just good reminders for a PBL classroom.

I know many teachers will be taking the upcoming summer months to reconsider how to integrate PBL into their teaching practices, so thought this might be a useful list, not as an end-all post, but more of a 9-point discussion-starter.

So let’s dig in!

1. When lesson planning, focus on a broader set of goals
How long will the project run? Identify the standards and skills you want emphasized. Are there other driving questions you’d like to add/substitute? Are you utilizing outside experts? Will you be the only teacher or are you teaming with other educators?  How many students will be involved? Will you run this with your class only? Or will you team with other classes in the building? Outside of the building? Will you team across age/ability groups? Who are obvious leaders? Who are hidden leaders?

2. Considering project prep and work safety is also tops
Identify the area students will be using and secure the tools students will need to use. Identify any tool-safety workshops that will need to be taught. Be sure parents are informed of project scope and learning involved. Ensure all educators are clear with timeline and end results expected.

3. Launching a project doesn’t begin with a 100-question pre-test
Start with a “bang,” whether that is a question, conundrum, a challenge, or quest presented by a guest speaker or an engaging approach, depending upon the emphasized standards and driving questions selected.

4. Purposeful grouping is also something to deeply consider
You may choose to have multiple teams assigned the same role, creating multiple solutions to the same project, or you may choose to have different teams working on various roles to complete one version of the project. This is selected according to the class and according to the project and outcomes chosen by the lead teacher.

5. Ending the project isn’t geared toward prepping for the final test
Take pictures of students and teams with their work and pictures, showing proud faces. Evaluation: students share their learning, focusing on the learning and skills building and not simply what they did.

6. Assessment of learning is more than a multiple choice bubble test
Teachers may use rubrics to assess evidence of growth, based on standards and skills identified at onset of the project. Students might also self-assess and peer-assess their own learning and skills development, as well as engagement in the project and the information.

7. Post project wrap up? You mean we’re not finished with the final assessments?
Debrief with educator and student teams to create “wows/hows/bows” lists, purposefully identifying positive and incidental growth, as well as areas for whole-project improvement. This is a good time for students to build class community by focusing on the strengths and persistence of their peers and in their own work. This event is more about celebration of growth rather than celebration of accomplishments.

8. Role of the Teacher-As-Guide
Teachers should expect to ask more questions than have reason to give directions. This is more difficult than it seems. The majority of the teachers’ work is to be done before the project begins; once the project starts, this role shifts more to one of “advisor” for learning and less of “teacher” for content-delivery. We role model questioning, learning, patience, persistence, and growth. And as a guide, our number one roles are to be cheerleaders, encouraging kids as they move the right direction into being more an active “learner” and less a passive “student.” We admire and applaud the work they’re doing, and we guide deeper learning with customized questions.

9. Role of the Learner-as-Leader
As we’re working in our projects, we should allow, and even encourage students to experience leadership within peer groups. Encourage students with budding leadership skills to push themselves. Help the students highlight each others’ emerging strengths as part of the post project wrap-up.

Today's featured LifePractice PBL recipe card for free download is "All About the Mayas" where students are challenged to create a book, audio, or video-based story that tells about the Mayas. Granted, that is a pretty open challenge, but the cards are designed to leave a layer of "optimal ambiguity" in the work so students and teachers are able to put their own spin or emphasis to their creations. And that's what we're going to be doing in this blog post. In addition to giving out a free sample card (download that card here), we'll also be highlighting a few of the possibilities for how a teacher might use this card with her classes, based on the questions that I'm frequently asked by real teachers with real kids in real classrooms.


But let's start at the beginning.

Project Based Learning is about learning by doing.
With this PBL card, students are being given a challenge that in order to solve it, they have to gather/learn information and develop skills in the process of answering the challenge.

The role of the teacher is to...

• guide the learning by helping to keep the interest high by creating interesting and challenging trails to follow.
• help students connect with expertise and
• assist the students in citing  high-quality sources of information. And most of all,
• facilitate successful group work and independent thinking, and
• help to create a sense of urgency to completing the work.

Her role is more about facilitating discovery & learning and less about only delivering facts and content. She's helping the students to become learners instead of passive students consuming information.

Students are encouraged to take an active role in exploring the mysteries of the Mayas and discovering what was interesting, as well as the bigger picture of their civilization. They then are asked to synthesize that information into a product that is informative and engaging.

So now we've heard the basics, how is the card structured?
If you look to the picture in this post, you'll see that a story-telling challenge is given. You'll also see many driving questions that are categorized into the core content categories of Social Studies, Science, Math, Reading, and Writing. While these questions are standards-based, it isn't an all-encompassing list of all possible questions. It's impractical to post all potential questions/topics that could be incorporated. Therefore, as you're looking at the card, if you have other ideas for questions that might be explored, please do add them for your own classes! Additionally, in reviewing the potential driving questions, perhaps you can see something you can hone in on for deeper learning. Go for it! Have the students dig deeper in that one content area. Nonetheless, we have created driving questions within each of the core content areas so that the projects are able to be as integrated as possible. If you see other questions in other content categories you might feel comfortable incorporating with the assistance of a co-teacher, that is highly encouraged.

Should teachers just put the driving questions onto a worksheet to hand to the students?
Honestly, that was not the design of the card, nor is it in true PBL form. The questions are meant for teachers to ask to students as they're in the process of learning. As they are exploring a particular thread of a project, the teacher should regularly be asking driving questions to spur the exploration deeper. However, a teacher may find a plan that is different. As long as we remember that it's "learning by doing," and that the teacher isn't the deliverer of information, we'll understand that authentic, engaged learning doesn't come from worksheets and will be fine!

Who can use this card?
The LifePractice PBL cards are purposefully designed to be highly flexible in order to address the needs of elementary through high school learners and this card is no exception. A teacher can ascertain the ability levels of her students and decide to go into deeper or more complex learning by deciding which questions she asks the students in order to go deeper into the desired content. Or she might decide that the age or readiness of her students calls for less-complex work. That's fine!

Likewise a teacher doesn't need to know all the answers to the questions that might arise in an investigation; this Maya card calls for students to know how to find high-quality information, how to cite their sources, and sometimes even to triangulate multiple sources in order to prove a fact, freeing them up to bring new information to the project that the teacher may not have originally intended to include or even known about. Now that's true PBL!

Do we have to create videos or podcasts to make this work?
Not at all. Again, the cards are designed for ultimate flexibility so that if you're in a school with limited (or no) technology, you'll still able to create a strong learning environment by having the students create a reader's theatre, skit, poetry, or other live performance where storytelling is elevated to an artform. Likewise, if you're decked out with the latest in software and hardware, you will certainly be able to make use of all the tools you care to. Consider what is important information and skills that you want your students to practice and learn and get going!

Does this project have to be done in one day? Or will this take a week? Or a month? or...?
The timeline for implementation is your choice. It is easy to allow projects to be "time vampires" for our classes, as we watch the days continue to tick away and the students continuously begging for "just one more day." That time issue will never go away. Therefore, before you begin the project, be sure you're clear in your mind regarding how much time you have available and help the kids learn how to prioritize their time and plans with the use of mid-point re-group meetings.

Or, if you have the students for a full day, this project can be done in one day.

Or it can be done in 3 days, in 1 hour increments.

Or it can be done in ... do you get the point? You could very easily work on this project for an entire semester. It all depends upon the depth and time you're willing to ask the kids to put into it.
My strongest suggestion is that if this is one of the first projects you'll be doing with your students, you'll likely want to err on the side of providing a shorter time period than longer. Sometimes, before students have developed a sustained attention span and a tolerance for the "optimally ambiguous" learning environment, they need shorter projects to keep frustration to a tolerable level for both the teacher and the students.

Can I do this with multiple classes?
Each class could create their own story. Or you might have multiple groups inside each class creating their own story. Or they could create a "chapter" of one larger story. Or you could have all your classes working on one story that has to mesh together. Or you could partner up with classes from another school to collaborate on the story.

Can you tell the variations are endless for this "All About the Mayas" card? That's the flexibility of PBL. If you run across someone who gives you lots of templates and tells you that PBL is prescriptive, that there's only one right way to do it, they are likely wanting to sell you a high-priced system that will end up not being PBL in the long run. As mentioned earlier, these strategies outlined in this post are only a few of the learning possibilities that can be created with our cards. And all of them can be transferred to each of our LifePractice PBL cards.

Download the free recipe card, available today only, and check out the other LifePractice PBL cards we offer as well.

And be sure to let us know if you have any questions or if you'd like us to come work with your colleagues and students!

Related articles

• Featured PBL: The South's Civil War Submarine, the H.L. Hunley (gingerlewman.wordpress.com)

As adults, the reason we learn new things is because our lack of knowledge gets in the way of something we want to do. So we go out and find a way to learn what we need to learn. Right? Our recognition of our lack of knowledge and our need to know leads to learning. Authentic learning.

But school isn’t set up that way at all. School is set up for us to be “fed” all the information that we’ll ever need to know before we’re asked to use it. Before we even know that we might need it. Before educators even know that it’ll be useful for us. It’s all based on the assumption that “they” know what “we” will need to know.

What if school was set up to help us practice learning how to learn instead of spending time asking us to prove that we’ve retained something that’s been fed to us? Because in the real world, rarely is the information we need to know for our jobs, for our lives, fed to us. We have to go out and find that information.

Well, that is, unless we’re working on an assembly line that requires very little original thought or initiative.  —— long pause ——  And just how many of us in the US have those factory based, assembly line types of jobs now?

Right.

So if we’re preparing our kids for the real world, why isn’t school set up with a series of challenges that made us need to learn information-gathering, idea processing, and content creation? And the kids learn what information (and skills) they need to know through those challenges? And best of all, why couldn’t the challenges be set up in ways students would want to complete them?

And why is this concept so difficult for us to try?

If you’re intrigued, let me know. I think I might have answers but I can’t complete this challenge alone. I need your help too.