Viva PBL!

I believe in Project Based Learning.  I have taught as much in my classes at National University.  My son went to a PBL high school.  I speak out in favor of PBL at every opportunity.

But….this year I haven’t practiced what I preached.  I have been so dismayed by the difficulty of simple class management that I have taken refuge in lots of individual assignments rather than risk the disorder that can come with small group projects.

Boys, was I wrong!  My school encouraged everyone to close the year with a project, so another teacher and I came up with one for the persuasive writing unit.  The project asked students in small groups to identify a neighborhood problem and then research that problem and develop solutions.  This project continues the neighborhood theme I've followed all year.  They've previously written a neighborhood narrative and a neighborhood news story.  It was a natural idea.

It was a lot of work to create all of the worksheets and guides for the project.  The project requires the groups to write letters to their city council member, create a page in Comic Life (a computer program to create comics-like pages), and make an oral presentation with power point support about the problem they’re working on.  They also have to interview people in their neighborhood about the problem.  They are using the laptops for a lot of this work.

I began implementing the project in all of my seventh grade English classes three weeks ago.  It’s a long project that won’t conclude until next Friday.  From the beginning I have been very happy about how these students have responded to this project.  What I believed about project based learning (but hadn’t yet practiced) turns out to be true! 

The boys have worked hard on all the many parts of this project.  Classes that have been very difficult to manage (like 5th period) have worked diligently.  To be sure the classes have been noisy, and not every boy is working hard every moment.  Nevertheless I have been consistently impressed with the level of focus and collaboration displayed in all of the classes.

It turned out to be perfect timing.  During the final weeks of school it is always difficult to keep students focused.  This project is succeeding at keeping them involved….so far!  They make their oral presentations at the end of this week, and I’ve invited the principal and assistant principal (big proponents of PBL) to visit. 

So what have I learned?  Students work eagerly in small groups on interesting projects.  Next year I will act on this knowledge from the beginning.  The key is establishing clear and regular procedures to be followed and then providing interesting content for group and individual work. 

I’m glad to end my incredibly difficult return-to-teaching year so successfully.  It was very uncertain at many points how this year would end.  I am eager for next year.

Alert! Alert! Contradictions detected in education “reform” movement!!

Last Saturday I went to the “Linked Learning Symposium” at Roybal Learning Complex in downtown Los Angeles.  This was a district-sponsored professional development session attended by a few hundred teachers and administrators, lured no doubt by the $25/hour training rate offered.  Actually, I was impressed that hundreds of teachers gave up their Saturday mornings for a paltry $100.  After all, these are the professionals who according to Republicans and billionaire neo-liberal school reformers are the main obstacle to quality education in the US.  Anyway, more politics later.

(I also want to comment on the venue of this training, Roybal Learning Complex, nee Belmont Learning Center.  It’s a beautiful new high school that should have opened years earlier than it did were it not for a rogue’s gallery of political opportunists who tried desperately to block the school.  More on that later too.)

“Linked Learning” is the latest formulation for an instructional pedagogy that is student-centered and holistic.  “Linked” refers to connecting academic disciplines with career paths and technical skills.  I wasn’t familiar with this term, but it is clearly derived from the career academy movement of a decade ago that lead to many small learning communities in our high schools.  The idea behind "linked learning" is that students, especially in high school, should be immersed in a rich array of academic and technical courses that together prepare them for a career broadly defined as a general area of work extending from entry level to advanced positions.

The main content of last Saturday's symposium consisted of a series of workshops describing various high school programs that exemplify this approach, including medical careers, law enforcement, graphic arts, etc.  Teachers and students presented each program, and they all included some form of direct activity in the career field as well as academic courses. 

There were also several workshops on Project Based Learning (including an excellent presentation from the LA School of Global Studies, my son Lorenzo’s alma mater!).  The pedagogy of Project Based Learning and of constructivism in general underlies all of the Linked Learning programs.  That pedagogy is that students must “construct” their own meaning by working on projects that generate learning and understanding through student initiative.

All of the programs were very impressive, and they certainly give the lie to the claim that only billionaire faux-reformers can save education.   These rank-and-file teachers (many of them with a lot of seniority!) actually addressed the needs of young people for both intellectual development and career preparation.  The billionaire reformers' claim that only by busting unions and districts can we get reform was soundly disproved by the kind of programs we saw at this conference.

NOW HERE’S THE CONTRADICTION!!  While the district and many educators are promoting project based learning and a constructivist, student-centered approach to instruction, the billionaire reformers and their allies in city halls and boards of education are fighting fiercely to evaluate teachers on test scores, which are at least secondary if not outright antithetical to the holistic goals of project based learning.   While the LAUSD’s proposed new evaluation process has some room for assessing the extent to which teachers implement project based learning, the big battle is to include test scores in teacher evaluations.  

The L A Times, for example, has devoted immeasurable resources to jury-rigging some way to evaluate teachers based on test scores but has never so much as mentioned the kind of programs that directly prepare students for both higher education and a career--programs that require intensive teacher involvement in design and implementation and can't be left to the latest computer program.

It’s not easy to measure the degree to which a teacher implements project based learning, much less the level of benefit to students who learn a wide array of interpersonal and thought process skills which won’t appear on any standardized test.  The benefits of the “linked learning” programs we heard about and of project based learning in general are much deeper and broader than the puny California Standards Test can even come close to measuring, and yet the leadership of the LAUSD and even of the federal Dept of Ed continue to insist that CST scores be used to measure teacher success.

By the way, in the early 1990's we had a test that tried to measure this broad array of student abilities.  It was called the CLAS—California Learning Assessment System—and it included group projects, writing, and other holistic activities.  Read more about it here.  But it was expensive to administer and for some reason the right wing medieval talk machine went on the attack against it, so it didn’t last long.  And now we’re stuck with the CST, which is inexorably sucking up all of the oxygen in the room so that really beneficial programs like the ones on display last Saturday are harder and harder to implement.

(More on the Belmont Learning Complex later, plus my own tardy foray into project based learning with the seventh grade boys.  And I want to share my thoughts about one of the most exciting and profound concerts I've ever attended, the LA Master Chorale's presentation of selections from Duke Ellington's Sacred Concerts last Sunday.  Stay tuned.)