My students worked on their products for about a week and were ready for a dry run on their presentations. It was planned that we would present our learning in the gym on an evening during the week, the plan was to invite parents, family, teachers, and district personal. In class a few days before our PBL showcase, students set up their projects in class. Students were given a BIE rubric for presentation, found here. We talked about how to keep eye contact with their audience and the use of body language. We talked about expressions and hand movements when presenting. Most of my students worked in groups of 4. I had 2 students stay at the station where they set up their project and I had 2 students move to another group to watch a different presentation. Students would then give and receive feedback using Post-It notes (note to self: buy stock in 3M and Post-It notes!) I also walked around and gave students feedback. Most of the feedback was reminding kids to talk to their audience instead of talking to their computer or poster or tri-fold board. I reminded kids to state their driving question and then highlight how they are going about solving this driving question.
Next post I will talk about grading and the big public product night. Comments or questions welcome.
0 Comments
The driving question for this project was: How can we solve the problem of plastics in the ocean/fresh water? Previous posts I discussed other aspects of BIE's gold standard for PBL, for this post I am going to focus on critique and revision. My students had done sustained inquiry involving research, reading articles, watching videos, as well as learning some chemistry behind molecular compounds/plastics. The students had decided on the type of product they felt would best solve the driving question, these products were mentioned in a previous post. I had students create posters that included the following information:
Once students were done with this poster we talked about giving a receiving feedback from peers and from a teacher. I showed this video: Even though the students in the video are elementary kids and my kids are high school, this is a great video to show and then have a discussion on useful feedback and how it can drive a product to become better. Following this we did a gallery walk, I had students hang their posters up around the room and I gave each student a handful of Post-it notes. Students were instructed to look at as many posters as possible and give one piece of positive feedback and one piece of advice for the groups project. Of course when I try something new, it goes ok 1st period, but it gets better as the day goes along as I make small corrections. I found that giving students sentence stems for their feedback produced better quality feedback. -I like... -I wonder... -I feel that you might want to try... We started with something like this: And moved into something like this: After students collected the feedback they received on their products, I grabbed a few of the Post-It notes and put them on the document camera. I asked kids if the feedback was useful and specific. Students were very good at identifying good feedback from not so useful feedback. The hope is that they will continue to get better at giving and receiving feedback.
From here students began working on their products, I did daily check-in's with groups and individuals. Students used the critiques they received from me and their peers to revise their products. In the next post I will discuss how we did a dry run of the presentation to peers before the public exhibition of their product and their learning. Comments? Another of the important aspect of Gold Standard PBL is the idea of student voice and choice in their project. Students are allowed some input and decision making on the direction of their project, how their learning will look, and what the product will be. The idea is to have students playing more of an active roll in their learning, rather that waiting for a teacher to tell them what and how to learn. The premise is that this will increase student buy in to their learning as it creates a sense of ownership.
Again for my first PBL unit, I posed the driving question of: How can we solve the problem of plastics in the ocean/fresh water. In looking back on the project, students had choice in how they will display their learning and what type of outcome or product they ultimately produced. A few of the products that students chose to work on in this unit were:
While students were working on project, I continued to carve out days where students learned chemistry content that was related to plastics. Most of the content was on the basics of organic chemistry involving molecular bonding, Lewis structures, valence electrons, and periodic predictions of molecular bonds due to placement on the periodic table. All of these ideas form the basic knowledge of how bonding creates monomers and through polymerization, polymers or plastics are created. The days that I did carve out of the project did not really have much if any voice and choice in them, it was back to direct instruction, practice problems, labs, and an exam. There were days that I had set aside for the students to work on their project. On these days I would check in with each group to see progress and I required students to fill out a project work report daily that set goals and list what was accomplished in each class period. I will admit that on project days, some students were not using class time as well as others. This was frustrating. Even with group and individual check ins, there were a few groups that just wanted to socialize. For the next project, I will most likely give less in class time for project work and focus in class time on making sure students know the chemistry behind the project. Our school does have a 30 minute office hour block where students can freely go to any teacher for extra help or to work on projects, this time will be perfect for this. In addition to this, we did use group contracts for students where each group set its groups norms and rules. Going forward I really need to revisit these group contracts with students that are not using all of their class time wisely. Questions or comments are always welcome. To be honest, the sustained inquiry part of my first PBL project was undoubtedly one of the more difficult pieces for me. Students were given a driving question of: How can we solve the problem of plastics in the ocean/fresh water? Students now needed to do some outside research to determine the scope of the problem and to begin to come up with a solution. Using BIE's project rubric for sustained inquiry: After the entry event and after students had analyzed a website, students then created a "need to know" list of questions. I had each group brainstorm a list of questions they needed to have answered in order to answer our driving question. I then had groups narrow their lists down to 1 essential "need to know" question per group. These were put on my white board by periods, going forward I will put these on a piece of poster paper that we can hang in the class as my classroom is set up with sliding white boards. I would slide the white board so that 1st period could see their questions, but they could not see of the other classes questions. Students were then given a project research document: https://goo.gl/kTf9kR This document was pushed out in Google Classroom and students were instructed to create a shared folder in their Google Drive to be shared with their group. All of their shared documents and and anything project related could be placed in their Drive for access by all group members. Students were told to research plastics in the ocean/fresh water and to take notes in the right hand column of their research doc. An interesting observation here, I had a few students that would ask me, how many websites or sources were required. My response was always, "do you have enough to answer your driving question?" Often kids would go back to work but some students seemed confused when I did not tell them to include at least 5 sources. Often times in the past on research projects I and other teachers had told students, you need X many sources and kids just would find that many sources to get the grade on the assignment. My difficulty in this process was while some students would ask new questions and then seek out that information, I felt other students where just filling out the research document as a way to get points for their grade, there was not 100% buy in. After a couple days of project research, I had a few students that felt they had enough research and they would rather be doing other things on their Chromebook's. It was tough getting kids to dive deeper into the content. For the next project I will be doing more individual and group check in's using BIE's critical thinking rubric, I did start doing check in's later in this project and will talk about that in a future post. The individual check in's are a great way to gauge students thinking and how they are coming along on their project. Link to the critical thinking rubric: https://goo.gl/9B29vK This is the piece from the rubric that I will use in the future for sustained inquiry: In addition to the check in's with students, this would be a great time to have students watch videos or read articles that I have found to be high quality on this subject, this would be great as a set up to a socratic seminar. I did not go this for this project but will in the future.
As always, comments and questions are encouraged. Using Buck's Essential Project Design Elements from above, after the challenging problem/question, which I discussed in a previous post, we dove into the sustained inquiry portion. My students started with an analysis of a website. In the age of fake news and propaganda, students must be able to discern a valuable website from a less than valid information source. I used the following web evaluation rubric: My students were tasked with finding a website related to our project and running it through the rubric to determine it's usefulness. I feel this is a very valuable skill that students will need both for this project and later in life. As I write this, students have already started their second PBL project and it is great to hear kids using the metrics on the rubric to analyze websites they are currently finding for their second project. I have overheard kids saying, "there is no author listed and I can not find credentials. It does not seem like it has been updated recently, I am a little skeptical of this website." This is enough to make a teachers day.
More on sustained inquiry to follow. As always, thoughts and comments are welcome. |
AuthorI am Jamie Camp, a chemistry teacher from Atwater, Ca. I teach chemistry and A.P chemistry in Atwater, Ca. I blog about the experiences of a PBL chemistry classroom. Archives
December 2017
CategoriesLinks |