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By: Veronica Buckler, High School English PBL Facilitator
Columbus Signature Academy New Tech High School
Columbus, IN
One amazing aspect of Project Based Learning is the opportunities it affords a school in combining courses to create more authentic blendings of subjects and learning. I am fortunate enough to have the opportunity to work at a school that values integrated courses and the unique projects and opportunities they provide our students. In our integrated US History and English 11 class, dubbed American Heritage, my co-teacher, Greta Biedermann, and I just finished our American Dream PBL Unit focusing on the gaps and barriers that the pandemic has revealed in an American’s pursuit of the American Dream. By exploring the evolving definition of the American Dream throughout American history and reading The Great Gatsby, our students created their own understanding of the American Dream. In this process, they identified needs in our own community that would help benefit everyone to attain that dream through equitable opportunities. In the following, I will walk you through each step of our PBL Unit to break down how we approached this task.
The Entry Event
An Entry Event’s goal is to generate excitement and curiosity about the upcoming PBL Unit and task while also generating knows and need to knows that will guide our learning. When talking about the American Dream, what better way to launch this project than to play a modified version of the Game of Life? I created my own boards from an older version of the board game and made a Game of Life Google Slide Presentation that took the place of the spinner and the action cards from the game. We also came up with several of our own events that would possibly pop up in our lives, while making others rather ridiculous and silly, from having to pay for flood damage to your house to buying that pony you always wanted! Modern statistics for child birth, marriage, and career switching were kept in mind, too. We basically used a checkbook register to keep track of our money (so we didn’t have to mess with that!) and the first person to retire with the most money won extra credit.
The students had a blast and immediately became engaged in the idea behind the PBL Unit. Throughout the rest of the project, they kept asking when we would get a chance to play the game again. Before and after we played the game, we also asked the students to consider what path their lives would take, what major milestones they expected to hit in the future. (Un)Surprisingly, a lot of them differed quite a bit from the classic board game. After we played the game, several students mentioned that they did not even think about those steps in the game as major milestones to hit in life anymore. This generation, more so than any others, are challenging the path valued by the traditional American Dream, which allowed for our Driving Question to be a great guide for their learning. We challenged them with this question: How has the pandemic revealed gaps in access to the American Dream?
Knows and Need to Knows
At the beginning of each PBL Unit, we always ask students to consider what they already know that will help them succeed. Then we ask them what questions they feel we must answer throughout the unit in order to be successful. These are called Knows and Need to Knows. Our Entry Event helped begin this process of asking questions and hooking their interest. In addition, the next class meeting started off with our Entry Letter, co written by our community partner from Council for Youth Development, Heather Carson. She was an absolute wonder helping us to arrange all of the other community partners, guest speakers, and judges for our presentation panel. Here the students had to immediately consider what the American Dream actually was, how it evolved over the course of United States history, and what barriers and obstacles currently, and historically, existed to make attaining that dream all the more difficult. We also set the breadcrumbs (clues) for why we would be reading The Great Gatsby. Students came up with some great questions such as:
Why has the American Dream evolved over time?
What services and products are already available in our community?
Who is most in need of support in our community?
How has the American Dream changed according to who is pursuing it?
Benchmarks
In order to help break down the final end product for your students, establishing benchmarks to check progress and understanding along the way is vital to a successful project. For this PBL Unit, we had three major benchmarks: 1) Issue Choice and Research, deciding on the topic for the group to pursue with data to support this as a need, 2) Proposal and Feedback - a presentation in front of the whole class with peers offering feedback in the form of Likes, Wonders, and Next Steps and questions for the group to respond to, and 3) Written Proposal, an explanation of the change proposed, along with a step-by-step plan for implementation.
Community Partners
One main component that sets Project Based Learning apart from just a traditional project at the end of the unit is the authentic community partner. They provide the realistic role in the “real world” as well as that outside evaluator and mentor to encourage students to approach the topic differently. Ours happened to be someone whose entire job is affecting change in our community, Heather Carson from the Council for Youth Development. From there, we compiled a list of other community members and organizations that work to support those in need throughout our community. We invited a representative from each of the following organizations: Turning Point, a domestic violence support shelter, Cummins CARE Initiative, NAACP, Columbus Area Arts Council, Bartholomew County Public Library, Landmark Columbus, Columbus Human Rights Commission, and Bartholomew Consolidated School Corporation administrators to come in and speak with our students about what they see as the American Dream and their organizations’ missions in the community. We also invited them back to be on our presentation panel at the end of the project.
This was an amazing experience for this PBL Unit as it allowed us to help our students make connections with services in their community, while also opening their eyes to the work that is needed to equitably support everyone in our community. Students were able to engage with leaders in our community discussing the pitfalls of the American Dream, the amazing opportunities our community offers its residents, and what work there is still left to be done. The students were able to feel heard and valued by their community, in addition to appreciating the involvement our leaders have in making this the best growing city in Indiana.
Scaffolding-English and History Content
The great debate of PBL is, “How do you balance the project work with teaching the standards of your class?”. This PBL Unit is one where I feel most confident and proud of how we integrated and scaffolded this content into the overall work and goal. We studied the different time periods of American history from Reconstruction to the post-WWII era. Each decade or era, we asked ourselves, “What did we value?” and “What obstacles stood in anyone’s way to those goals?”. Students identified education as a value from Reconstruction as newly freed enslaved people pushed for and built the precursor to our universal public education system, while also identifying that racism and discrimination prevented many during the Gilded Age from attaining land, money, and the freedom of self-determination. We collected all of these observations onto a document I titled, A Portrait of the American Dream. From there, we had a final discussion deciding on a universal generalized definition of the American Dream and used that to guide our presentations.
As for the English portion of our PBL Unit, we asked each student to read The Great Gatsby and consider the pitfalls of an American Dream attained and then lost. Students used sketch notes for each chapter to demonstrate their understanding of the main ideas and concepts of the novel, while also considering what it had to say about the overarching project. They had discussions after every three chapters, sharing their sketch notes and drawing connections to the overall project. While we studied the Roaring 20’s specifically, we also asked whether the novel was a good representation of the changes and issues present during this time period. Students made value judgments of each character and determined their American Dreams based on the character profiles.
We also continued to utilize an amazing routine we have built into our curriculum all year: pop-up debates. My co-facilitator, Greta Biedermann, introduced this activity into our classroom this year and it has been an amazing experience. The general rules of this are as follows: 1) To speak you must stand up, and students must decide amongst themselves who gets to speak if more than one of them stand up at a time, 2) Only one person may speak at a time, 3) Everyone must speak at least once and no one may speak more than twice, 4) You must use evidence in your response to the prompt, and 5) You must build upon, respond to, or challenge another person’s response in your own response. Since we do pop-up debates every other Friday, we had two debates during this PBL Unit. Our first question was to ask if the American Dream was idealistic/spiritual or materialistic. Students really engaged in this question vacillating between idealistic freedom and materialistic financial success. The second question we discussed had to do more with the novel we read with us asking whether Gatsby attained his American Dream. We had a riotous discussion with many making the argument that his dream was to actually be rich therefore to be worthy of Daisy, while others argued that the money was a means to an end which was to be with the love of his life, Daisy.
Final Product and Presentation
Finally, the whole PBL Unit was working towards a proposed change to our community. They had to identify a need in the community, find data to support that as a need, as well as identify the stakeholders in this area. Their final benchmark, the written proposal, acted as their guide to the presentation and drove their final product idea. They also had to draw connections to the American Dream with an explanation of how their identified need is necessary to support as a piece of the dream. We provided a checklist to ensure students included all of the necessary components in their presentation: American Dream Presentation Expectations. For our assessment of their employability skills we used the following New Tech Network rubrics: Oral Communication, Agency, and Collaboration.
Ultimately, this was a whirlwind of a PBL Unit, with our students working intensely to find data to support their proposals, while also understanding the origins of the American Dream itself. We made so many connections to community leaders and future community-led projects that we are thrilled to see the ripple effect a PBL Unit can have on our students and the community they live in. This is why I teach, and this is why it will always be in a PBL classroom.
For more on how to adapt English to a PBL classroom check out this blog from Veronica:
Veronica Buckler is an English and social studies teacher at Columbus Signature Academy New Tech in Columbus, IN. She is an eight-year facilitator, with five of those in PBL. Veronica's favorite part of facilitating in a PBL environment is the creativity and ingenuity displayed by her students as they work through and complete projects in multiple ways.
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