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By: Trisha Burns, Middle School Facilitator
CSA Central-Columbus Signature Academy Middle School
Columbus, IN
I hear it often during PBL workshops I’m facilitating. There is a moment when we discuss authenticity in the design of PBL Units where teachers get nervous. “If it is truly authentic, do I have to come up with new projects every year? Is it even possible to reuse PBLs?”
I was inspired to write about this topic the day after we gave a $6205 check to United Way. The funds had come from our PBL Unit, Carnival 4 a Cause, that our students created and ran for our entire Middle School. I remember back 7-8 years ago, when we created random carnival games out of recycled material just to survive the last month of school. We did it as a Science/Math project, and I don’t remember the details except we wound up with a bunch of carnival games that we set up in the rain. Then we let the students play each other’s games. When we were finished, we said something about how we should put a little more time into this project instead of just trying to survive the end of the school year. Fast forward to 2017 when this Facebook post was made:
We were so excited to see what the students were able to do during this project. They had a fantastic carnival, and we even got a few of the other academic teams in our school to attend and participate. Throughout the years our carnival has grown, and now we have most of the students in our school coming to our carnival during the school day. It has become a tradition for our school, and as I mentioned earlier we raised over $6200 for United Way!
This amount of success didn’t happen the first year, or even the second year of the project. If we would have assumed we could only do this “authentic” project one time, our students, our school, and our community would have missed out on the amazing opportunities this PBL Unit has provided over the years. So I’ve been inspired to discuss the benefits and challenges of reusing projects that you’ve developed.
Now, there are PBL Units that don’t make sense to repeat year after year. In some cases, once students solve that unique problem, it would be difficult to reuse it, and I would NEVER want to take away from these relevant, time-sensitive projects that make a huge impact on the community. However, I want to spend this time discussing the ones that can be reused.
Benefits
Finding authentic projects that you can reuse comes with several benefits. They say “hindsight is 20/20,” so there is definitely something valuable in being able to reflect at the end of a project (or during it) to make changes that will make it more relevant, student-driven, and workable the next year. We create our project calendars on Google Docs. As we do our integrated projects throughout the year, we are able to look back at it the next year. When we discuss things that we would want to change for the future year, I type it on the top of the project calendar and highlight it so it catches our attention the following year. Here is an example of the beginning of our carnival project calendar. You will notice that even though we are 7 years into this project, we still make loads of changes every year!
Finding projects that can be reused also gives you time to polish your craft. When you do the project for the first time, you spend your entire time creating benchmarks and scaffolding, and figuring out how to grade the benchmarks. That process usually takes all the time and attention you can give. However, once you are more comfortable with the project and have the benchmarks and scaffolding created, you can find more opportunities for more academic rigor or even more adult connections for the project, both of which can drastically increase the success of your project. An example of this added value happened “on accident” a couple of years ago in the Carnival project. When it started raining during the carnival, we had to move all of our booths to be under the overhangs at school. By doing that we realized how much more space we could actually use and we encouraged students to bring in canopies. The extra space and the canopies really helped solidify the appearance and organization of our carnival for future events.
You also can learn from the experience what works and what doesn’t to help your students. One example of this comes from a few years back. The students wanted to have a game ticket and a food ticket that cost two different prices for carnival participants to purchase. We learned this was extremely confusing, and students didn’t understand that they needed to purchase two different types of tickets to participate. We learned from that ‘fail’ experience, so we are now able to help the next year’s group understand why that didn’t work and isn’t a good idea. This enabled them to then use their brainstorming skills to make other decisions to polish the carnival. Another lesson that we shouldn’t have needed to learn, but just didn’t think about, related to the type of candy being given out as prizes. Guess what? Chocolate melts after being outside all day. Unfortunately it took a year before we realized it and were able to warn the students about the type of prizes they needed to have for their booth!
Challenges
Reusing projects isn’t always easy, and it definitely can come with some challenges along the way. If you decide to reuse your projects, you have to be careful not to take away the active exploration for the students. I think about a project that we do where students get to choose their own community partner (local charity/organization) to work with. The first couple of years that we started this project there was a lot of active exploration for the students to research and call the organizations to see if it was a good fit. However, throughout the years, we know which organizations can make the connection work and which organizations have opted out in the past. So yes, we can save the students time, but we have to find new things for them to explore. In our case, we added a business sponsorship to the project that they could research. If you take out all of the active exploration, you lose a key component of the student voice and choice–and recycling your project is supposed to increase the 6 A’s of PBL Design not reduce them.
You can also get too comfortable with doing a project and go on “Auto-Pilot.” If you aren’t careful, you can start jumping from benchmark to benchmark and remove the peer feedback and revision part of the project. It is important that students get feedback and time to improve their final product. So again, I would say to not let your reusing a project reduce the student’s experience.
One of the things all teachers have to deal with from time to time is burn-out. I believe one origin of burn-out comes from doing the same thing too often. I faced it during my pre-PBL days when I taught the same math textbook chapter by chapter, period by period, year by year. So although using PBL definitely breathed new life into my career, I have to be cautious and not let that happen again by doing the same thing over and over again in my projects. If you as the facilitator are burned out, it will reduce the experience for your students.
How can you overcome the challenges?
It is possible to breathe fresh air into your projects so you don’t reduce the student experience by reusing your projects. Here are some ideas to help you overcome these challenges.
Find a new community partner: Sometimes just finding a new community partner to work with can revive a project. Or better yet, if your community partner relationship is still working well, find a similar partner and let your students choose who to work for or with. We have a math/social studies project where students design a historical vacation out West. Now, obviously once a family takes the trip, this loses its authenticity, but we just find new families who are interested in letting 8th graders potentially plan their trip. By having different families every year, the project is never the same for us as facilitators because it brings new solution criteria each year.
Broaden the expectations for students: We do a project where the students write a historical fiction Choose Your Own Adventure story, and the teachers go back and forth every year if it is time to change projects. Their plan next year is to broaden the scope and allow the students to write different styles of books: free verse, comics, etc. Sometimes the first time you do a project, you are too nervous to give too much voice and choice for the students. As you become more comfortable with the process of the project, you can begin to change the amount of voice and choice you give the students.
Utilize the 6 A’s of PBL Design: As you begin project planning for a PBL Unit you plan to recycle, purposefully brainstorm with the 6 A’s Rubric in your hand. Just like your students, starting your planning off with the rubric helps to ensure you meet the solution criteria of project planning. I would also recommend at the end of the project, you reflect with this rubric to think about the additions you would want to add the following year.
Embed Protocols in the Process: When you are creating your benchmarks and project calendar, make sure to purposefully use protocols that increase student inquiry and reflection throughout the process. Expecting to have time to build in those protocols while your students are knee-deep into running the project is unrealistic. Choose the protocols and where they fit in the scope of the project from the beginning to ensure you use these best practices.
Set up a CFG (Critical Friends Group): Create a group of your colleagues who will give you valuable feedback. The Tuning Protocol is specifically helpful for you to fine tune your project. It is best if you can go into this feedback session with focus questions for your CFG. What part of the project do you feel you need to revitalize to be able to reuse it? Have them focus their feedback on your challenges instead of giving you general feedback. Critical Friends’ feedback on your focus question can really help breathe new life into the part of the project that you feel needs it the most.
So in conclusion, don’t panic! It is possible to reuse your projects. You’ve put a lot of work into getting them classroom ready, so if you are intentional, you can continually improve the quality of your PBL Units by reusing them.
What about you? What experience do you have reusing projects without reducing the student experience? Please share with us in the comment section.
Trisha Burns is an 8th grade math facilitator at CSA Central Campus in Columbus, Indiana. She is a certified teacher and trainer through the New Tech Network and certified through Magnify Learning to teach Project Based Learning in Indiana. She has taught in the classroom since 2009 and facilitates for Magnify Learning in the summer. When she is not developing and implementing projects in her class room she loves to hang out with her family and scrapbook their memories!
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