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By: Joe Steele, High School PBL Facilitator
Columbus Signature Academy New Tech High School
Columbus, IN
My father, veteran Rodney Steele and I, immediately following the Veterans Day event.
The Inspiration:
In the summer of 2022, our school hired a new Social Studies teacher, Miss Hope Alexander, a 2015 graduate of our program. Though her PBL knowledge was deep from her own education, our school still on-boards new teachers by pairing them with a veteran teacher for one of their sections. This pairing creates co-facilitated courses that blend each teacher’s core standards.
While relaxing on the disc golf course in the middle of summer, my principal called and asked me, a life-long English teacher, to co-teach U.S. History with English 11. Between holes, I searched on my phone, having never taught history, for these new-to-me standards. My eyes quickly caught the Vietnam War, and I knew immediately I wanted to create a PBL Unit that pulled my father’s Vietnam experience out of him. At this thought, I stopped scrolling the rest of the standards and began brainstorming a Unit that would involve my dad and his service in Vietnam. Since I was a child, I had been curious about my father’s experiences in war, but knew he was reluctant to discuss it. Yet I knew my dad would support my students, and now that I was tasked with teaching the Vietnam War, I was not going to pass up this opportunity. I knew this PBL Unit could easily load in the 6 A’s of PBL: academic rigor with the right text; students would make adult connections through interviews, and they would get active exploration in choosing a veteran and how to share their story. I just needed an authentic vehicle for students to apply their learning. Upon identifying the end product, I could start locking in my assessment practices. It didn’t take long for the inspiration to hit me.
Before my PBL life, I taught at a small, rural Jr/Sr High School. Every year the local veteran’s hall would host a Veterans Day event as a school-wide convocation. This memory formed the rest of the plan: Our 11th graders would interview a veteran whom they knew either from their personal lives or our community. Then we’d invite them to school on Veterans Day to share their stories and honor them as a group, face to face, with the entire school as their audience. A quick search told me November 11th, 2022 Veteran’s Day, would be on a Friday this year. I love it when big events can culminate on a Friday, as they take so much energy, it is nice to float right into a weekend. I then looked at our semester calendar and noticed this date was four weeks into the second quarter, meaning it would take some precision planning for our students to make a huge event a reality in just a month.
The Planning:
In my first introductory email to Miss Alexander, I shared my excitement for our partnership and slipped in the idea of possibly hosting a Veterans Day event among other possible idea sparks I had from reading the US History standards. With an enthusiastic response to the idea, we were off to plan. The first step was getting approval from our principal to host a convocation. He loves big ideas and encourages the messiness of PBL, so his response was, “I don’t think any of the high schools have ever had a Veterans Day event. Go for it!” My second step was a few days later at dinner with my parents, when I asked my dad if he would participate. After some hesitation, he agreed. His hesitation reminded me we had to approach these veterans humbly, and we had to prepare our students not only with interviewing skills, but also in talking to someone with traumatic experiences. This was yet another sign that this project was going to have some great side-effect-outcomes.
As summer continued, with the rush of the school year not yet upon us, I did a little internet exploration about interviewing veterans and found The Library of Congress’s “Veterans History Project”, This program, though no longer active, offered a plethora of resources on interviewing veterans, including preparatory materials, sample questions, and hundreds of example recordings. The English standards to be covered started to become more clear, and I began preparing for anticipated workshops and building a list of benchmarks and required products. I brought the materials from the Library of Congress, along with some other ideas, to our school-year planning summer date with my new teaching partner, and this early November event became our starting point for the semester plan.
Miss Alexander laid out her U.S. History standards, and we pulled the ones appropriate for this project, and the standards that we would need to cover prior to the event. Noting that all of WWI, the majority of WWII, and even Korean War veterans were gone or very elderly, we decided the focus of our Veterans Day program would be on the veterans and standards of the Cold War, the Middle East, and contemporary conflicts. She knew the students would need the context of the Cold War, so American conflicts from reformation through World War II would be covered earlier in the year, leading into our study of our modern conflicts during our Veterans Day project. Somehow the Navajo code talkers were mentioned, and we decided to address WWI and WWII through having the students create historically accurate escape rooms. Together, we cobbled together the basic structure of that project, and then decided that the year had to start with teaching students research techniques and identifying credible sources. We decided a law project studying the essential cases of the Supreme Court would start our year. The Veterans Day project would be our third project of the year. Seeing that these three projects would be heavy, we decided our final project of the first semester would look at American innovation, where students would make inventions, like on Shark Tank. I resonated with the Supreme Court project and the Veterans Day project, and Miss Alexander set out to whittle down the Escape Room and Shark Tank standards, products, and assessments. We left the meeting with a rough outline to get us to winter break.
With it still being summer without students and deadlines, I was able to visit a few possible resources. My first stop was our county’s Veterans Affairs office. The gentleman in charge there informed me that they already had a Veterans Day event planned for downtown. We were more than welcome to come watch, but beyond that, he couldn’t see how he could assist us and didn’t think my high school students could be of any assistance to him. His brushoff motivated me to make this project as big as we could, and I doubled my efforts. Though I had high hopes the Veterans Affairs office would be my community partner solution, I had to move on, brainstorming other options. After some thought, I made my next stop at the local American Legion where I met the wonderful Commander Alan McKown. He was so excited that someone cared to engage with veterans, and he gave me the names of possible interviewees and volunteered his services. He indicated that he usually led the color guard for local events and would happily participate in our event, leading the flag ceremony. I then took some time to explain the PBL process and that it would actually be students who called and worked with him, and to just be ready and act surprised come mid-October.
With the English standards in mind, I decided a slideshow during the Veterans Day event could be used, with each group sharing out about their veteran through a few slides. At this point, I began feeling that I was getting too specific in my vision and would not make room for student voice and choice. I stopped focusing on the details of the event and began planning the steps from the show date backwards, so students would have the space, resources and time to create whatever they envisioned for our Veterans Day event. Starting from the Friday, November 11th event date, I began fleshing out the days to get us there.
The Soft Launch:
At our school, the first quarter ends in early October, leading into a week off for Fall Break. With an immovable deadline of November 11th, we decided to do a PBL project “soft-launch” preceding the Fall Break, with an entry letter home to parents. We also created a Google Form to reach out to friends and family, looking for possible veteran community partners to ensure we got close to a one-to-one ratio. This early letter and Google Form gave families a chance to discuss possible relatives who were veterans, and we thought some students may need the week off of school with families to conduct their interviews or to get a jumpstart on the project novel. Speaking of the novel, because I could foresee a lot of downtime in the classroom with interviews happening at the convenience of our veterans, I wanted students to have something to work on at all times. I also love Tim O'Brien’s Vietnam War memoir, The Things They Carried, and knew it would pair perfectly with dealing with the delicate experiences of active duty military personnel.
The Official Launch:
Following Fall Break, we edited the entry letter to address our students and packed it with more urgency to gather possible veteran names as well as more detailed, self-evident breadcrumbs. Knowing that we had to hit our deadline, I made the benchmarks very clear in the entry letter, making it easy for students to see the timeline and weekly goals to be ready for an unmovable culminating event. To distance myself from being the community partner, I had the entry document come from our principal asking the students if they would be willing to be the first high school to host a Veterans Day event. Yes, the project was my idea; yes, I was just in my principal’s office asking for permission, and yes, I was now making it seem that all of the excitement and ideas came from our administration. Oftentimes in PBL, you are acting surprised at the details and the items students add to the Know/Need to Know list. So, yes, the curtain hiding Oz was rather thin for this project, but the work they would be doing interviewing primary sources of war, and being able to honor friends and family would be extremely authentic. The launch led straight into a great Know/Need to Know session, then into an open discussion on possible community partners and everyone’s connections to the military. Some students had already used their Fall Break to reach out to possible veterans. By the end of launch day, students were excited, brainstorming, and ready to learn about our standards.
Photo of a group interviewing their veteran in one of our conference rooms.
Week One:
The PBL classroom can look very similar to a traditional classroom on even Day #2 of a project, and that was the case here. We wanted to pack in content and process workshops as soon as possible, so as to not waste any precious class time. The students told me that in order for them to interview and share the stories of veterans, they needed to know how to conduct an interview in general, and specifically how to discuss possibly traumatic combat duty with a veteran. Each project has different immediate Next Steps following the launch. Sometimes, students need exploration immediately, so that they can begin scraping together an idea or gain an understanding of the topic, then solidify solution criteria, seeing how their newly found ideas will come to fruition in the project. For this PBL Unit, the early exploration students needed to do was brainstorming possible veterans and reaching out to relatives that had served. They could do that outside of the classroom, yet once they located an interviewee, they needed my content skills immediately. Thus on day two, we went straight into a workshop on professional interviews, communication, and how to approach those who have served. For the history side, on Day #3, we went straight into a lecture on the history of Armistice Day and its evolution into Veterans Day. This included viewing videos of traditional Veterans Day activities. This gave students possible elements they may want to incorporate in their Veterans Day event. The rest of the first week was dedicated to content on the Cold War era, groups forming around interviewees, and then ended with a quiz over English and U.S. History content.
Tanner Archibald, Purple Heart recipient, discusses his story with students to prepare them for interviewing war veterans.
Week Two:
The second week started with wounded war hero and Purple Heart recipient, Tanner Archibald, speaking with the entire class. Tanner is a friend of mine whom I contacted through Facebook. I knew that Tanner had previously shared his story with various groups, and I was pleased that he was ecstatic to interact with my students. He used the Library of Congress’s questions I had sent him to lay out his presentation and he gave the students great advice on talking with war veterans. The rest of the second week was filled with more history content on America’s wars and conflicts through assigned readings and workshop presentations, from the Korean War through the Middle East. Groups continued conducting interviews, and as a class we solidified how they would host the veterans on November 11th. This led to a grade-wide shared slideshow for each group to add details about their veteran. Students would then have 30-60 seconds on stage to honor their veteran, giving everyone time on the stage and every veteran an opportunity to stand and be recognized.
First article covering the project in our local paper, The Republic.
Week Three:
Week three had groups at various stages of interviews, building their slides, and finishing their novel work. The students also solidified their guest speaker for the event and contacted the color guard by calling the American Legion. The students were amazed at how easy it was to get veterans to volunteer. To the students, it felt like the veterans were just waiting to be asked to help; it must be magic! Following our school’s social media post about Tanner Archibald speaking, the local newspaper came and interviewed students, and wrote a wonderful article about our PBL Unit. They also promised to return to cover the event the following week. This was exciting, but raised the expectations for the event and forced students to step up and lead. It was during this week that student leaders really stepped forward. Though many were at various stages of their work, everyone was on task and everyone had something to work on. The week ended with another quiz on The Things They Carried.
Students preparing the room for the Veterans Day event. Students planned and set up all aspects of the event, including the live streaming.
Week 4:
Going into the fourth and final week of the PBL Unit, students were excited and natural event managers took the lead to create and send out professional invitations. Others created a printed program for the event. Another group organized a coffee and donut breakfast area for the veterans, and the rest decorated for the event. One group decided we must livestream the event for veterans unable to attend, and that was put into action as well. In the classroom, interview transcripts were due, veteran slides were due, the novel study guide was due, and event expectations were clarified. Finally on the eleventh day of the eleventh month, we held our Veterans Day event. All classes were invited, with many attending filling our seats. All students were professionally dressed and greeted their veterans at the door, leading them to the breakfast area to mingle with their comrades, where a local newspaper reporter and photographer interviewed students and veterans before the event started.
Magical moment for me: Following the event, my son, who is a sophomore and was in the audience, found and hugged my dad, his grandfather, thanking him for his service and his story.
The Culminating Event:
The event itself was absolutely amazing! Our guest speaker was a retired military captain with years of active duty, including a tour of Vietnam. He was now, in retirement, a middle school Title One tutor and knew many students in the audience. His speech was powerful, challenging the students and honoring every veteran watching. Following his speech, our student hosts shuffled through the slideshow, quickly entering the stage, honoring their veteran with slides of pictures, facts, and anecdotes they gained during the interviews. Every student took this very seriously, with some giving truly heartfelt thanks to their veterans for their service, stories, and interviews, many in tears as they asked their veteran to stand and be honored. We miraculously ended at exactly 10:58am just in time for one of our students to play “Taps” and lead us into a moment of silence at the time of World War I’s armistice time, the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. Following this long silence, the flags were withdrawn, students in the audience filed out for their classes, and our students got one more moment to hug, thank, and send off our honored veterans.
Article #2 in The Republic with photos from our Veterans Day Event.
Reflection, Final Assessment, and Celebration:
The class returned Monday to reflect on the PBL Unit and the culminating event, and share ideas to improve next year’s plan. First, we celebrated the great article about us in the local paper. Students completed the Google Form Reflection individually, then we circled up and had a classwide discussion. We wrote down their comments as they came. This transitioned into a review of the novel in preparation for their comprehension/written reflection final exam. Then we ended the day planning our celebration events and treats to follow the exam. On Tuesday, students took the first half of the class to complete their exam, then turned on music, broke out the food, and celebrated the success of the project, so that their hard work was honored and they felt refreshed for the launch of the next project on Wednesday.
Epilogue:
Now months removed, I am still so pleased with this project. Though the inspiration came from a very personal place, the students were able to have their own personal experiences through the work they completed. Wanting a great experience for my father pushed me to plan months in advance, and it paid off. I was able to identify dead-ends with certain resources, and had time to plan the placement of other resources that appeared. Usually, you have a few days or moments to gather project elements. I really love that this PBL Unit can become a perennial one, able to be improved, expanded, or scaffolded for future classes. Our local reporter was a great added bonus, as the students loved reading and sharing the article during our project celebration. And finally, it was magical seeing our students directly interact with our content. They experienced the textbook recollection of American wars first through our workshops, then veterans’ firsthand, primary source accounts, and then on the final days of the project, an Army recruiters’ persuasive presentation. I truly felt students were prepared to consider that path. I hope to recreate that progression next year, and now fret over how to do it just as successfully with other PBL Units!
Joe Steele works at CSA New Tech High School as Language Arts Facilitator and also serves as a Magnify Learning PBL Certified Instructor. He lives deep in the hills of Brown County with his brilliant wife, Bridget, a middle school science PBL teacher. They have three children, Kaleb, Savannah, and Weston.
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