Contemplating pbl vs. PBL

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If you are a student, educator, parent, or other-labeled learner, then do you ever wonder about this acronym “PBL?” In my daily work, I hear people ask such questions as, “Does it stand for ‘project-based learning’ or ‘problem-based learning?'” I hear others respond, “I thought it stood for ‘place-based learning.'” Still others ask, “Is PBL the same thing as CBL (Challenge-Based Learning) or DBL (Design-Based Learning)?” And a host of others curiously wonders, “Isn’t PBL just inquiry-driven instruction?” I hear some 30-year veterans declare that they’ve been doing PBL forever, and I work with master educators of various career stages that puzzle and struggle with the complexities of PBL…wondering if they’ll ever be able to “do PBL.”

I may spend the better part of a full-life career in education contemplating and practicing PBL. Personally and professionally, I find PBL fascinating and a critical component to all this talk about 21st century teaching and learning, as well as to school transformation. For me, I can think of at least a few major waypoints on my path of better understanding the depth and breadth of PBL.

  • Becoming a middle-school principal and realizing that all of my real-world work, all day long, is project-based…and that I am supposed to prepare students for life in the “real world.”
  • Serving in a sabbatical that was largely geared to understand more of how the “real-world” works in projects.
  • Watching my two sons, currently ages 7 and 4, emerge in the world as master learners…simply because they are humans. Realizing in a “duh” moment, that has lasted for years, that their learning is primarily project-based…or passion-based…or problem-based…or place-based. And starting #FSBL (Father-Son Based Learning) as a Twitter hashtag to chronicle some of how my sons and I explore and discover in order to learn stuff that fascinates us!
  • Reading, studying, and immersing myself in the book The Falconer, by Grant Lichtman (who is now an invaluable colleague).
  • Participating in the TEDxAtlanta community and forging a relationship with Gever Tully, now of The Brightworks School.
  • Undertaking a multiyear project to operationalize my research in 21st century learning – and to enact a Falconer-type class – by creating and co-facilitating a course known as Synergy (community-issues problem solving, transdisciplinary, non-graded but heavily assessed).
  • Connecting with Jonathan Martin, currently at St. Gregory School – especially over a blog-based discussion about PBL (examples here and here).

And, in the last month, I may just have added another significant waypoint on my path to understand better the depth and breadth of PBL. In September 2010, I read an article in Educational Leadership, but I have only recently returned to the article to study it intensely – because my team of PLC (Professional Learning Community) facilitators is using the article to support the creation of a lesson study devoted to PBL.

“7 Essentials for Project-Based Learning,” John Larmer and John R. Mergendoller, Educational Leadership, September 2010, Vol. 68 No. 1, http://www.ascd.org.

For over a year, I have been thinking about the spectrum which is PBL. For PBL is not a monolithic construct, nor a dichotomous light switch. PBL is a spectrum, and I think of the spectrum as ranging from lowercase “pbl” to uppercase “PBL.” Well, what in the world causes a learning experience to move along the spectrum from lowercase pbl to uppercase PBL? I think a number of factors contribute to this spectrum location and dynamic. Two such factors are: 1) degree of focus on a community issue, and 2) connection to an authentic audience. [In future blog posts, I may discuss a number of the other contributing factors.]

Students might replicate the kinds of tasks done by professionals—but even better, they might create real products that people outside school use. (from “7 Essentials for Project-Based Learning”)

And…

Schoolwork is more meaningful when it’s not done only for the teacher or the test. When students present their work to a real audience, they care more about its quality. (from “7 Essentials for Project-Based Learning”)

In my opinion, there are sound reasons why teachers and schools should pursue projects all along this spectrum. There are appropriate times for operating in the lower left quadrant, as well as appropriate times for operating in the upper right quadrant. But the more we work in the upper right quadrant, the more that we uppercase and capitalize the PBL. Ultimately, if education and learning are about making a positive difference in this world, then perhaps we are all striving to engage in more work at the upper right quadrant.

What do you think?

[That’s all the time I have to write this morning, and I want to publish this post 24 hours prior to our PLC-Facilitator meeting on Thursday morning, so, like most things, this is a work in progress!]

What’s Coming Up on It’s About Learning? How I use observation journaling to discover and ideate about possible PBL opportunities… Stay tuned!

Learner-preneurship and Innovation – PLEASE share your thinking! #NOV8 #NAIS #NAIS2012

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What are the conditions necessary for “learner-preneurship” in schools? How can we establish, maintain, sustain, and promote entrepreneurial-type innovation in the strategic designs, daily operations and purposeful activities that define “school?”

On December 28, I was blessed to receive a Twitter DM from Jamie Baker (@JamieReverb). Jamie has invited me to co-present at the NAIS 2012 Annual Conference, along with her other teammates Grant Lichtman (@GrantLichtman of The Falconer) and Lee Burns (@PDSHeadmaster). I am thrilled to join such a team of inspired educators and dynamic, innovative thinkers and doers.

W8. Move from “Why Innovate?” to “How?” — Become an Entrepreneurial School
Entrepreneurs know how to innovate. Discuss how to innovate at your school by developing the entrepreneur’s mindset in the board, head of school, administrators, teachers, and students. Cultivate understanding in the entrepreneur’s innovation process, building capacity by moving through resistance, and developing organizational habits of innovation.
PRESENTERS: Jamie Baker, Reverb Consulting (TN); A. Lee Burns, Presbyterian Day School (TN); Grant Lichtman, Francis Parker School (CA); Bo Adams, The Westminster Schools (GA)

For the next several weeks, I imagine that I will be writing and thinking even more deliberately and intentionally about innovation in schools. To write is to think, and I look forward to developing my thinking here in this blog and elsewhere.

Given that “WE are smarter than ME,” I am curious what you think about the opening questions in this blog post. Do you have ideas about what makes some schools more “learner-preneurial” and innovative than other schools? Do you have hypotheses, research, thoughts, and opinions about how innovation can become more nurtured in the ways that we work in schools? I hope you will take some time to share your thinking in the comments below – your resources, your ideas, your questions, your own blog posts and writings about the topic of innovation in schools. Here’s to our ideas colliding in a Steve Johnson coffee house of sorts.

Thanks for sharing. WE are smarter than ME!

PLEASE JOIN THE IDEATION HERE (and elsewhere)! On New Year’s Day, here’s to a 2012 full of innovative ideation and implementation!

Happy New Year! It’s About Learning!

[Note: An interesting story about the power of PLNs – I will meet Jamie Baker and Lee Burns for the first time face-to-face at our February 29 NAIS session. While we “know” each other online and while we will certainly video-conference in the weeks ahead, it is the power of “the world’s best faculty lounge” that has brought us together for this work!]

Learning is the constant. Let’s re-examine time in 2012.

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“Learning is the constant. Time and support – the variables.”

For far too long, it has been the other way around. I hear and say the above quote so often, that I forget when and where I learned it first. I believe I heard the first utterance from Rick or Becky DuFour, the Yoda and Obi-Wan Kenobi of PLCs.

Just today, I discovered an excellent article at Edutopia that addresses the core of the opening quote:

It’s Time to Rethink the Hours America Spends Educating

I wonder sometimes what would happen if we treated faculty initiatives as “student-like classes.” What would happen if we allowed every faculty member the same exact number of days and hours to learn/accomplish a new technology, process, pedagogy, or procedure? (I would have been “in trouble” more than a few times!) In my experience, though, we allow for different learning bases, paces, and rhythms for faculty – without (outwardly) tracking them as “regular” or “honors.” Of course, the same could be said of administrators and learning, too. (Use of Google Docs and email search features come to mind… “Can you re-send me that email with that attachment? I can’t seem to find it.”)

No, let’s not change the adult time-pattern to match the student time-pattern. Let’s change the student pattern to match the adult pattern – learning should be the constant. We did not all learn to walk and talk at the same developmental month, nor at the same pace. As adults, we don’t constrain ourselves to the same time progression as school learning for quizzes and tests. Why do we treat  students so differently? Efficiency? What about effectiveness, instead!

Perhaps you see that we are already in such a transformed place – where time and support are the variables, and learning is the constant. What do you think?

[Note: I’ve been in this discussion many times. With one colleague, he found fault with me for perceiving that I was demanding “limitless time” for school. For the record, I don’t think I am asking for such a boundless solution. However, I think the artists and scientists who are educators can devise more creative solutions than currently exist with the 50-55 minute class periods that dominate an approximately 180 day school calendar.]

App-etizer: This American Life

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During my sabbatical, when I was working as “the 40-year-old intern” at Unboundary, Alex asked me if I listened to This American Life on NPR. Even as a big fan of NPR, I had never heard of This American Life. Alex sent me a link to an episode, and I stored the link in a note-taking app.

Months later, I am now a regular listener and huge fan of This American Life. On November 5, 2011, my family adopted a rescue dog from Lookout Mountain, TN. As best as we can tell, Lucy is a cross between some kind of hound and some kind of pointer – maybe a German Short Hair. On November 6, my morning routine changed appreciably, as Lucy likes to walk near 5:30 a.m. each day.

I love walking with Lucy. Nevertheless, I was a bit reticent to give up the time that I use in the morning to read and write. So, Lucy and I walk with Ira Glass many mornings. After hooking up Lucy to her leash, I use the This American Life app to select an episode to which to listen during our walk.

The show has become a great “school” for me, and I am learning a great deal about P.I. Moms, Amusement Parks, Middle Schools, etc. What’s more, I am connecting a great deal of what I hear to other things about which I am thinking. For example, in a recent listen about a library program that puts students through a simulation of Reagan’s decision to invade Grenada, I was able to think considerably about the spectrum of project-based learning that exists. Additionally, I am also thinking a lot about the communication format of podcasting. That might be my next creative communication venture. How interesting it could be for a tribe of reporters at our school newspaper to post a series of podcasts…This Wildcat Life.

On to walk. Lucy and Ira are calling.

“What year are you preparing your students for?” Heidi Hayes Jacobs #TEDxNYED

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As usual, Heidi Hayes Jacobs makes some intriguing and thought-provoking points. Among them…

  • Are we educators studying television literacy and its effect on learning, especially given its force relative to print media? If not, why not?
  • Are we upgrading (making strategic replacements of outdated curriculum)?
  • Are we keeping “classroom curiosity” lists to archive the fascinating questions and researching of our learners? Or are we too busy “covering what has to be covered?”
  • “I can’t think of a better time to be a public learner…which is what you must be if you want to teach.”
  • Social production democratizes learning.

Take 17 minutes and explore theses and other provocations yourself. Or don’t.

[Note: In her talk, Heidi mentions “contagion” from a video that kicked off TEDxNYED. I bet that is Kiran Bir Sethi’s TED talk. If you have not seen it, and if you are interested in PBL with a “capital P,” then watch it. Or don’t.]