Maria Silva's Learning Diary
Introducing Project-Based Learning in your Classroom (II)
Let me introduce myself!
It is my pleasure to be among eTwinners again, especially those who are eager to learn and to share what they learn with others. I teach English in a secondary school in Sátão (Escola Secundária Frei Rosa Viterbo), a small town in the north of Portugal. Travelling, learning and reading are activities I can't live without. I believe that it is by meeting different people and learning from each other that we widen our visions of the world. So, travelling and meeting people is one of my interests as it allows me to learn about other cultures and see the world through other perspectives.
I will share this diary with my Apps4EL Erasmus+ project partners whom I have been collaborating with in the project to use educational apps PBL consists in creating a student-driven environment in which pupils acquire a deeper knowledge and grow up as responsible citizens while exploring the real-world and challenges.
COURSE INTRODUCTION
What to keep in mind about this course?
Duration of the course: 5.5 weeks. There are 4 modules- one module per week with an extra week to complete all work at the end.
Tasks in order to qualify for the course completion certificate:
- Visit each section of the 4 modules. Watch/ read the resources carefully
- Contribute to at least one of the reflection or discussion activities
- Complete the required peer review activity in module 4
Module 1: WHAT IS PBL- PROJECT BASED LEARNING AND WHY USE IT?
1: What is PBL- Project Based Learning?
PBL consists in creating a student-driven environment in which pupils acquire a deeper knowledge and grow up as responsible and engaged citizens while exploring the real-world and solving challenges creatively and collaboratively with their peers.
Reactions to the videos and resources in the Padlet below the video, in particular identifying any questions you have about PBL, what you hope to learn on this course and what challenges you anticipate in adopting PBL in your school.
1- The video "project based Learning: explained" introduces the approach by comparing the way adults respond to real-life problems and challenges by organising the resources they have to solve them and PBL. It shows how PBL contributes to the acquisition of deeper knowledge and the enhancement of XXI century skills like communication, collaboration and Critical thing. I totally agree with the opinion conveyed that the kind of knowledge which is being transferred through books and teachers delivering content is insufficient to prepare students for real life problems. They learn how to replicate knowledge easily if they have good memory but this knowledge is quickly erased from their momory after a while because it is not significant and relevant to tehir lives.
PBL focusses on learning to learn, learning to work with others and learning to manage knowledge, skills and resources in order to solve problems creatively and collaboratively.
And that is what I have been trying to implement in my teaching practice. Instead of keeping students seating still and quiet and want them to move around, to desire to learn, to look for information themselves, to collaborate with their peers to build knowledge and create solutions to real problems.
- The second video gives us a practical example on how to implement PBL. I have done PBL with eTwinning projects by linking them to real-problem solving challenges. I will personally take the idea on how we should adapt the curriculum to PBL to increase pupils' deeper knowledge and building skills that are valued in the real world.
Optional P2P - Reflections on our current teaching practice
I have for more than a decade realised that pupils won't learn much by sitting quietly pretending they listen to the teacher. After 10 minutes most students are 'somehere else' (on the moon or on their mobiles) if not they look bored. As an English teacher I have also realised that most straight A students in my classes weren't able to deal with communicative tasks if unprepared. They knew the words and the grammar for the test and the drills but not for what really mattered: to communicate and interact with real people.
So I needed a change. I was tired of fighting against the inevitability of the fact that what students were doing in class didn't matter to them and had little impact on their growth as citizens.
So I decided to implement PBL with my first eTwinning project in 2008. Since then this is what I have been doing.
This is my first success story with eTwinning and PBL. My first eTwinning project. "Learning from One Another".
The research I carried out was meant to prove how eTwinning would support change to students-centred and PLB learning approaches.
Abstract:
The Internet has introduced new forms of interaction and learning environments. On the one hand, individuals can interact directly with the sources of information and knowledge and actively participate in its production. On the other, the Internet increases new processes of socialization and mobility in virtual multicultural and multilingual environments. For this reason, the potential of ICT for intercultural communication should be explored, particularly in the context of foreign language teaching (Audras & Chanier, 2008; Kern et al., 2008; Liaw & Master, 2010; O'Dowd, 2007, 2010; O'Dowd & Ware, 2008; Ollivier & Puren, 2011; Yang, 2011, among others). The eTwinning action provides European teacher with the opportunity to develop teaching-learning strategies that promote intentional discovery, social interaction, the collaborative construction of knowledge and openness to plural social and cultural contexts. LOA eTwinning project was developed as a teaching strategy in the context of an action-research study aimed at testing the impact of the integration of intercultural communication mediated by ICT tools on the students’ motivation to use and learn foreign languages and the development of their intercultural communicative competence. The project methodology was inspired by Candau (2003) and Maurice (2008)’s models of intercultural approach. In line with the contact hypothesis (Allport, 1954; Amir, 1969, 1976; Pettigrew, 1997, 1998; Pettigrew & Tropp, 2000, 2005, 2006), this experience of intercultural contact among students from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds was based on sharing equal status, working together for common goals and building friendship relationships. LOA eTwinning project led to a change in the teaching process and to the design of a learner-oriented curriculum, which contributed to increase learners’ motivation to use foreign language to interact with people from other cultures. The results show an improvement in students’ linguistic self-esteem and autonomy as learners showed to be committed in using English to learn from and with their eTwinning partners. The study of the frequency of the intercultural contacts shows a substantial increase in social initiative. Moreover, the analysis of the communicative acts gives evidence of an increase of acts that reveal attitudes of respect and consideration towards their interlocutors.
Feel free to take a look at my thesis: http://repositorio.ucp.pt/handle/10400.14/14036
Class to involve in the PBL experiment: 9th a and 9th C
Topic: Caring about others.
Why aren't teachers implementing PBL?
In Portugal, teachers have several opportunities to implement PLB by embracing one of the many projects advertised and supported by the Ministry of Education. There are plenty of projects we could take part in which are based on PBL approach but the majority of the teachers prefer to rely on their year plans, course books and normalised tests as it is much easier to teach that way. Some keep on blaming the national curriculum and national exams for keeping the things the way they are for centuries.
Components of Good PBL
https://www.bie.org/object/document/pbl_essential_elements_checklist
Any project worth developing has to have an impact on the students' life now and later. So it is important for me that the projects involve community real problem solving so as to make pupils come up with their own solutions and answers to their world. I have developed a project that challenged students to think of a community problem that matters to them so that they could learn about that problem and create a solution to the problem.
We also take part in Apps for Good project which is a great opportunity to engage students in their communities' problems and implement PBL in the classroom.
The importance of the driving question to trigger critical thinking in students.
"Writing the driving question is one of the hardest parts of an effective PBL."
Optional P2P - Your PBL Design: Formulating your driving question
Module 2: Developing effective collaboration for PBL
Finding collaboration partners outside the classroom
Add an entry to your Learning Diary reflecting on which people from your community you or your students could engage with. Think about if you have contacts to or knowledge of networks of local professionals? Which organisations or people engage with the school on a regular basis? Are there any businesses working with the school such as caterers, IT companies, or sports organisations?
Collaboration Tools
Optional P2P - Building your PBL Learning Design
- As a first step, if you haven't done so yet as part of the Course Introduction, create an account on the Learning Designer and take a browse through the tool to familiarize yourself. For an introduction to the tool see here.
- Next comes the first step of creating your PBL Design: Create a new Learning Design and at the top you will see some general fields to be completed.
- In the field "Name" add your Driving Question or a shorter title representing your PBL approach. In the field "Topic" add the curriculum topics that you would like to address as part of the implementation.
- In the field "Learning Time" fill-in your anticipated time for what you are planning. Don't fill-in the "Designed Learning Time" field as this is automatically completed as you add TLA's (Teaching and Learning Activities) later on.
- In the field "Description" again add your driving question together with a short and general overview of what students will be doing as part of the investigation of the question.
- In the field "Aims" outline what you anticipate to achieve with your PBL approach and what you hope will be the final product of students' work.
- In the field "Outcomes" you can add a selection of pre-defined learning outcomes by clicking on the + sign and then adding a short description for each. You should have already defined these as part of your driving question in Module 1.
- Finally, add your first TLAs to your Design. These should focus on collaboration and could be about setting up groups using the TeamUp tool (see section 2.5) and then helping the groups to become a team through a team-building activity such as the Chop-Stick Challenge (see section 2.3). These TLAs don't need to be the first TLAs of your Design. Later on, as you add more TLAs you can still move them around.
- Once you have completed the above steps, click the Share button to receive a shortened URL (the technical error that prevented this before has now been fixed), paste it into the peer review text box below, add the link to your Learning Diary for some context as well as some contact details in case your reviewer has some questions, and then make sure to submit your work before Deadline 1 which is Wednesday 15th November at 23:59h CEST.
- Finally, once you have been assigned another participant's work, provide some feedback to them before Deadline 2, Wednesday 22nd November 23:59h CEST. IN ORDER TO ACCESS YOUR PEER'S LEARNING DESIGN, MAKE SURE THAT YOU ARE FIRST LOGGED INTO THE LEARNING DESIGNER. Please provide feedback to your peers using the following questions:
- Are the description, aims and learning outcomes clear and aligned? Do they fit to each other? Can you identify further learning outcomes based on the description and aims?
- Is it clear what the teacher and students are doing as part of the collaboration TLAs? Do the collaboration TLAs build student's collaboration skills or scaffold the process of working together?
- UNTIL 15TH NOVEMBER
MODULE 3: DEVELOPING STUDENT-DRIVEN ACTIVITIES FOR PBL
Developing Student Resilience Identify how we as teachers can weaken our student's confidence and independence. Use your own and others' reflections to help you create a classroom environment that supports students to become confident and independent learners. Of course, as usual, don't forget to add your reflections to your Learning Diary. Please, always remember to mention your first name, last name and country of origin. Anonymous comments do not encourage dialogue.
OPTIONAL P2P - Building your PBL Learning Design
continue adding TLAs to your Design, with a focus on scaffolding for student independence and ownership, building resilience and an entrepreneurial mindset in general. For example, you should include a TLA where students reflect about their own work and how they can improve it, thereby supporting independence and ownership over the learning process. After adding these TLAs your Design should ideally provide opportunity for students
- to identify the questions they would like to pursue (within the context of your Driving Question)
- to make choices on all key project-related aspects such as resources used, products created, use of time, etc.
- to take significant responsibility and work independently from the teacher, but with guidance if necessary
- to reflect during the project about their own work and learning
TeachMeet: Introducing Project-Based Learning in your Classroom - Rerun
But we must be able to attend rehearsal on the 7th November at 17:30.