Perhaps the quickest way to start planning PBL is to learn an idea from other teachers or other projects and apply it to your classroom situation. To this end, Barker Institute of Education runs a resource-rich project library, and you can search by grade and subject. Many course providers will also provide ready-made project solutions. You need to look at these projects critically and make sure that they cover all the elements of the gold standard PBL.
Megan Ashkanani is from Novi, Michigan. She teaches the fourth grade. For her, learning from and perfecting the ideas in the project library of Barker Institute of Education made a good start for her first project. She recalled: "When I found a ready-made example that could be slightly adjusted, there was only one word in my mind-thank God!"
She was motivated to try PBL because she saw the benefits of PBL for students, but she also admitted: "I'm worried that I will make mistakes. I don't know how to create everything from scratch. This is a very depressing feeling. It is really helpful for me to refer to project examples that meet our teaching needs. "
One project case particularly attracted her-students need to introduce their inventions in the form of "shark tank" (an American venture capital project, sharks refer to investors, and entrepreneurs need to introduce their projects within a certain period of time to win the investment of "sharks"). "I can see how all the parts of the project fit together. I may not be so creative when I play alone. "
Step 2 rebuild
Re-examine the units you have taught in the past and see how to rebuild them into PBL. The advantage of this is that you already know the teaching content like the back of your hand and fully understand the topics that students are interested in. If students ask such a terrible question "What's the use of learning this" in the teaching of the original unit, it may be time for you to reconstruct it into a project that conforms to the real world.
While teaching argumentative essays, Ashkanani once asked her fourth-grade students to write a letter to their parents explaining why they should get a puppy. This is a lovely homework, and parents seem happy to receive these letters, but this lesson has not brought very meaningful results. No one has ever really had a puppy!
As Ashkanani became more and more familiar with PBL, she found that this course could be reconstructed into a more real project. Opportunity is a recent practical discussion on how to apply the computer game My World to education. Many students like to play My World after school. They all think it would be cool if they could play at school.
Based on this inspiration and previous experience in improving the existing PBL scheme, Teacher Ashkanani is going to design a new project with the goal of learning argumentative writing. But this time, students will write (and talk) to a more open audience and become real decision makers. Students' driving problems are:
How can we persuade the Home School Committee to buy the right to use the educational version of My World? The students put forward a convincing scheme supported by the research results. They got the expected result with strong arguments.
Step 3: Listen.
Students' questions can provide continuous inspiration for the project. The key is that teachers should consciously listen to the contents that can attract, inspire or arouse students' interest, and then find the relationship between these contents and learning objectives. What did the students mention in the morning meeting or chat? During the class discussion, did you hear some questions that might indicate that students want to discuss a topic in depth?
Early in his teaching career, Ray Ahmed was troubled by this question: "How can we attract children to care about what adults care about?" With the accumulation of experience, he found himself asking the wrong questions all the time. "We should ask:' How can we find out what students really care about and get them involved in learning?
This change in thinking helped him design a chemistry project from student groups, concerns and interests. "I often sit for a few weeks during the summer vacation, trying to squeeze out some project ideas. The children put forward many more and better projects than me."
If you don't hear students ask interesting questions, you can try to stimulate thinking by investigating their interests or let them interview each other. Some teachers reserve an area on the whiteboard or wall to record students' interesting questions, which may eventually become projects.
In Rhode Island, third-grade teachers Lori Loughborough and Linda Spinney are teaching a more traditional course about the symbols of their state. Then a student asked, "Why don't we have national insects?"
This question inspired the project. In that project, the students proposed to designate the endangered American buried insects as the official insects in their state. Students no longer simply study the symbols of the country, but deeply study habitats, endangered species and government operations. Their efforts have achieved practical results and persuaded the state legislature to pass a law to designate their favorite insects as state insects.
4. Teaching with the help of titles
What has happened in your community or around the world that will make your students talk about it? What do these things have to do with your teaching content? Instead of staying in a brief discussion of current events, it is better to design a project with shocking headlines.
Darla Routh Savage teaches English at Delaware State University Preparatory High School. When there was a racial discrimination dispute about Oscar nomination in the news (summed up with a topic tag, # Oscar is too white), she knew that she could design a fascinating project based on this news.
Therefore, she established the Carter Prize in memory of the historian Carter G. Wooderson. Wooderson is regarded as the initiator of Black History Month. Teacher Savage challenged her students to design their own nomination lists according to the Oscar model, and supported the nomination lists of several major achievement awards with writing, video editing and critical thinking.
5. Link the project with popular culture.
Which books are used by students for recreation? Who is the most popular movie or music artist today? Linking projects with students' cultural interests is an effective way to improve participation. For example, teachers use popular works such as The Hunger Games to design projects that focus on the rise of totalitarianism and its conflicts in world history.
Step 6 respond to real requests
Maybe students can meet the real needs of your colleagues or partners. Their "customers" can be non-profit organizations, local government agencies, companies, and even teachers or classes in other grades.
Jim Bentley teaches elementary school seniors in Elcroft, California. A few years ago, he designed a storytelling project to teach various courses with digital tools. His students are already very good at making documentaries and teaching films, and now they receive requests to make short films and public service advertisements for the community.
High school students from the University of Iowa in Des Moines, Iowa regularly work with local partners on projects. These projects can stimulate students' interest, help them solve community problems and pay attention to academic knowledge. Based on this real cooperation, students designed a dance therapy course to promote people's tolerance for people with special needs, investigated the use of drones in agriculture, and transformed an abandoned meat processing factory into an entertainment venue.
7. Out of enthusiasm
Paying attention to students' interests is a good source of project ideas, but you should not ignore your enthusiasm. Your enthusiasm is another source of inspiration for PBL.
Heather wolpert-Gao Long, a junior high school teacher and blogger, shared a PBL design tip-"I hope I'm excited about what I'm going to show my children … design what you like … and what your students are interested in at that age". She often starts with ideas that she has always found interesting, such as the science behind superheroes, and then looks for the connection between these ideas and curriculum standards.
Similarly, Mike Kertser, a high school teacher in Grand Rapids, Michigan, became interested in the citizen-led restoration project of Rapids (the source of the city's name). He designed an ambitious interdisciplinary project about the future of his hometown Grand Rapids. Students didn't realize the importance of this problem until Mr Kertser immersed them in a local project that integrated history, environmental science, language and literature.
8. Design in cooperation with students
Starting from the problems that students want to solve or the challenges they face, cooperate with them to design projects covering the learning objectives of the subject.
This is how Ray Ahmed, a high school teacher, designed the chemistry project for the second semester. These projects are not only meaningful to students, but also meet the standards of high-risk graduation exams. When introducing PBL to students in the first semester, he paid more attention to his leading role in project design.
"Earlier this year, I tended to ask the core questions myself," he said. "But by the second semester, the children are ready to ask their own questions. They put forward ideas, implement them, and then defend their findings in front of the expert group. " Their recent projects include: using non-toxic dispersants to clean up local oil spills, preventing cosmetics from oxidation, and deciding which bactericide to choose to control the water bloom in local lakes.
In the process of students' active learning, Mr. Ahmed believes that his role is to integrate chemical knowledge into the project. "I know the knowledge of this subject. It is my responsibility to ensure that the corresponding knowledge content is covered in the project. "
Student-centered teaching method;
In the process of project-based learning, students will actively collect information, acquire knowledge and explore solutions to practical problems.
A practical problem is not necessarily a real problem in the real world, but a skill that needs to be used in real life to solve this problem, such as critical thinking, teamwork ability, decision-making ability and so on.
Therefore, in the process of project-based learning, students are not only required to apply what they have learned, but also to know how to apply what they have learned in real life.
Talking about why project-based teaching should be implemented, Dr. Robin Atfield, a professor of education at University College London, pointed out that in the Internet age, knowledge acquisition has become extremely convenient, so how to use knowledge and the ability to find and solve practical problems have become more critical.
Based on the framework of students' core skills in the 2 1 century, he pointed out that it is more important to cultivate students' three skills: learning skills, reading and writing skills and life skills. Among them, reading and writing skills have been improved in the information age, including information literacy, media literacy and technical literacy.