PBL Place
  • Home
  • About
  • Projects
  • Blog
  • Resources for Educators
  • Teacher Education
    • Artifact/Reflection #1
    • Artifact/Reflection #2
    • Artifact/Reflection #3
    • Artifact/Reflection #4
    • Artifact/Reflection #5
    • Artifact/Reflection #6

Digital Escape Rooms by Amanda Houser

4/20/2021

3 Comments

 
Hi there! My name is Amanda Houser. I’m finishing up my student teaching experience this spring, and I have definitely learned a thing or two about utilizing technology in the classroom - even with remote and hybrid learning aside. 
 

While it may have taken a literal pandemic to encourage New Mexico to move toward a 1 to 1 technology model, it has proven to be both awesome and a struggle for kids. Extended screen time can be hard for students to endure. By mixing in some well-timed collaborative digital activities using interactive websites, teachers can leverage the benefits of online learning while providing their students a break from traditional instructional approaches. One benefit of online teaching I have been experimenting with, thanks to my cooperating teacher, are digital escape rooms.  

In a physical classroom environment, escape room activities are created using lock-boxes, riddles, and articles focusing on the unit content. Virtually, digital escape rooms can be customized for just about any educational topic and length of time - meaning endless opportunities. Whether you want to introduce an upcoming unit, take a virtual class tour of ancient ruins, or have students process information at the end of a unit prior to a summative assessment, they can be helpful to gauge where your students are at — and they're fun! I see the most engagement in my online students when they interact with digital escape rooms.  Students who normally turn their Google Meet on and then walk away are collaborating with their groups, finding clues to "unlock" the webpage, "escape," and earn homework passes. Competitive students love it because they get a chance for bragging rights, and they learn something without feeling like they're being forced.  
​

I like to use a Google Site as a base for an escape room, and then build forms, puzzles, and clickable pictures into it to create the room. There are other ways to accomplish them, but I find this is the simplest method. There are plenty of resources online from teacher blogs, where you can read about the strategy and see a step-by-step guide for creating your own digital escape rooms, to free and purchasable escape room activities from teacherspayteachers.com to help you engage students in any subject. Most recently, I created an escape room to introduce my students to the idea of gender roles in Shakespearean England and on the Renaissance stage. I knew if I had used any other method to introduce this topic, I would have been met with muted mics and no discussion from any of my groups. Instead, I had to turn the volume down on my computers, there was so much collaboration happening! While I don't think that digital escape rooms should be used on a daily basis, they can certainly provide a welcome distraction and novel learning opportunity for even the most reluctant students. 

Amanda Houser is a graduate student in the Secondary Education Program at the University of New Mexico. Her future language arts students will be lucky to have her! Check out this Ed Tech themed digital escape room she created.
3 Comments

Fostering a Culture of Collaboration

1/6/2020

3 Comments

 
Coming back to school after Winter break can be tough. Whether you have new students for the new semester or you are reuniting with your classes after a couple weeks off, the transition into a new semester is a great time to establish or maintain a positive classroom culture. Continue reading for more about fostering a culture of collaboration with students, scroll down to the team-building activity, or use this link to access a printable version of the activity.

Creating an environment conducive to learning is a critical component with regard to establishing an environment where all of our diverse students can learn without limits. To create the kind of classroom conducive to 21st century education, we must help our students develop their agency to work both independently and collaboratively. The latter is often a sticking place with teachers who have had negative experiences with collaboration and group work.

As I transition from being a classroom teacher to a university-based teacher educator, I am able to interact with a wide range of educators and pre-service teachers. Through these interactions I am learning that collaboration can be a surprisingly controversial topic. Teachers have varying opinions about group work based on their own experiences. Like many I’ve spoken with, I can remember doing collaborative assignments in high school and in college and being the major contributing force in my “team” during those activities. That kind of experience is a significant deterrent for many teachers when it comes to creating opportunities for student collaboration. We don’t want to put our students through the same kind of misery we experienced. It makes sense. 

The fear of doing more work than one’s teammates is a common feeling amongst many American students when confronted with collaborative assignments. The notion that someone might be getting a free ride on the back of our hard work often gives rise to furrowed brows and feelings of consternation. American psychologist Bibb Latané even coined a term for not pulling one’s weight while doing group work: social loafing.

Social loafing is a real concern. When teachers tell their students to get into groups, there’s a serious risk that many of their students will immediately disengage. Our job as educators is to teach students that when they work together, they benefit and succeed. There’s inherent value in teaching students to work together in harmony, and it’s important to make class time to foster those collaborative skills.We cannot afford to hide behind our own negative experiences with collaboration as an excuse to avoid using it in our classrooms. Consider this: If students have a negative experience with collaboration (because of social loafing), how much of that is the teacher’s fault? By deliberately and artfully scaffolding opportunities for students to collaborate, teachers can reclaim group work from the wastebasket of misuse. By changing how we ask students to work in groups, we can begin to subvert the cringe-inducing, conditioned response many of us have when we hear the words group work or collaboration.

Being a teacher requires that we help our students get along so they can work together without wreaking havoc on the learning environment. The strategy outlined below can be used at any point in the school year, but the transitional time around the start of the new calendar year lends itself perfectly to nurturing student relationships and classroom community. 

The Strategy: Collaborative Map Labelling

Materials needed: 
  • Blank maps of the USA (or the country where you live, if you’re reading from abroad)
    • Make a copy for each student
  • Pencils

The Procedure:
  • Pass out blank maps to each student
  • Ask them to label the Pacific Ocean. Let them know that there’s no grade, so they can guess or not guess as they wish. No pressure.
  • Ask them to label the Atlantic Ocean. Then encourage them to label the state where they live.
  • Ask the students to label all the states they can. Let them know it’s okay to make a guess. Give them a few minutes to work independently as you monitor their progress.
  • When their progress slows, and it might not take long, ask them to work with a neighbor/partner to go over their maps and help each other make corrections and/or label even more states. Give students a few minutes to do this while you monitor.
  • When the progress slows, ask the pairs to partner with another pair so groups grow from two to four members working in collaboration. Give them a few minutes to work.
  • When you feel the students’ progress merits advancement, ask the groups to combine again to grow from four to eight members. You may have to use some of your own judgement and creativity to group students if your class size doesn’t accommodate large groupings. Give the larger groups time to collaborate while you monitor.
  • At this point, depending on your class size, you could combine groups again. You can also move into the final phase: a whole class collaborative discussion.
  • When the groups’ progress ends or when they’ve labeled all the states, transition into a whole class discussion. For this stage, it would be beneficial to display a blank map that the whole class could refer to. If you don’t have the ability to project a map, you can show the blank map by holding up a printed version and walking it around the room as your students discuss the correct location of each state and you point to it on the map so everyone can label it correctly. You may also want a correctly labelled map to use as a reference to make sure the states are labeled accurately. Try to guide the conversation more than lead it. Let your students work out where the states are. This could be a good opportunity for students to practice working out disagreements or disputes in a safe learning environment.
    • The goal of the class discussion is to illustrate that when we work together we can accomplish more.
  • At the end of the discussion, each student’s map should be correctly labeled with all 50 states.
  • Before you end the discussion, have students talk about the activity and what it revealed about the power of collaboration. You might ask what it revealed about their own thoughts about group work and whether their opinions changed and why. You could even have students self-reflect, aloud or in writing, about the experience and their own participation.

This snowball style collaborative activity can be adapted into any content area and used in a variety of ways to sustain a positive classroom community. In a chemistry class, students might do this activity with a blank periodic table of elements. Students studying biology or anatomy might label a blank illustration of a cell or a skeleton. Young students or students with special needs might work together to label a sheet depicting a variety of animals. You could use this to review vocabulary or any other content. You could even give students an entire test and allow them to collaborate like this. On second thought, you might not give them the test to take together if you’re going to award individual grades, but you could do this activity with a study guide students can take home to review.

In my own classroom, these kinds of activities provided my students with undeniable evidence that we are smarter and more capable when we work together than when we work in isolation. It also showed my students that they have the power to revise if they make mistakes. Collaborative activities like these, that are designed to put little to no stress or pressure on the students, send the message that making mistakes can be a positive learning strategy. As teachers, we need to encourage students to see failure as an opportunity for growth. In conjunction with providing opportunities to fail or struggle, this activity also shows the students that they are capable of helping each other correct their mistakes. As educators, we have an enormous responsibility to prepare our students to be ready to contribute to their local communities as citizens who can work together to advance our society. When teachers create opportunities for students to collaborate, they are making an investment in the future. Teaching students the value of working together is worth the investment.

Check out the teacher resources page for even more community-building resources.

Did this get your creative juices flowing? Do you have some ideas for collaboration and culture building or for adapting this strategy to your content area? Share in the comments section below.

​
3 Comments

PBL and New Teachers

10/28/2019

3 Comments

 
Since I embarked on my journey to earn a PhD in Teacher Education at the University of New Mexico, I have been thinking more and more about how to teach pedagogy and PBL. I love project-based learning, and I think all teachers should be using it most of the time, but I also know that it is difficult to implement. Now that I am working directly with preservice teachers, I am getting a firsthand look at the struggles teacher preparation programs have when it comes to teaching students the art and theory of teaching and carving out time to let them practice in a real classroom. This challenge means that advanced strategies like project-based learning are an afterthought or even a non-thought, which leaves too many new teachers without enough PBL knowledge to implement it successfully. With this in mind, I would like to suggest a precursor to PBL: thematic units.

Thematic units are a great way to think about PBL. Every project should have a theme to focus the content and learning. For example, I have centered projects around solar power, wilderness survival skills, and the nature of reality. Before I dove into the deep end of PBL, I crafted thematic units. In fact, my first attempt at PBL, back in 2014, was a glorified thematic unit about bullying and school violence.

As the anchor text, I showed the documentary Bully. I think nowadays they are calling it The Bully Project. They have a lot of resources on their site, and my students really responded to the film.

I don't know if you've ever heard the song "The Last Stand of Shazeb Andleeb." It's a Frank Black song about a kid named Shazeb Andleeb who was beaten to death at school in Los Angeles. I used the song in my unit, and we analyzed the lyrics. 

We also read an article about the incident: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1995-05-19-me-3412-story.html

My students made an anti-bullying campaign in which they created flyers to promote Blue Shirt Day, made a bulletin board for the school, and wrote a research paper about how bullying impacts public health. (Here’s the scaffold I used to help my students write the paper.)

This is not a great example of project-based learning, but it is a good example of a thematic unit. More importantly, it gave me a place to build from. If you want to use PBL, there’s no easy way to do it. Start with a thematic unit and build from there.

Picture
3 Comments

The Whirlwind: What I learned from my second year using project based learning.

7/30/2016

1 Comment

 
Last school year was a blur. With three different preps, multiple lenses to try to teach through, and my first foray into standards based grading, I was having trouble keeping my head above water by Halloween. I tried to do too much, and I sacrificed my blog to do it. Now, as the summer is drawing to a close, I am ready to try again, and I want to start with a reflection.

The most important thing I learned about using project based learning (PBL) last year is that just because I am crazy excited about the teaching method, it doesn’t mean my students will be. I assumed that my students would embrace nontraditional learning, and love learning English Language Arts with hands-on projects. I was wrong. I know that many students enjoyed the projects we did, but there were open complaints from the beginning. My students had been conditioned to think of school, especially their English class, as one-dimensional. I failed to prime them for the experience and won’t make that same mistake again.

This year, I am starting with the WHY. I had seen Simon Sinek’s TED Talk about starting with why, and I still messed it up. That’s why this year I am going to start by asking my students to create a list of skills they think employers will want in their employees when they graduate. Hopefully they come up with skills like communication, critical thinking, creativity, problem solving, and collaboration. A quick Internet search reveals that these are some of the skills employers are looking for (this article even comes with cool interactive charts). Once my students see their list, I want to ask them how we can grow those skills in our English class. I want them to see right from the outset that a traditional model of instruction won’t get them there. I want them to be the ones who tell me, we need to do more than sit at a table reading and writing. Then I want to introduce them to the idea of PBL.

Starting with why we are using project based learning is only part of how I’m hoping to improve my classes for the next school year. I also learned last year that I need to be stricter when it comes to deadlines. I was so worried that I, and my students, would look bad if we presented to a live audience and didn’t have everything perfect, so I kept pushing deadlines back to give my feet dragging students time to finish their projects. This only caused problems. Many students finished their work by the original due date and I had to scramble to find them something meaningful to do so they didn’t sit in my class trying to watch movies and YouTube videos on their Chromebooks. One project I tried was never even completed, much to my embarrassment after it had been publicized in the local newspaper and on my district’s website.

I will be focusing on setting firm deadlines for my students and scaffolding the work to ensure we meet those deadlines. I am also going to do fewer projects at the same time. That way I have time to plan and scaffold properly instead of flying by the seat of my khakis. Last year I had three different projects going on with five different classes far too often. I was stretched too thin to do the best job for my students. Thankfully, this year I will only have two different preps with just four classes, due to a schedule change at my school. The pace should slow considerably and my students will benefit from longer classes.

The last reflection I want to mention here is about the number and frequency of projects I forced on my students. For more than the first half of the school year I tried to go wall-to-wall PBL with my sophomore class. By Christmas they were through, and we still had a project to finish in January. That’s right, I ran a project across semesters. Half of it was done and counted as a midterm, and they still had to complete it in the new year. It was a less than ideal situation for them and for me. Fortunately, the project finished on time, thanks to a deadline set by my collaborative partner.

My students and I had open and honest conversations about the projects we were doing. They voiced their complaints and concerns. I listened and explained the reasons why I had pushed them so hard, but I did not become defensive. Their complaints were valid, for the most part, and I wanted their voices to matter. I gave them a few choices for what we could do next, and they decided we would take a break from PBL and read a book instead. After taking time off from PBL we finished the year strong with one last project.

I’ve already started writing three different projects for next year to mix in with some that I’ll revamp and redo, and I have to keep reminding myself not to bite off more than I can chew. I know that my students will benefit from the experiences, but they also deserve to have well-crafted projects that can be completed on time. Of the three new projects I’m drafting, two are for the Spring semester. That will give me enough time to scaffold them and ensure we meet our deadlines.

I’m still crazy about PBL, and this year, I think my students will be too.

1 Comment

Why I Use PBL

5/4/2015

5 Comments

 
“This is the most fun I’ve ever had in a class,” gushed a young lady in my English I course this year.

This is why I use project based learning (PBL). As a language arts teacher, it’s not always easy to engage all of my students. Lots of kids don’t like to read and write. They don’t enjoy learning about subject-verb agreements or reading the plays of William Shakespeare. For my first three years as a teacher I struggled with how I could engage more of my students in a content area I’ve loved since early childhood. I have always been enthusiastic about reading and writing, and that enthusiasm helped engage more students than the material alone, but it wasn’t enough.

This year, in a new school, I’ve been given the freedom to create non-traditional units centered around a driving question that build toward a culminating project. I’ve seen increased engagement from my students and my enthusiasm has only grown. I always knew that if I could give my students real world applications for learning difficult material they would not only learn more, they would make significant personal gains that are not always easy to teach – gains like building confidence speaking in front of an authentic audience and the ability to learn from mistakes and fail forward without the experience turning into a negative and tanking one’s grades.

For me, PBL is a no-brainer. It benefits the students in ways I never could have as the center of instruction. For three years I meticulously planned lessons designed to “make learning fun” as I led the class with comedic genius embedded in my lectures and a few opportunities to work in collaborative groups. I created PowerPoints with awesome images in the hope that they would keep students focused on the content. I berated my classes into listening and shamed them when they didn’t. I had heard about being the “guide on the side,” and sometimes I tried that with some success. The truth is: I like attention. Being the “sage on the stage” can be great fun – especially when you have a quick wit and a good sense of humor, but it’s not always fun for the students.

This school year, things changed. I moved from rural Eastern North Carolina to a slightly less rural area in the Blue Grass region of Kentucky. My new district is dedicated to innovation and moving education forward. Hence, they have focused on project based learning. Since I was interested in trying PBL, this has been a perfect fit. It hasn’t always been easy, and I’ve learned as much about implementing PBL from my own mistakes as I have from all the literature I’ve read about it or trainings I’ve attended. Not every project has been a major success, but I feel like my students have learned as much or more than any of my past classes. Giving the kids opportunities to direct their learning and make choices for how they want to demonstrate that learning has been an amazing experience. There are times when my class is running so efficiently without my assistance that I don’t really know what to do with myself. When this happens, I stand back, out of the way, and just watch (with immense pride) as my students collaborate and work together. I thought I knew what it meant to be the “guide on the side,” but until this year I had never really experienced it.  Now that I’ve seen the powerful impact PBL has on student engagement and learning, I’m hooked. I still get to be the center of attention often enough to satisfy my ego, but my students get the opportunity to make their own learning fun, and that’s the best part.

5 Comments

    Zack Ramsey

    National Board certified English teacher and Project Based Learning enthusiast.
    Connect with me on Twitter @EducatorRamsey

    Archives

    April 2021
    January 2020
    October 2019
    July 2016
    May 2015

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.