Project Based Learning: Reflections from the Summer Sandbox Conference

Introduction 

This week's post offers a different perspective on progressive education: this week, I had the privilege of attending the 4th Annual Summer Sandbox, a 2.5 day conference focused on project-based learning (PBL) and education in the 21st century hosted at Yeshivat Noam in Paramus, NJ.

As an educator well aware of the use, jargon, and general interest in PBL within the progressive educational community but without much insight into its underlying principles and methods, I've been meaning to attend this conference for a few years now.

I'm so glad I made it after all of these years, and if only for the conference's slow but steady reaffirming "pump-up" towards looking forward to the school year with fresh, positive, and innovative eyes.

Of course, I have far more pedagogical theory and practice to reflect on, but what a pleasure it was to attend, too! I'll start this post with much gratitude for the leadership of education pioneer Tikvah Wiener, her conference, the East Coast Summer Sandbox (she ran one on the West Coast, too!), and her institute, i.d.e.a.s. schools, as well as the support of SAR High School for sponsoring my attendance. Without Tikvah's leadership and organizations, innovators and leaders in day schools would feel far more isolated and lost, I think, while advocating for and implementing such theories of progressive education.

There were so many personal highlights from the conference. It was enough just being able to meet and work with like-minded educators--educators who want to reach every child in the classroom, who want learning to be reflect real-life learning and work, who want to challenge the status quo and the naysayers. But there was so much more, including

• redesigning my classroom as a "21st Century Library Classroom" and engaging in the prototyping and iterating/revision that Design Thinkers Emily Winograd and Marc Fein of PresenTense modeled for us; 
• learning from a graduate of High Tech High, a PBL driven school, about the curricular implementation of PBL at the school; 
• revising one of my units as PBL so it might help differentiate learning and reach all learners;
• actually creating a PBL unit together with other teachers on yetziat mitzrayim
• actually drafting my own PBL unit, receiving feedback from other teachers, and offering feedback to others' units

It was absolutely refreshing and absolutely challenging--I noticed how much resistance to change rose up within myself, but I was rewarded tremendously when thinking through my ideas with the support of others.

I know that I could write a tremendous amount about each session. Instead, in what follows, I attempt to mark a record of the conference for my own use and future recall by distilling the essence of PBL, noting the differences in practices and assumptions between PBL and traditional learning with projects, and offering my big take-aways from this conference.

PBL: Basic Definitions 

First, some basic definitions of PBL. I'll open with a description of PBL classroom management in a case study by John Mergendoller and John Thomas, entitled "Managing Project Based Learning: Principles from the Field":

For teachers who use Project-Based Learning, the task of classroom management is quite different from that faced by teachers employing the traditional instructional methods of lecture, discussion, and seatwork. With PBL, very little time is devoted to teacher-directed seatwork or whole-class discussions. Students spend the majority of their time working on their own or in small groups. Teachers typically do not lead instructional activities, nor do they dispense resources, or present material to be learned. Students find their own sources, conduct their own research, and secure their own feedback. Experienced PBL teachers report that they spend very little time promoting student engagement or handling student misbehavior. Teachers often spend their time participating in projects as peers rather than as classroom managers. (3)

Here, multiple principles and characteristics of a PBL classroom converge: student-driven inquiry, processing, and presentation of student learning is an absolute priority; teachers spend very little time in any sort of conventional classroom form, including lecture, discussion, or monitoring and responding to student seatwork. Students are given the tools to conduct their own learning; teachers are, essentially, the coaches of their process.

As a teacher of a standards-based classroom where complex literary texts, reading comprehension practices, and writing skills are modeled, taught, and assessed, I am immediately challenged by a vision that turns conventional classroom activities on its head. Still, I remained open to what could emerge, given a PBL classroom.

In PBL, students are offered (or even articulate) a driving question, an essential research question that focuses the student's inquiry. The independent inquiry should be held to certain standards-based rubrics. According to the PBL standards "wheel" students are given voice and choice while identifying and inquiring into "authentic," real-life problems, students sustain their inquiry independently (and with the direction of teachers), and through processes of critique, revision, and reflection, and students showcase their learning to the public in some manner. The same authors identify these elements of PBL towards the end of their case study:

Project characteristics that seem to facilitate management of Project Based Learning include the extent to which the project is “authentic” (Steinberg, 1997) and not “school-like,” and the degree to which instructional responsibility is shifted from the teacher to the student. These latter characteristics include making students aware of precisely what they are responsible for doing and producing, establishing professional standards for student products, providing examples of high quality work, introducing external resource people as mentors or partners, building in realistic consequences for failure and non-participation, holding frequent conferences and peer reviews, and assessing student learning on the basis of some realistic performance event. (37)

Summer Sandbox: Exploring the Underlying Assumptions of PBL

During my time at the Summer Sandbox, I reflected on what makes the underlying assumptions of PBL so different than conventional learning. Besides for the obvious shifts from teacher to student-focused classrooms, I also think, in other words, that there is an essential shift in values. Unlike traditional, conventional classrooms,

• PBL demands institutional comfort with student experimentation, failure, processing, and reflection. Learning looks very messy in a PBL classroom, because the process of creating a project has to be inclusive enough to allow for failure and refinement--prototyping and iteration, in the earlier "Design Thinking" stages of PBL. 
• PBL assumes that learning should address real life, real world problems--that the learning should speak to people beyond the particular scope of a skills goal or thematic inquiry into an obscure text. Instead of focusing on studying content--Shakespeare--for its own sake, a PBL unit focuses instead on the contemporary relevance of Shakespeare, or focuses instead on even greater, abstract, Shakespearean questions (e.g. "How do we understand the complex failures of great leaders?") in the context of Shakespeare and other works and media. 
• Because PBL is so interested in process-based learning, it is also OK bracketing sophisticated reasoning and analysis within the learning, to a certain degree. This emerges in the framing of driving questions. Instead of asking why something is the case, we ask how might  instead (e.g. how might we see the Exodus narrative as related to narratives of modern slavery?)
• PBL demands self-paced inquiry, but it also demands working with others through collaboration as a necessary means for realizing the project. Group work, in other words, is not in service of one's project--it is the very substance of the project, too. 
• PBL embraces differentiation as a necessary aspect of learning--every student's voice and choice is honored, and from initial framing of research topics, through the process of learning, to the creation and presentation or publication of a product. Students with IEPs, in conventional classrooms, require accommodations. PBL is itself the accommodation in allow that same student varied forms of expression.
• PBL embraces unconventional demonstrations of learning. If I were to redesign my unit on Jekyll and Hyde as a PBL unit with the driving question "How many people are you?" then students could express their mastery of the question through various means: plays, symbolic graphic novels, poetry, songs, visual art. Not every student needs to demonstrate mastery of the literary essay, in other words, in such a unit.
• In its reach towards greater real-world questions and projects, PBL expands its focus from particular texts to greater ideas or problems as demanding mastery or expression. In the Jekyll and Hyde unit, students who struggled with the complex diction and syntax of the novella could still express mastery in the unit through an original project that addresses the driving question in a meaningful manner. 

PBL Today: 21st Century Learning

Though PBL is not new--John Dewey pushed it in the early 20th century, and it was popular in the 1970's but lacked rigor, the return to PBL is supported by the rising trend of technologically infused and informed schools, as well as research and rigor driving PBL, generally speaking.

First, PBL mimics much of 21st century work, which demands independent learning--teaching as self-teaching--through the use of technology and collaboration. Much as Khan's One World Schoolhouse suggested, self-paced learning through the thoughtful use of technology in and out of the classroom teaches life-long learning and productivity. Second, PBL's recent rebirth embraces standards, rubrics, and skills-based classrooms, and has been the subject of a fair amount of research. It is, in other words, far more founded in its place in 21st century education.

I'm glad that I attended this conference. So much of what I do already just needs to be foregrounded and fitted into a PBL model, language, and execution--and it will be that much greater. Looking forward, I'd like to do the following:

1. Foreground my essential, year-long and particular unit questions for each grade level of English as PBL questions that are real-world, real-life questions (e.g. "How do we grow as writers?" "How many people are we?"). To do this, I'll incorporate interviewing between students--and between students and myself in teacher/student conferences--as a process for sharing and tweaking. 
2. Foreground the project for the year and for the unit as related to the driving question and as a process and choice of the student. As I've done in the past, I intend to continue to run my class as a portfolio-driven class. But the "portfolio" as a concept simply needs to express learning through examples of work throughout the year--and it can do so by answering the driving question ("How do I grow as a writer?") in a variety of media (e.g. Google Site, video recorded play, published book, oral history!). For each unit, I want to ensure that the driving question reigns above (ideally complements) the particular skills and goals that we continue to stress as grade-level standards.
3. Foreground each driving question as contributing to each unit or year-long project. 

Questions that still remain include the role of homework, the more challenging texts (e.g. Macbeth) that are usually taught in lecture form--scene-by-scene, passage-by-passage. There's a flexibility that the conventional English classroom can offer the PBL minded teacher without altering its form--up to a certain point.

As Tikvah stressed in her session on dispositions on PBL teachers, I think that success will be experienced in being flexible and communicative with all stakeholders, though I trust that students will enjoy this sort of learning. I know that they love writing in their journals, reflecting on their learning, and crafting their self-assessments and portfolios. Weaving these elements into the vision of the PBL classroom will only enable a more unified, integrated, and meaningful learning experience.