Project Based Learning
now in project-based learning as opposed to activity-based or direct instruction learning is framed around more extended projects that can go for an entire lesson through to an entire semester sometimes even an entire year so that means we have to plan out project-based learning in a different way it also means it's a very different experience for the students now generally project-based learning would involve a range of steps we tend to follow the Project Life Cycle that you may have experienced in industry but they'll start with some sort of inquiry stage or research stage and then students will plan and create their designs and often we'll have them create multiple designs multiple options that they will then choose between for the actual implementation of a solution so they'll then create and test their Solutions and then they'll evaluate and often present their Solutions in some form so the curriculum has in the processes and production skills these set down as learning elements content descriptors but in general projects and project-based learning follows through that General cycle in its most simplest form it's called the design developer evaluate cycle where we designed something we develop it and then we evaluate it but there are lots of other little elements that we can add on to each of those stages some models have 20 or 30 stages and we'll be looking at one model challenge-based learning which has a few other variations to the basic model now there are two main types of project-based learning there's intrinsic and extrinsic and it relates to behaviorism and it relates to students um we'll call locus of control their involvement with the the project so in extrinsic um project-based learning the motivation is generally external to the student the teacher sets the task okay um it may be everyone is to develop a database for the sports Carnival where it goes through and we collect all the data from the events and we summarize it and able to present that on a big screen in terms of who's broken what what records and so forth using a database now that is set externally they've been given those specifications by a client by the teacher but they haven't had any decision on what to do they may have some capability deciding on how to do it but sometimes even that can be extrinsic where the teacher says okay we're going to use a spreadsheet and they may even go to the extreme of doing it as a work through where you demonstrate how to create a table then the students create the table and you demonstrate how to query the table and the students query the table and everything is done in a teacher-centered way that's one approach to project-based learning and often represented as worksheets or instructional guides or step-by-step tutorials and assembly takes students through creating the output of a project but not necessarily being involved in the decision making within the project now intrinsic project-based learning allows students to have a lot more decision around the various stages of a project and this depends upon their level of experience and also their level of maturity for beginning students or students in the younger years often we would frame things for them such as giving them the problem for more advanced students we may allow them to come up with the actual problem now we might say take the UN development goals and identify a problem to be solved using digital Technologies sort of at a sort of most extreme in terms of openness of the project more likely because we want to see certain curriculum goals achieved we would say you need to in developing the solution to your project you need to incorporate a database you need to have various elements of a programming language demonstrated such as iteration selection and modularity so that we can actually then assess specific things because sometimes a project solution might be valid but not necessarily have achieved the learning outcomes that we need to see demonstrated for their overall learning in terms of the curriculum guidance so we'll generally always give them some constraints around their projects but wherever possible we should try to allow students to have um decision making around the project processes now this again can be done in groups so students might work with their peers and have to come up with a collaborative decision around these various stages that where possible in intrinsic project-based learning students have that control and that tends to be a more effective learning process where students have intrinsic motivation it tends to be much more effective than extrinsic motivation in terms of behaviorist learning theory okay so this again involves a shift from what we see in direct instruction to from teacher-centered to student-centered learning in student-centered learning students are investigating things much more of interest to themselves so they may find a particular problem to be solved that relates to computer games so like that they've got a passion and interest around and so they are developing a solution around that another group of students might have a passion around um animals and developing a solution around Animal Welfare management and control so one aspect of project-based learning is that you can see differentiation where students are learning in different ways and project-based learning actually makes that relatively easy now it does impose more difficulties for on you as a teacher if everyone is doing the same project that makes it easier for you to manage that process and to provide support and guidance and instruction because you could just just do the same thing for all of your students the more confident and experienced you become the more you'll be able to cater for for different groups doing different things and ideally eventually you'll get to a stage where you can allow students to individually explore different solutions and be able to support up to 20 or 30 different projects being explored by different students now that takes time and experience with you as a teacher to develop that capacity so you shouldn't try that straight away um often you experiment with your capacity in allowing say two groups to do two different projects and see how you go with that and then if that works well then you might do three or four groups and you slowly Build Your Capacity as a teacher to manage differentiation and multiple projects that digital Technologies is good in that way particularly through project-based learning in that allows differentiation to occur in a fairly controlled and managed way okay so in general there'll be a progression from intrinsic project-based learning to extrinsic where when you first start out with a class and you don't know them very well you don't haven't set expectations you don't know their capacity They Don't Know Your Capacity you'll start with intrinsic based sorry extrinsic based activities well they'll work through a worksheet or an online tutorial or some sort of much more guided activities and projects and then over time you'll allow them more and more freedom to express their own individuality in their own interests in intrinsic project-based learning now I've given you a couple of examples of project-based learning that incorporate the various elements of the thinking skills and content descriptors one is around students developing a solution that ends up being a Quidditch game using some robot balls and another on community meals developing a more database based solution so you can have a look at those that may go through the process that the students would have gone through in coming up with their ideas and working through developing the solutions to a project yeah one aspect of project-based learning is often teamwork and collaboration where students work in groups now this opens up its own challenges and difficulties now in the main we do collaboration and teamwork a lot in high school doesn't necessarily generally it's only when we get to tertiary when students start really hating collaboration and teamwork of course becomes more high stakes testing and and so forth but in schools students don't tend to mind at all working in teams and groups and in fact many of them like that approach to learning but it does need to be managed um you don't want students some students relying upon other students to do all the work which is the main complaint at a tertiary level but students will tend to form friendship groups in schools part of their learning is about how to socialize and form friendships and you can support that learning it shouldn't be seen as something you need to fight against so allowing students to self-form their own groups can be a very effective approach but sometimes you want students to think about um project management and teamwork from a different perspective so one aspect of that is around capabilities and human capacity and seeing humans as a resource HR human resource management so in this approach having students identify what they need in their team in order for it to be successful so they may need someone that's really good at doing Graphics they need someone that's really good at doing the mathematical coding elements they may need someone that's really good at doing the interface design they may need someone's really good at doing presentations and presenting their ideas and their friendship group their existing teams may not necessarily have all those skill sets so strategically thinking about who needs to be in a team is an important skill that students need to develop and that's hard for them because they can conflict with their friendship requirements so often you have to enforce that process and make the teams be constructed in a way that don't just rely upon them drawing in their friends so a lot of different aspects around collaboration and teamwork and developing leadership skills but also Fellowship skills as a lot of theoretical processes that can be brought into play around that but don't see all the processes of team work as negatives positive conflict is an important part of teams and of creativity having students argue their positions and disagree with one dollar is an important part of a collaborative process um so these are things you actually have to promote whereas in the main in schools we try to minimize conflict sometimes in teamwork we have to actually um encourage it and actually get students to present different ideas and differing ideas and argue argue those so there's a whole range of aspects around team formation and team development that you need to read about and over time you'll develop skills around these and as we explore the various activities that you can do in digital Technologies some of these will come into play one aspect that you should be thinking around in to do with creativity and there's the whole creativity and critical thinking uh General capability but one element that's particularly important for digital Technologies is around what's called moonshot thinking or solving for x and this is being ambitious in our learning goals particularly if you allow students to set the learning goal um having them think about what they can do that goes beyond their limitations of course one aspect of learning this is called bigotsky's um learning theory or zone of proximal development is that we should always set learning just beyond what students are capable of so if they've been able to demonstrate they can do something in the past they should always now try to do something a little bit beyond that not so far that it's beyond their capability and that's where your guidance can come into play say if you're doing game development and students want to go off and develop a a game in unity which is well beyond the capacity of most middle schoolers so even though they might have the desire to create a a professional game that often involves many billions of dollars over many years with hundreds of people involved in the development um you have to temper that desire with the capacities that you know that they are able to achieve but you want them to go beyond what they've been able to demonstrate in the past that they've been able to do in terms of their software development and potential game development so you assist students in identifying what they're capable of and then say okay how about you try to do this now it's going to be beyond what they already know how to do so they're going to have to do some new learning the games have to investigate some new elements of coding or databasing or limits of gaming and incorporate that in with their existing knowledge to go beyond what they are already able to show that they can do but not so far as it's beyond their capacity so that's part of what we call moonshot thinking it's also trying to really um explore things that they don't necessarily think that they're capable of um and that's X thinking this is really trying to come up with some really really ambitious Solutions now that is a conflict with what I've just said around bringing it into their capacity but often in our initial explorations of a problem we can set the goal at trying to solve really really audacious problems so to solve the problem of um global warming so that is set out as the goal now as students then think about how they can come up with a solution to that it comes more into the Realms of reality but we can still set the goal because you never know your students may actually come up with the solution it's highly unlikely but it's not outside the Realms of possibility so we should always still keep within the prospect of what we're trying to do solving things at a really really high level but then as they work through what is possible and what they can achieve that then comes back more within the Realms of reality and that's part of the problem-solving process so think about um the idea of extincting and then finally what I want you to do is to look at challenge-based Learning this was a particular version of project-based learning that was developed through a rigorous experimental process which was done to identify whether or not it would be an effective learning approach and teaching approach but it has a more rigid structure than a more General approach to project-based learning but it has some particular guidance and structures in there that allow you to develop the various stages of project-based learning in a more comprehensive way so I encourage you to look at challenge-based learning and we'll discuss that more in the tutorials but the final thing we need to talk about is classroom management now well-developed projects that engage students negate most classroom management issues if students want to be doing an activity are exploring something that they're passionately interested in they won't be disruptive or if they are you can simply um put the threat of not doing the activity that they're passionate about to them and they would come into line very quickly of course they want to be doing it they want to be doing the learning and that removes 99 of all of your issues they'll still sometimes be extraneous issues where students are having something happening outside of the classroom that's impacting upon their behavior in the classroom you can't do a lot about that but good project-based learning can help alleviate those of course if they want to be doing their learning activity even if they are having things outside of your control that are impacting upon their potential Behavior they will tend to try to suppress that because they want to stay part of the learning activity so identifying things that students are passionately interested about and allowing them to explore that through project-based learning can eliminate most of your classroom management issues that said there are still things that you need to manage in project-based learning particularly Team Dynamics while I said that positive conflict Can Be an Effective tool sometimes that positive conflict can um go into negative conflict where students are too passionate or too forceful around their particular approaches or too domineering and you do have to manage that you have to make sure that no particular students are trying to take over too much control now this particularly becomes an important aspect around gender where boys tend to express dominance around technology tasks at the expense of female students so sometimes you need to enforce particular rules and structures now it may be all girl teams but also maybe where you assign roles within teams and you assign certain roles to certain students so particularly for those students that might be a little bit shy you might give them leadership roles and and enforce that within the project teams um you might have the role of the coder being given to a student that would necessarily be more timid in that role or where they might be um there might be a tendency for others to dominate that role particularly for boys over the girls so often they would have the girls being the coders and the boys being part of the design processes and other elements where they would Express their designs to the girls to then do the coding so you have to just be aware of what's Happening and make sure that all the students are experiencing a positive learning process in project-based learning you still want to sit in place certain levels of predictability and structures so that students know that there'll be times when you need to explain things to the whole group and so they have to withdraw from the individual project-based elements and attend to your explanations or when you arrive at their project team they need to then um allow you or explain what they're doing to you and for you to then take on the guidance that you provide them so there are certain structures that you put in place in expectations around project-based learning also around how they interact with other groups sometimes there's a tendency for some groups to want to find out what other groups are doing and learn from that or steal their ideas as some might interpret it so you do sometimes have to manage those processes but sometimes that can be done in a positive way creating a competitive environment where students are competing against each other in their projects but again that needs to be balanced um some very effective techniques can be when students uncover a new approach or develop a new capacity sharing that with other students so if one student has learned how to do say nested iterations having them share that and explain that to other students or if they found a new resource on the Internet or new element that's useful in their projects utilizing that as a teachable moment where the students can then explain what they've found that gives them Kudos but it also then helps percolate those ideas throughout the group
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