For our current Professional Learning Teams focus at Parramatta Marist, we have been examining the recent work from the Buck Institute, Setting the Standard for Project Based Learning, by John Larmer, John Mergendoller and Suzie Boss.

We know that in our context, we consistently produce what we would consider very ‘good‘ PBL projects, many of which exhibit elements of ‘greatness‘.  We were hoping that by engaging with this resource, we could shift some of our ‘good‘ projects to being ‘great‘ projects.

I thought a good way to examine some elements of Gold Standard PBL would be through some examples from a current Year 9 integrated History and English Project: The Shadows of the Shoah.  This project saw students challenged to construct an interactive museum exhibit to highlight how one historical personality was affected by their experiences in the Holocaust. While this is a good project, there are still some aspects of the project that we can improve and so I thought I would discuss only 2 the Buck Institute’s revised 8 Essential Elements of PBL; Public Audience (which I’ve extended to include broader adult connections) and student Voice and Choice.

Public Audience

PBL experiences can connect them with experts and learning experiences they might otherwise miss. Larmer, Mergendoller & Boss, 2015

Project Based Learning provides us with unique opportunities to engage our students in meaningful real-world situations, connecting them with expertise in the field to support their learning and provide feedback.

For The Shadows of the Shoah, we launched our project with a lecture from an external expert. Dr Jan Lanicek from the University of New South Wales was kind enough to offer his time to provide a 40 minute lecture to pour students, introducing the Second World War and the Holocaust in general. Dr Lanicek is an historian who specialises in and has written extensively on this aspect of history. Although Dr Lanicek was unable to be physically present for the session, due to his schedule at the university, we managed to FaceTime him in to the students in our theatre.

Dr Lanicek was able to pitch the lecture at the student level and provide them with some excellent resources to start their project journey. It was a great experience and added weight to the task the students were asked to undertake.

Below is a short video of the lecture:

Another external connection we fostered throughout the project was with Museum Victoria. We connected with the museum education team who were able to share some very relevant resources on the role of museum curators and the construction of museum exhibitions.

Jan Malloy, Cam Hocking and Liz Suda were excellent contacts throughout the project. Their advice in terms of project design was indispensable and the resources they suggested we use were terrific and supported the students effectively throughout the project.

This connection culminated with a skype session with Liz Suda and Cam Hocking. Although technical difficulties meant that not all students were able to attend this session, the students involved found the opportunity to ask questions of the curators very beneficial. Liz was able to respond to all of the student’s questions with relevant examples from their own museum. The team were also kind enough to record the session for us so we could ensure all students had the opportunity to benefit from the session.

Below is a short clip from our hour long session with Liz and Cam.

Below is a short student reflection from a student involved in the museum Skype.

Another adult connection we were able to make was with the Auschwitz Memorial in Poland. Maddie Cleveringa, my team teacher for this project made this connection through Twitter and asked if there was a possibility of skyping our students in. Pawel Sawicki, one of their museum educators, was a terrific contact and was open to the possibility of a live skype; something they had never tried before!

Due to the time difference between Australia and Poland, we needed to organise the Skype for after school one afternoon. A large number of boys stayed behind after school to be a part of the experience.

This was such a powerful experience for our students and a reminder of how technology has become an important tool in bridging gaps and making connections. Having our students ask questions of Pawel as he walked them around the site was amazing. Being taken into the gas chambers at Auschwitz I, shown the barbed wire fences and having Pawel stand beneath the famous sign “Arbeit Macht Frei”, “Work Sets One Free” was truly a unique experience.

Student Voice and Choice

‘Some are concerned about controlling the classroom and planning every minute, so conducting a project with student voice and choice just seem too ‘messy’ and fraught with uncertainty’ Larmer, Mergendoller & Boss, 2015

Student voice and choice is such an important aspect of Project Based Learning. Although providing these opportunities can be fraught with challenges (more on that later), the benefits for the students far outweigh these limitations.

For our Holocaust project, we sought to provide a number of opportunities for students to provide their own voice and make their own choices.

Students had some ownership over:

• Their team members for the project
• The personality they chose to research
• The style of narrative they produced
• The structure of their museum exhibit
• The artifacts they produced

One of the benefits of allowing students freedom of choice is that their end products are unique and more of a representation of the student, rather than being simply a ‘paint by numbers’ or ‘cookie cutter’ style of end product.

Cognitive dissonance can also be fostered through the provision of opportunities for students to make choices. When we ask students to direct their own learning throughout a project, this can cause friction within and between groups as students put forth ideas and challenge one another’s opinions in seeking to come to a consensus. These are unique learning opportunities for our students who we hope can take these skills forward into new situations when they leave our classrooms. This is well summed up by Larmer, Mergendoller and Boss.

‘Faced with a challenging problem or question, students must be able to exercise judgment and make decisions about how to resolve it. Otherwise the project becomes an exercise, a set of directions to follow.’ Larmer, Mergendoller & Boss, 2015

Below we have some students discussing the challenges they faced wit the choices they needed to make throughout the project.

Intrinsic motivation is also fostered when we provide opportunities for students to make decisions about their learning. Larmer, Mergendoller and Boss also make this point very clear:

In terms of motivation, giving students an opportunity to express their own ideas and opinions and make choices during project work validates the basic drives of autonomy and competence, and contributes to intrinsic motivation (Brophy, 2013).   Larmer, Mergendoller & Boss, 2015

Below we have some students discussing the choices they made throughout the project and how this led to a sense of motivation:

The End Product

The work students produced in their end product was very impressive. The variety that excited in terms of the presentation of their museum exhibits was a testament to the choices they were afforded throughout the project. The quality of the work that was produced can be attributed in many respects to the opportunities students had to engage with experts globally.

This was such an enjoyable project to facilitate and our boys gained a great deal from the experiences they shared throughout the project.

I’ll put together another blog post soon with some examples of student work.

Update – our data wall populated below…

The Why

Throughout Term 1, in our Professional Learning Teams, we have been working  on a whole-school literacy initiative focused on improving students writing. The DEC Literacy Continuum provided the framework for our work. As the continuum is so broad, encompassing 8 literacy foci, we took the decision to focus only on the Aspects of Writing component of the continuum. The reason for this is that our NAPLAN data for the past three years had seen our Year 7 and 9 students demonstrate improvement in some areas of their writing, but this was still a weakness our students were demonstrating, in comparison to the Reading and Numeracy components of NAPLAN. The Aspects of Writing component of the Literacy Continuum is also one the 8 elements that is not considered ‘constrained’, based on the work of Paris (2005). These  ‘unconstrained’ stills are those that continue to grow and develop throughout a child’s lifetime and therefore are the areas on which we are more likely to have an impact with a whole-school literacy initiative. See image below from here.

The What

We launched our PLT focus at the beginning of the term and charged our teachers with examining a variety of samples of student work and using the Aspects of Writing component of the Literacy Continuum to map students on our Data Wall.

Using the Technology

Our school has recently switched to using Sentral as our main student data management system (administration, assessment, attendance, communication, etc). Sentral includes as a part of its package a Continuum Tracker, which was a great tool to help us track student placement on the Aspects of Writing component of the Literacy Continuum. This was particularly important as we often had numerous teachers examining work for the same student and making independent judgments in regards to which clusters students were presenting at on the continuum, at that point, for the sample of writing the the teacher had chosen to examine. The Continuum Tracker allowed us to click on and off individual markers on the continuum so we could keep track of where students were at any point. When you hover over a marker that has been clicked on, a pop-up indicates which staff member had flagged this marker and the date. Sentral also allows you to see at a glance an overview of where students are placed on the various aspects of the Literacy COntinuum. You can see an example of this feature below. Any cluster where students have a marker highlighter will be shown in green and yes, that is me …

Introducing Literacy Interventions

The work did not stop with the mapping of students on the continuum. Staff were also challenged to develop and implement literacy interventions that would serve support the needs they had identified for students in their classes. A raft of writing strategies and activities were provided and our teachers had time and opportunities to discuss in their teams what they felt would best serve to support the learning of their students. They were also able to to unpack how much success these interventions had on the learning of their students each fortnight.

Data Walls

Our diocese has been successfully implementing Data Walls for the past four years, based on the work of Michael Fullan and Lyn Sharratt in their work Putting Faces on the Data. Below you can see Lyn Sharratt discussing how Data Walls support schools as they develop strategies and interventions to support students in their learning.

One challenge we have found with our Data Wall implementation is that, with such a large staff, there was not as much teacher ownership of where the students ‘are at’ with their progression on the wall. Another inhibiting factor was that the students were placed on the Data Wall based on the PATR test, an excellent diagnostic test, but one that teachers were not involved in developing or for which they needed to provide feedback. We hoped that by utilising the literacy continuum, with each teacher involved in examining student work and physically placing students on our Data Wall, we would see much more ownership of the wall itself and subsequently, of student writing.

The Challenges

The Professional Learning Team focus was a replacement of an earlier iteration of a whole-school literacy initiative called Hot Paragraphs. I have previously blogged about the successes and challenges of this initiative. We had thought that this new approach to literacy would be somewhat less taxing on our teaching staff and somewhat easier to  implement.

We were wrong. This was very challenging for our staff who found it difficult to engage with the complex language of the Literacy Continuum. Staff were also concerned about placing the students on the Data Wall as they feared they might ‘get it wrong’. This provided us with opportunities to work with each team to allay these fears and remind them that more important than perfect placement on the continuum was that we had begun what was to be an ongoing discussion about the literacy needs of our students and how we can support them with their writing. What was terrific was the genuine concern of our teachers to ensure that they were doing justice to this process and that their students were fairly represented on the Data Wall.

I think for most teachers, the act of physically placing the students on the data wall was very powerful. The discussions it generated around student writing and what we are all doing in our classes to improve writing were deep and thought provoking.

 One of our Professional Learning Teams placing their students on our Data Wall

Where to from here?

The work doesn’t stop here… To maintain ownership of our Data Wall, our staff will continue to examine student writing samples from their allocated class during our PLT sessions throughout the remainder of the year. While the placing of the students on the Data Wall was exciting, looking forward to seeing our teachers owning the process of moving their students’ profiles into higher clusters on the Literacy Continuum as we progress through the year.

An excellent blog by Ginger Lewman on the importance of ensuring we are doing PBL and not simply projects.

In putting together the program for our Professional Learning Teams focus on assessment I was thinking about how little we tend to focus on Assessment ‘as’ Learning. The past couple of decades has rightly seen the focus of assessment shifted clearly from solely valuing Assessment ‘of’ Learning, or summative assessment to acknowledging the important place of formative assessment in the learning cycle.

Work from influential learning theorists like Dylan Wiliam has seen a Assessment ‘for’ Learning, or formative assessment, recognised as one of the most important measures of student learning and achievement in our classes.

Despite even this new focus on Assessment for Learning, a quick Google search reveals where the majority of the attention is given:

Lorna Earl‘s 2003 work, Assessment for Learning: Using Classroom assessment to maximise student learning, presented the assessment pyramid as we traditionally identify it:

However, she suggests that this pyramid would be much better if inverted:

Assessment as learning, according to Earl, should be the foundation of all of our assessment practice and should be the most utilised for of assessment in our arsenal.

So What is Assessment as Learning?

Given the dearth of information on Assessment as Learning, this is probably a very good question to begin with. Lets have a look at what BOSTES suggests compromises Assessment of Learning:

Assessment as learning occurs when students are their own assessors. Students monitor their own learning, ask questions and use a range of strategies to decide what they know and can do, and how to use assessment for new learning.

Assessment as learning:

• encourages students to take responsibility for their own learning
• requires students to ask questions about their learning
• involves teachers and students creating learning goals to encourage growth and development
• provides ways for students to use formal and informal feedback and self-assessment to help them understand the next steps in learning encourages peer assessment, self assessment and reflection

Surprising?

Probably not, especially when strategies such as ‘self-questioning’, ‘metacognitive strategies’, ‘reciprocal teaching’, and in particular ‘self-reported grades’ are all ranked so highly in John Hattie’s meta-analysis of influences and effect sizes on student achievement. 

Assessment ‘as’ Learning and PBL: an organic union?

I really think that student-centred pedagogies like Project and Problem Based Learning organically foster opportunities for Assessment as Learning. When students are working in a group, and that group is working well, they naturally turn to one another for feedback, often before they will turn to the teacher.

I was thinking about this while conducting a Learning Walk the other day. I had asked a student if he was doing well in the class and he replied that he thought he was. When I asked him how he knew he was doing well, his reply had nothing to do with formative or summative tasks or marks and grades. He said something like: “we’ve regularly compared what we have done to the marking guidelines and discussed how well we think we are meeting the elements and we think we are going well. We check each others’ work and make suggestions to improve it.” When I asked another student where he turned to when he was stuck he said: “I ask my team members first and then I check back to the marking guidelines and check the assessment notification.” Another student, when asked the same question, told me that he often looked at the driving question when he was stuck, as it helped him ensure he was on the right track.

Beyond the Organics: actively promoting Assessment as Learning

I think the answer lies here in the use of protocols to promote student critique of their own and their peer’s learning. There is something about using a protocol in class that provides students with a safety net for examining work. If you’ve not used protocols much in your classes before, the National School Reform Faculty provides a wealth of information and examples to get you started.

For us, the Critical Friends protocol is a go to protocol for staff and students alike. It allows students to be ‘hard on the content’ whilst being ‘soft on the person’.

Other great protocols for having students examine one another’s work include:

• Gallery Walks
• Tuning Protocols
• Writing Workshops

Online Student Portfolios: The Holy Grail of Assessment as Learning?

This is something we looked at maybe three or four years ago, but I honestly don’t think we were quite ready for it. Some of my colleagues visited High Tech High last month for their Deeper Learning Conference and engaged in a Deep Dive to examine the power of student created digital portfolios.

These allow students to purposefully reflect on their own learning, to analyse their own strengths and weaknesses, to target areas of improvement, to highlight their learning growth and to curate a body of their own work for public display. I can’t think of anything better as a tool for Assessment as Learning.

Jeff Phillips and Stephen Henriques, two of my colleagues, were incredibly impressed with one High Tech High Year 11 student who was proud to share her digital portfolio. This is an incredible piece of work which highlights her experience of the learning process, demonstrates her 21st Century skills and will support her transition to university and career. For this student, the digital portfolio was an investment in her own learning, not a high school assessment activity. She plans to maintain and add to the work she has already begun.

To Conclude?

We may not have been ready to embark on digital portfolios a few years ago, but we are more than ready now and Year 7 will be beginning the process in the coming weeks.

So are digital portfolios the Holy Grail? Perhaps not, but I think that this is one way to ensure that our students are provided with opportunities for Assessment as Learning.