Written by Image from: http://www.jborden.com/the-best-laid-plans/
Progress Update:
It has been a busy couple of weeks, we are in the process of buying our first house, at school, we have had Parent Teacher Interviews (and all the last minute marking in preparation for them).
I have been starting to find that my ‘best laid plans’ look rather different outside my head. As soon as other real world factors such as course team members and students (not to mention day-to-day school stuff) are introduced, the plan begins to diverge and become increasingly complicated. On reflection, so far the Project Based Learning model experiment in Careers has produced some mixed results.
The Good: A couple of the mini-projects we did – an illustrated timeline of each student’s life 0-30 years, and a design your own personality test (joint project with Computer Science) have been a real success. I think it definitely helped allowing students greater autonomy and choice during these projects, certainly lead to more authentic, original products.
The Bad: We kind of fell off the wagon a bit when things got busy a few weeks ago. This meant we did not have as much time to collaborate as a course team and defaulted to more of a traditional instruction model for the quality of life mini-unit. We are aiming for a zero homework course, so one success of the infographic assignment was that most students were able to finish it during a single work period. It was interesting to see how the quality and creativity was significantly less than the previous assignments though.
The Ugly: With Parent Teacher Interviews and different classes having fewer lessons to date, a couple of classes have fallen 2 lessons adrift from the other 3. This has meant that our course team planning has been even more tricky. The most recent ‘Choose your own adventure’ Career Route Map assignment turned into a bit of a worksheet style activity. In my head, I was imagining these extensive multi-layered plans to show multiple routes from ‘high school student’ to ‘a career of choice’. In reality, what I got was large sheets of paper with some scrappy hand drawn flow charts. This was a useful lesson in the value of scaffolding activities, rather than expecting students to be able to interpret written instructions, without exemplars. The fact that we are doing many of these assignments for the first time has been tough when students have asked ‘do you have an example of past work I could look at?’. The second year through it should get easier… You live and learn.
Moving Forwards: All is not lost, this is when the perseverance kicks in. I think something I have learned through my experiments so far, is that not everyone is going to share / understand my vision until I can provide some concrete examples. Even then, there are bound to be things I would do differently next time around. I am going to endeavor to prepare materials ahead of time and offer to take on more responsibility for planning when time is short. I think the key to future success in projects is to have very clear expectations and to provide a thinking / planning framework for students to work through, rater than a simple assignment sheet. Even mini-projects lasting 1-2 lessons should be broken into more manageable chunks, rather than launched and left.
I am sure there will continue to be mixed terrain before things start to level out – isn’t that what helps keep things interesting?
Laura
Thanks so much for sharing, Laura. It’s nice to hear that I’m not the only experiencing good, bad, and ugly with some of the new approaches I’m trying. At the heart of your post is something I think we all need to be better at – accepting the fact that we are not perfect, things will not always go the way we planned, AND THAT’S OK! Students are resilient and they are forgiving. I think they appreciate seeing our “human side” from time to time where we can admit to them, “that didn’t go how I planned, it’s on me, I’ll be better moving forward”.
Hi Michael,
Thanks for your comment. Yes, I actually launched the Careers course at the beginning of the year as an opportunity for me to share and experiment with different projects and technology. For our students, Careers has not always been particularly valued. I am attempting to re-brand it as both a chance to unwind, and do something less academic, but also try out different thinking / inquiry frameworks in a low risk situation. One of the things we stress is the importance of developing soft skills, these should include self-evaluation and resiliency, in addition to communication, organisation etc. This year, it feels a bit more of a shared experience because we are all learning together. We also benefit from having relatively light course content, so I have lots of time to lay the necessary ground work for new technology and frameworks. I try to lead by example for my students in this regard – I usually have a backup plan and adapt my lessons if things don’t turn out as planned (which I am sure we have all experience many times!). What I am aiming to do is to transfer all the best bits to my Geography courses.
Many thanks,
Laura
Hi @lross,
Thanks for your honest reflection! It’s easy to talk about the good but far harder to put yourself out there and admit that things aren’t going as planned, as well as sharing the student perspective.
The exemplars piece is interesting, because it’s great to see something someone else did but if they are trying to make something for themselves, do exemplars stifle creativity or give students a place from which to jump? I think it depends on the student. I think the role of feedback in these situations is a big part of it as well, and I wonder if there are opportunities for peer feedback and what this looks like in your project based approach?
We certainly all feel the crunch at certain times of year, we’re not all that unlike our students in that way are we? I think @acampbellrogers recent post about spaghetti junction is a great one! Not really about the crunch rather an iterative look at what education is in the 21st century.
Hi @ddoucet,
Thanks for your comments. I have a tendency to be quite self-critical (as many people do), but feel that it helps me to strive to continually improve what I do. If you feel like things are easy and running perfectly, you are probably not aiming high enough! I try to encourage my students to have high expectations of themselves, so that they do not limit themselves in terms of what they can achieve. No matter how well you do, you can always improve.
I agree with you on exemplars – they can be a help or a hindrance to creativity for some students. So far this term, I feel like we haven’t provided enough scaffolding for some tasks, so students have been slow to start – they need no encouragement to procrastinate 🙂
I think prioritizing goals and tasks is important, both for us and our students. I enjoy getting stuck into new challenges and find that I need to build some momentum to continue with my plans for the long term. I suppose this echos the importance of providing feedback to students during projects, so that they feel more able to progress and complete the assignment after the initial planning phase.
Thanks again,
Laura
Hello @lross,
I really enjoyed how you structured your post into GOOD, BAD, and UGLY and helped model the importance of showcasing vulnerability for when initiatives don’t go as well as planned.
Your entire blog is actually a case study in perfect teacher reflection: I had a clear sense of what you were hoping to attempt, your observation on the activity itself, and, of course, thoughts on how to improve for next time.
I amplify @ddoucet when he mentions the role of feedback, remembering to not work harder than your students when “taking on more responsibility for planning”.
E.B. Daigle
Hi @edaigle,
Thanks for your comments. I was made to watch a lot of Westerns growing up 🙂 I think it is important to embrace success and failure – usually, if you have a good plan in place, these failures are minimal, but I find I learn most from what went wrong, rather than what went right. Analyzing mistakes, or ‘areas for improvement’ is what staves off complacency. I don’t think I have ever taught the same thing, in the same way twice. For one thing, it would make my job rather boring. I think it is important to be flexible and adapt plans to suit the needs of your students in any given class, rather than doggedly stick to a tried and tested mode of instruction.
I think for my plans to come to fruition, I will need to take on more responsibility for the planning and take some of the burden from my colleagues. I am enjoying handing over more responsibility for the learning to my students though. I need to work smarter, not harder between now and the end of term…
Thanks,
Laura