Final Blog: Course Reflection

What do you now understand best about Project Based Learning? What do you understand least?

Prior to this course I had only a vague idea of what project based learning was. After working on my own PBL unit, I had to redefine my notion of what a “project” entailed. My pre-EdTech 542 understanding of a project was having students work on a research paper that I would grade and a presentation that students would present to their peers, but which, ultimately again, I would grade. The feature of PBL that struck me the most is its heavy emphasis on reflection, reflection not only on the student's’ part, but also more importantly on the instructor’s. The driving question relies on a reflective process to be effectively constructed, the activities that are deployed during the PBL unit rely on the instructor’s continuous reflection on student progress, and the success of future PBL units relies on the instructor’s reflection on the student products and outcomes of a completed unit.

What I am still a bit unclear about is whether lectures or mini-lectures of any type have a place in a PBL unit. In my teaching context, students are learning skills rather than concepts. Many of these skills such as the proper application of grammar and vocabulary require explanations of grammatical forms, abstract meanings, and examples of use. In addition, in the ESL context, learners may require multiple variations of an explanation of a particular topic. In the effort to be a “guide on the side” is anything that resembles lecturing abandoned in a PBL context?

What did you expect to learn in this course? What did you actually learn? More, less, and why?

I enrolled in this course expecting to learn how to effectively incorporate projects into my teaching context. As I mentioned above I didn’t have a clear picture of what project based instruction looked like. As I progressed through the course I learned the specifics of incorporating an effective PBL unit into my teaching context. I have a clearer understanding of the main features of PBL (e.g. a clear driving question, sub-questions that promote critical thinking, multiple opportunities for student reflection, and a product or service that is presented to an authentic audience). I was also able to clearly see how PBL naturally lends itself to the critical and creative thinking characteristic of the higher order thinking levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy.

What will you do with what you have learned?

I plan to present the PBL unit that I’ve created in this course to my peers in the ESL department. Since the department is fairly open to new pedagogy, I should have no problem convincing my peers to allow me to pilot the project. After having my students present their projects to the ESL faculty and having my peers rate the in-class essays (summative assessment), I will report on the overall PBL experience, make adjustments to the unit as required, and recommend that other sections implement the same or similar project during future semesters. Although my goal would be to implement Gold Standard PBL a few trails and revisions will probably be required. I might also suggest the PBL format for courses at lower level courses in the credit ESL department, non-credit ESL department, and Intensive English Program.

Post Project Reflection

Who will you involve in the process?

In a perfect world where everyone has an unlimited amount of time and everyone's schedule revolves around my schedule, I would include students, faculty from the ESL department, faculty from other departments, and administrators involved in the PBL project reviewing process. In reality, I would settle for a few of the students who were involved with the project, a few peers from the ESL department, and one or two peers from other departments. I would also invite a few administrators to be involved in the review process knowing that their participation would probably be superficial at best. A diverse group of reviewers would help me further fine tune the PBL process. Students could address any issues that I missed or may have not addressed thoroughly enough. ESL department faculty could critique activities and assessments to ensure that they facilitate mastery of course objectives, are valid measurements of course objectives, and are informed by current applied linguistic research. Feedback from faculty in other departments could guide ESL instructors in what skills should be addressed in more depth by the PBL unit based on their own experience with learners who come through the ESL program. They could also provide suggestions on future PBL units, perhaps geared towards content/problems stemming from other disciplines. 

What will your process look like?

1. I would begin the assessment process at the onset of the PBL unit. I currently keep a teaching journal for the classes that I teach, so I would carry this method over for the PBL unit. 
2. Since I envision the PBL unit being completed well before the end of the semester, I would acquire student feedback immediately after the completion of the unit. The feedback could be obtained in the form of a survey or as a journal-type assignment. 
3. Feed back from ESL faculty, faculty from other departments, and college administration could be obtained any time after the presentation of the final products. 
4. An ESL faculty meeting could be arranged for sometime before the end of semester to compare notes and discuss the future of PBL units in the department.
5. A meeting consisting of interdepartmental faculty and administration could be arranged to discuss various aspects of the PBL process, the success of PBL in the ESL department, and the future of PBL on the campus as a whole.

Is it just a one-time assessment?

Just as multiple opportunities for reflection is a salient feature of the PBL unit for students, the assessment for this project would be iterative in nature as well. The assessment process would start shortly after the onset of the PBL unit itself and would continue to the end of the project and carry over to the start of the next PBL unit that is implemented. Initial assessment would be completed solely by the instructor and then involve students, faculty, etc. as the unit progresses. Each time a PBL unit is implemented, whether it is a repeat project unit or a completely novel unit, reflection must include reference to past project successes and failures.  

Moving from Instructor to Facilitator

One of the greatest challenges for an instructor in a PBL unit is to adapt to the role of facilitator. Reflect on the following:

Will my role in the teaching/learning process change?

Adapting to the role of facilitator in a PBL unit will be somewhat challenging for me. As a communicative language instructor my lecturer/facilitator ratio is between 80:20 and 20:80. The range is large because of the fact that my student population largely originates from countries whose educational systems are predominantly based on the "sage on the stage" model. I start a semester at about 80:20 and move slowly toward the goal of 20:80 after certain skills including asking questions and participating in cooperative group tasks are practiced. The implementation of a PBL unit would have to take place during the second half of the semester when students are sufficiently acclimated to the "guide on the side" model. The challenge for me will be giving up that 20% lecturer role. In a language learning classroom, I'm not sure if instruction would be effective if the instructor moved into a 100% facilitator role.

What are the skills of effective facilitation?

• Grouping students according to their language backgrounds and individual skills
• Providing clear guidelines as to the goal of the project or activity
• Guiding students toward asking the "right" questions with adequate schema activation
• Asking students the "right" questions to support critical thinking skills
• Rerouting students in cases where their ideas may be irrelevant to the project's progression
• Modeling effective collaboration skills
• Demonstrating effective organization and time-management skills
• Monitoring collaborative groups to ensure that students are all contributing based on their individual strengths
• Providing support for individual students in the areas where they may need remediation
• Having faith in the learners' abilities

Will the students develop the competencies and skills needed to be successful?

As long as an instructor is always conscious of the fact that the class is made up of individuals rather than a homogeneous group of students coming into a course already prepared with the necessary skills and background knowledge to be successful, and as long as the instructor leverages this fact by individualizing instruction as much as possible, students will be able to develop the competencies and skills needed to be successful. Instructors can also utilize the knowledge and skills of advanced learners to assist in developing the skills of peers who need extra help understanding specific concepts and skills. This in turn develops peer relationships and mentoring skills of the advanced learners.

What changes will you need to make in order to become an effective facilitator in your PBL unit?

• Focusing on the development of effective collaborative group work
• Developing more effective schema building/scaffolding activities
• Providing models of excellent projects
• Reflecting on student reflections and peer evaluations
• Reflecting on my own classroom practices to ensure that I am actually making changes to match PBL

Scaffolding in PBL

Scaffolding is standard practice in the language learning setting. As an ESL instructor every skill from grammar and reading to vocabulary and writing requires scaffolding to ease students into new language learning concepts. Likewise, scaffolding is of great importance in project based learning. In PBL students must be guided towards the creation of a product or service. According to Jamie McKenzie, scaffolding provides that guidance in the following ways:

1. Providing Clear Directions - This is a standard practice in ESL and probably should be in all educational settings. In the ESL setting both small and large scale assignments in many cases must be broken down into small digestible chunks. Directions must be broken down to into component steps and must be given using very simple language. In and ESL+PBL, I assume this skill will be the same but the need for this part of scaffolding will be even greater.
2. Providing a Clear Purpose - In my experience, this is standard practice for teachers of ESL students and at-risk students. Students want to know why they have to complete an activity. They want to know why they should invest their time in learning the skills they are being taught and if the skill will be relevant to their lives. In the ESL+PBL setting, this will be even more important since many students become unmotivated when there is a huge, time and resource consuming task at hand.
3. Keeping Students on Task - This is another issue that is relevant to all teaching settings. Students are easily distracted by "outside" factors such as unrelated conversation topics as well as "inside" factors such as vague directions or inattention by the instructor. The "inside" factor could be considered more serious since students can waste a tremendous amount of time traversing the wrong path. In the ESL setting this is a common issue since it has been found that the thought process varies from culture to culture.
4. Offering Assessments to Clarify Expectations - In the ESL department in which I teach, this is standard practice for writing assignments. Students are provided rubrics for paraphrase writing, paragraph writing, journal writing, threaded discussion, and of course in-class essays. What is expected of students is clear from the beginning. In my own writing classes, students see both good and bad writing models and analyze the models for relevant features again providing students with concrete evidence of what good and bad writing is and what their own writing is expected to look like. In an ESL+PBL unit, this practice would clearly carry over to the evaluation of final products or services.

Effective Assessment in PBL

My PBL unit assessments meet the Key Principles of Assessment criteria in the following ways:

Assessment is for Students

As this project was created specifically for international students at in the community college context, it is clearly relevant to the lives of the intended learner audience - community college international students. The iterative nature of the project allows students to become confident and articulate about the knowledge they acquire and the products that they generate throughout the PBL unit.

Assessment is Faithful to the Work Students Actually Do

This PBL unit include multiple opportunities for self reflection on the progress of the group project. In addition, since the self reflections are written, the students will have ample opportunity to practice the language skills that they need to acquire in order to be successful in the culminating summative assessments (website and essay). The objectives and requirements are clear from the onset of each portion of the project so that students clearly understand what they need to know and what they need to be able to do to be successful in producing an excellent project and in the course.

Assessment is Public

Rubrics and scoring sheets are provided throughout the PBL unit so that students are aware of what is expected of them prior to the completion of the unit tasks. At then end of the unit, the student created resource websites are presented to faculty across the college campus and students present their research in a public presentation or panel discussion. The audience of the public presentation includes both international and resident peers, ESL faculty, faculty from other disciplines, staff, and administrators.

Assessment Promotes Ongoing Self-Reflection and Critical Inquiry

This portion of my PBL unit may need revising. Since ESL is a skills field as opposed to a content field, it may be difficult to adjust to a PBL type of assessment where criteria is open-ended. Students must achieve a certain level of grammaticality and complexity in their writing. These factors are more concrete and objective than content courses. However, the content and organization of say the summative written assessment may allow for some open-ended revision.

Developing a Driving Question

Developing a driving question for this project is far more difficult than I had first thought. The factors that need to be considered in constructing an effective question are numerous and ensuring that I have addressed each key feature is an arduous process. 

Revising and rethinking this single driving question makes revising and preparing a piece for publication seem like a piece of cake! 

A good driving question should

• be answerable but not be easily answerable (ie. not google-able). The driving question for this project is not an easily answered question since it is not a question about international students in general.
• be open-ended in that multiple answers and/or solutions are possible. Multiple answers and solutions are possible for this project. Students will find practical solutions to address the issues that international students face.

• be interesting, engaging, and relevant for learner. Since the topic revolves around international students,  the learners themselves should be more invested in finding an answer(s) to the question. They are not only learners but also stakeholders.
• lend itself to a wide range of subquestions. Learners will have to ask themselves many subquestions to answer the question thoroughly and propose practical solutions.
• lend itself to research, investigation, and reflection. The specific nature of question and subquestions will require that students do both primary and secondary research and investigation.  Given that this project is focused on international students and the issues they face, learners will engage in reflection from the onset of the project. It also requires a written component, so students will engage in reflection during the writing process as well.
• allow learners to demonstrate the mastery of learning objectives. The learners will be able to demonstrate their mastery of the outline learning objectives in both the media artifact and the culminating written paper.

The driving question and subquestions can form the basis for a unit since they require a great deal of research, reflection, and application of specific language skills. Students will perform both primary research using interviews and secondary source research. This will require the development of effective question composition and interviewing etiquette as well as information competency. In addition, since the ESL department in which I teach employs content-based language learning pedagogy, all language skills such as vocabulary learning skills, grammar, skills, and summarizing skills can be taught with sustained content that is guided by and related to the driving question. This material could include general interest articles and peer-reviewed academic journal articles. 

Drake, R. J. (n.d.) Driving Questions [Weblog]. Retrieved from http://www.jetspost.com/eportfolio/pbl/driving_questions.htm

Technology Supported Project Based Learning

Over the past few days, I have been thinking about the final topic or project I would like to develop for an intermediate/advanced ESL academic writing course. The learning objectives that students must meet were developed to facilitate the successful transition of international students into mainstream freshman composition and all other undergraduate general education courses. A few of the course objectives on which I would like to focus include:

1. Paraphrasing and summarizing ideas from texts using correct citation format
2. Integrating appropriate quotes into essays in order to support claims
3. Demonstrating the appropriate use of lexical items on Coxhead’s (2000) academic word list
4. Interpreting information from readings and other media to select and evaluate ideas for writing

There are three factors that need to be considered when approaching the implementation of PBL in this ESL course:

1. Students come into this writing course with no previous experience with the skills mentioned in the course objectives, so they are learning these skills as they progress through the course
2. I would have to implement PBL during the last half to last third of the course after students have been introduced to these skills and have had ample opportunity to practice them.
3. Content-based language learning is the preferred method of instruction so unit themes can be varied (This is a positive aspect . . . I think.)

One theme around which this project may revolve is discrimination and racism. I touched on this theme briefly in Ed Tech 502 but I would like to develop it into something with more substance. I thought this topic might be relevant because of random conversations among some of my students, my own interactions with friends who were brought up in other countries, and anecdotes from other ESL instructors. It seems that many international students

1. have a very cursory understanding about discrimination and racism in general
2. believe that discrimination and racism is a problem unique to the U.S.
3. believe that there is no discrimination and racism in their own cultures.

A second theme I am considering is academic integrity/plagiarism and intellectual property. I thought this might be relevant as this issue is an already major concern in institutions of higher education across the U.S.

I am not sure what the final project would be in either case; however, I do know that whatever it is will be used in conjunction with the final exam in the course, so this is an additional factor I would have to consider.