We talk about moving our schools to places where students are immersed in constructivist learning expeditions that give them much more control over their learning. We want open-ended projects driven by students asking questions while being connected to their personal learning networks to find answers. Student interest and passion drive learning.
As someone who helps design the project-based curricula at my schools, I have been bringing up how we are “skilling” our students to participate in these learning journeys. I do this because I think it is a disservice to our students to not fully develop their “learning toolkits” or personal learning systems to be prepared for the student-centered learning we discuss. While so much of elementary school is about teaching our students how to learn concurrently, we sometimes need to discreetly focus on all the skills and dispositions needed to be self-directed learners expected to work and think divergently.
As Daniel Pink points out, providing autonomy and the pathway to attain mastery are powerful motivating forces. However, many motivated students must gain organizational skills and habits of mind to successfully participate in self-directed and collaborative learning projects, especially when working with technology. To see one’s personal learning system device as a tool for learning and productivity often takes work for adults and teenagers. So what do we do about this?
At one of my previous schools, we put a learning skills plan together for new students starting at our school. We wanted to prepare our students for a new type of learning and introduce them to the culture of our international school and our 1:1 laptop program. As we were in Taiwan, where many of the local students had only experienced passive learning in teacher-directed classrooms, it was quite a challenge for them to begin the process of learning how to become self-directed, engaged, and “efficient” learners, especially with the distractibility of having a laptop.
Besides several ongoing community-building activities to further the new students’ understanding of an open learning community, we used the 7th-grade Humanities class to teach the social studies topic of culture in our school’s culture. The unit also included the teaching of the organizational and learning skills needed to help build out each student’s learning toolkit/personal learning system, which included knowing where to go online to find text and video tutorials, which widgets to have on the laptop (e.g., calculator, dictionary), which software to use for which purpose (technology literacy), which online tools to help with recording research and bibliographies, etc.
I was prompted to write this post by Will Richardson’s recent ASCD article on personal learning networks and my current school’s effort to help students become more active and independent learners. We are piloting the use of iPads in our 5th-grade classrooms. The iPads are helping the teachers give students more access to information and creative tools to make meaning and to create projects to communicate their understanding. We are moving our students on the continuum of dependent to independent learners, and a big part of the process is helping them be more organized, efficient, and intelligent in how they use their time on iPads. I hope we will help our students learn how to set up their iPads with specific apps and bookmarks to online resources that further empower them as independent learners, knowing which tools to access to meet their varied learning needs.
Do read Will’s article in its entirety. Still, one paragraph covers the shifting process, looking at what we teach and how we are preparing our students to be learners prepared to go deep to find proper understanding.
“That rethinking revolves around a fundamental question: When we have an easy connection to the people and resources we need to learn whatever and whenever we want, what fundamental changes need to happen in schools to provide students with the skills and experiences they need to do this type of learning well? Or, to put it more succinctly, are we preparing students to learn without us? How can we shift curriculum and pedagogy to more effectively help students form and answer their own questions, develop patience with uncertainty and ambiguity, appreciate and learn from failure, and develop the ability to go deeply into the subjects about which they have a passion to learn?”
February 27, 2012 at 7:50 am
Great post, David. If kids don’t have much experience in problem-based learning, there are a plethora of skills that they’ll need to develop before they can be successful, much less efficient. You can almost think about this as a scope and sequence. In order to create a digital documentary film in a history class, for example, the students probably need the following skills (at a minimum): a) practice in analyzing historical documents, b) effective structured note-taking skills, c) concept mapping skills to find the essence of their story along with supporting ideas and evidence, d) presentation skills (orally and/or in writing) to express the vision for their film, e) Web research skills to find additionally information, f) collaborative writing, editing, and revising skills, …. And we haven’t even talked about any of the requisite technology skills. I wonder how often a teacher tries to shift her practice in ways that simply demand too much from their students relative to their prior experience. If, however, she could build toward a major shifted learning experience say a few months into the year and identify and practice the required skills in work leading up to the project, I’m guessing it would be a much better experience for her and the students. Keep these posts coming – very though-provoking.
February 27, 2012 at 9:46 am
Mark- You paint a very clear picture of how complex the pathway can be towards PBL learning opportunities. Thanks for making the process so visible and scaffolded especially when it comes to having students work on video projects. And as you point out, there is the whole technology skill set the students need to learn especially for the complexity of creating documentaries. Cheers.