On PBL and much, much more

We were travel-weary and struggling with the two-hour time zone difference, but that didn't deter a rich exploration of project based learning (PBL) last night. In case you didn't catch it last time I shared them, the articles we read in preparation for this conversation are: 

What is PBL? 

Main Course, Not Dessert

7 Essentials for Project Based Learning

Since one our high school will be 1:1 iPads next year, one of our secondary goals on this trip is to get really comfortable using the iPad for learning. In that spirit, I used the Notability app to read and annotate these articles. 

It's currently 80% off in the iTunes store. Great for organizing virtual notebooks and syncs with Dropbox. 

But I digress...

With the heat on in my hotel room to combat the cold rain falling in Southern California, I read the articles in preparation for the evening discussion. Here are my thoughts/questions: 

Because I'm an administrator (and a D for my DISC-enamored friends), my thoughts always go immediately to, "So what's the next right step? What can we do tomorrow?" I will continue to explore this question--it's my main mission here--but I think I know some answers going into this work already. 

• May Term/J-Term with a PBL focus--this is a conversation that's been bubbling under the surface for years in our district. When I hear about the mind-blowing things my friends at Spirit Lake did just this January during their LIVE J-Term, I know this is one of our next right steps. Everyone can involved in PBL this way--and it doesn't require throwing everything away and starting over. 
• Teaming--create a schedule for a group of teachers who want to be able to throw everything away and embrace PBL every day. Figure out a way to let them share kids and time. Easier said than done, I'm sure--but not impossible. 
• Seek and implement inquiry-based instructional practices in all content areas and all classrooms--this would make a great complement to May Term and J-Term and build nicely on some work with Science Writing Heuristic (SWH) and problem based math approaches we already have in place. 
• Side note--If we do decide we want to jump in with both feet and just do this, I've decided that crazy hexmester schedule Steve Kwikkel (Middle School Principal) created is a great way to do it. 

Since one of my major responsibilities in the district is curriculum, I spent a fair amount of time and mental energy wrestling with curriculum issues. What I know is this--if we are truly going to embrace Teaching for Understanding (as the Iowa Core compels us to), inquiry-based approaches, and project based learning, we will have to value deep learning over wide coverage and agree collectively to a significantly narrower focus in terms of curriculum. And when I say significantly, I mean 5-7 big ideas (Power Standards) per year per content area--as opposed to the pages of content we require in Iowa after Common Core adoption. I'm totally willing to do this, but my struggle here is whether this is a battle we can win. Will we set our teachers and district up for shame and failure if we do so? The world of education is becoming increasingly accountable through high stakes test to content minutia. Take a good, hard look at your new Iowa Assessments. I believe the middle school math teacher who said to me, "Bridgette, no one needs to know this math." How do we balance this? We're going to have to collectively agree to let go of some things, and we need support from those to whom we're accountable to. I'd love to have this conversation with the folks at the Iowa Department of Education who are supporting our move to competency based education. 

A curriculum related thought for me is about how we can support the development of project based learning experiences. Many schools we're looking at reference project libraries or project based curriculum materials they've purchased. For us, I know this means we need to engage deeply in the #IACoPi work. We need the open source content AND the community of practice. 

More to come; much more to come. Thanks for following our journey. Please jump in the conversation with us.