May 9, 2015 - 15:23
Silvi Shameti
Schools in American Cities
Spring 2015
Final Fieldwork Paper
My placement at the Student’s School, a newly-established high school in Philadelphia, served as an incredible platform for observing the ways innovative teaching practices could be put to use in a classroom. One of the practices that forms the crux of the Student’s School is the use of project-based learning across all subjects. Instead of a more traditional classroom setup where teachers are seen as possessing information that they then pass down to students by lecturing, project-based learning gives students the opportunity to immerse themselves in activities that require high-level thinking, collaboration, and real-life connections. The ultimate goal of project-based learning is to engage students in skill-building and critical thought, and to allow them to feel agency in their learning. However, this kind of learning cannot just happen on its own; it has to be closely instituted and monitored in order to ensure its effectiveness. This is where the Student’s School efforts come into questions; after talking to many of the students in the ninth grade class, I received mixed reviews about the enjoyment and usefulness they were getting out of their project-based classroom experience. Because of that, I want to explore how one could more fully and successfully implement this practice in a school like the Student’s School.
The classroom I mainly resided in was a science classroom in which students were studying various ecological processes. The first project they had worked on was about the water cycle, followed by a food web combined with an energy pyramid, and lastly a survey that would be used to conduct research. When I entered the classroom at the beginning of the semester, students were in the middle of their food webs. Blumenfeld, Soloway, Marx, Krajcik, Guzdial, Palincsar (1991) says of project-based learning:
“There are two essential components of projects: they require a question or problem that serves to organize or drive activities; and these activities result in a series of artifacts, or products, that culminate in a final product that addresses the driving question. Students can be responsible for the creation of both the question and the activities, as well as the nature of the artifacts” (371).
In my classroom, the project was handled in this way: the teacher and the class did an example of a food web together on the board, and then the teacher told the students to do it on their own. They were to stick to one of four ecosystems (wetland, forest, river, or lake) and use at least ten animals, using arrows to clearly indicate the direction of the relationships (predator vs prey), and the animals had to be native to Pennsylvania (for example, one student used moose in her forest food chain and was asked by the teacher, “Have you ever seen any moose in Pennsylvania?”). Students were also encouraged to look things up on their computer - in fact, when Mrs. G* did the example on the board and asked kids what each of the animals ate, they would shout out answers and she wouldn’t accept them unless they looked them up first to make sure they were correct. (The co-teacher and sister of Mrs. G would tell them to “cite sources” - “it’s not a right answer if you don’t cite your source”) (field notes, 3/20/15).
Although I appreciate the teacher’s tying the material to an environment that could be more relevant to students by grounding it in Pennsylvania, I encountered very little discussion around the importance of the topic and the goal of the project, which is stated above. To my knowledge, there was no clear driving question beyond the exploration of what a food chain is and how to make one. In addition, the fact that students were able to use their computers to research the ecosystems and food chains online meant that there wasn’t a lot of original thought or processing that necessarily went into the conceptualization of the project. According to Barron, Schwartz, Vye, Moore, Petrosino, Zech, & Bransford, the Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt, (1998) this is not an uncommon problem in the world of project-based learning:
“Too frequently, however, the question that drives a project is not crafted to make connections between activities and the underlying conceptual knowledge that one might hope to foster. Although the opportunity for deep learning is there, it often does not occur because of the tendency in project-based approaches to get caught up in the action without appropriate reflection (see Blumenfeld et al., 1991; Schauble et al., 1995). In such cases, the ‘doing’ of an activity takes precedent over ‘doing with understanding’” (273-274).
One example that this researcher uses explains an instance in which students are performing a project in which they have to build a rocket ship that goes to Mars. The researchers found that
“An example of the need for a well-crafted, driving question comes from projects in model rocketry. Petrosino and his colleagues (Lamon et al., 1996; Petrosino, 1995) have worked at a number of Nashville sites on a ‘Mission to Mars’ curriculum that includes a component in which students build and launch model rockets....There are many reasons to proclaim such projects a success. However, what do students actually learn from their experiences? Petrosino (1998) found out that many sixth-grade students who completed the traditional rocket project learned relatively little from the hands-on activity of simply making and launching their rockets. They did not, for example, understand what made a better or worse rocket, and they did not understand how to evaluate the effectiveness of their rockets in any systematic way. One reason for this may be that the students did not have a driving question that could foster focussed inquiry. For example, when students were asked what they thought about the purpose of the activity, a typical response was ‘You know, to build them and see how high they will go.’ In response to a question about measuring how high things go, a common response was ‘You know, look at it go up and see how high it goes.’” (274).
I see this as a potential issue with the classroom I am in. Although I arrive at the end of the week on Friday, which means that, by then, both teachers and students are probably a little bit ready for the weekend and a little bit done with focusing on schoolwork, I found that students spent a long time working on projects that shouldn’t necessarily have required all that time; for instance, they would often be working on the same project several weeks in a row, and often times projects would be handed in past the due date that was explicitly set by the teacher. From my field notes: “Students were once again [second week in a row] working on food webs for the different Pennsylvania environments. This seemed to be a larger project than the week before - it consisted of a packet of different worksheets about the topic. Many kids had already finished the project, but Mrs. M* was giving the kids who didn’t finish time to do it in class” (3/27/15). I think part of the reason that students aren’t completing their projects on time is not because they are unable to, but rather because they aren’t engaged enough in them to find them a worthwhile pursuit, and therefore tend to drop them halfway through class. And it isn’t merely a lack of desire to do the work; one of the complaints I heard often from students was that they felt as though they weren’t learning enough in the classroom, presumably because they didn’t see a clear point to every project. Because many times the projects feel as though they are not necessarily connected to a larger picture or in order to reach some greater understanding and instead seem to measure very specific understandings, they lack the crucial link to the lives of the students that would make them more appealing.
In addition, “kids who had finished did not seem to have a different or new project but were kind of hanging out. I worked with a student on her packet for a while - she moved through it quite quickly but didn’t really stop to read the information on them, choosing instead to go straight to the activities (presumably in order to finish it and turn it in). She would also look up the info she needed if she had trouble answering the questions.” Students who did work at a more controlled pace and were interested in finishing their work often didn’t have other activities to engage in once they completed their work. Because the classrooms are very student-driven, and without a lot of teacher instruction (in fact, Mrs. M* often spends the class time interacting with students one-on-one, either by answering questions they have about the material or assignment, or by dealing with various altercations that arise), students are often left to their own devices when it comes to completing their work. When I walk around the classroom to help students with work or to encourage them to complete their assignments if it seems that they’ve gotten off topic, I find it hard to direct their attention back to what they’re supposed to be doing. This is where instituting scaffolding as a technique could be useful, especially because the Student’s School* puts emphasis on the idea that students work at different paces. Instead of giving everyone the same worksheet or assignment to do, the teacher could give students several options for how they could approach the project. For example, the food web could be expanded to include several different parts so that once students finish one level, they can move on to the next one. It also helps make a project accessible while building skills as they move up levels.
Because project-based teaching is not the norm across our schooling system, it does take a lot of time, effort, and investment on the part of the teacher in order to come up with projects that are able to encourage and assess learning while keeping students engaged. Researchers have written,
“Despite considerable potential, project-based education is not without problems. The idea that projects represent learning by doing certainly is not new. Roots of this conception go back to Dewey. However, lessons from the past suggest that without adequate attention to ways of supporting teachers and students, these innovative educational approaches will not be widely adopted....The newer cognitively-based approaches that contemporary projects represent also require substantial changes in teachers’ thinking about and dispositions toward classroom structures, activities, and tasks. These changes, as previous curriculum innovations have demonstrated, are not easy to achieve” (Blumenfeld et al., 1991, p. 373).
This suggests that project-based teaching requires an entire restructuring of a classroom not just externally, but in the way one conceptualizes the way a classroom exists in one’s own mind. The teachers working at the Student’s School came from many different backgrounds; the teacher in my classroom placement had actually had experience with city schooling before, but project-based learning was still a new concept to many of them. Because of this, the school has undergone several changes in its curriculum in order to match up student and teacher expectations; there have been many times when the teacher’s expectations of what the end product of a project should look like has been different from the way a student envisioned it.
Another element of project-based is the assessment of projects. At the Student’s School, each project is deemed a “competency,” and each competency determines mastery of a particular subject or skill. In the classroom I was placed in, the teacher sat with each student and went over each of their assignments in order to assess them together. Assignments were assessed on several dimensions; for example, there might be a grade for using scientific language correctly, for presenting information in relevant ways (like bar graphs or pie charts), for getting feedback from others, etc. The “grade” students received were based on how much students at the ninth-grade level should be achieving, and how their project compared to those standards. Students were also asked whether they felt that through doing the project, they had achieved the skills it set out to teach (and most students agreed that it did).
The fact that the teacher sat with each student individually during class time was also an interesting piece of the grading process. I think it was great for building a rapport with them and allowing them to feel as though their voices were heard; I know there are many times during my own schooling career when I wished I could’ve conveyed how much effort I had put into an assignment to my teacher, and I think it is meaningful that Mrs. M was able to give her students that space. In addition, it made both her and her students accountable for the grades received; if they didn’t agree on what a grade for an assignment should be, they would have a conversation about it in order to come to an understanding - or to find a way to make it reach a higher goal.
On the other hand, talking to each student individually took up a lot of class time, and many students used the fact that they were waiting for their turn as a way to avoid engaging in other academic work, which may have prevented them from using their classroom time productively.
In general, I think the project-based learning style is a movement that should definitely be gaining traction because of its potential to engage students in higher-level cognitive thought, and to allow teachers to stretch their creativity and incorporate different materials and forms of pedagogy into their lesson plans. However, I think the idea of project-based learning is often not relegated the amount of thought and structure that it requires. Many of the classrooms at the Student’s School look a little chaotic if viewed from the outside, and it feels as though that’s allowed to happen because the students are presumed to be working on their projects; I think there could actually be more done in order to make sure students are actually working on projects. Even though I think the amount of freedom given to the students in the classroom is admirable, I also think it’s unfair to expect students to know how to be the most productive when it’s their first time experiencing this kind of teaching style, as well. I think it could actually be a really useful practice, especially because students seem as though they do want to be more engaged, as long as teachers continue refining their practices to make that possible.
References:
Blumenfeld, Phyllis C., et al. "Motivating project-based learning: Sustaining the doing, supporting the learning." Educational psychologist 26.3-4 (1991): 369-398.
Barron, Brigid JS, et al. "Doing with understanding: Lessons from research on problem-and project-based learning." Journal of the Learning Sciences 7.3-4 (1998): 271-311.