PBL

I have now completed my first year of teaching PBL and thought I would share some of my thoughts. As mentioned earlier the latest PD session helped heaps with the planning of PBL projects. I have enjoyed teaching the projects this year as they are varied and interesting for the children. The children have been engaged more than I have experienced in previous type topic work.

The one thing I was worried about with this approach to learning was how the children would cope with more independence in the way they learn. I have found it not too bad as we kind of scaffold it a bit at the start of the year for the children. We did have to teach them some self managing skills at the start, however this improved  as the year went on. So overall I have been pleased with the children's improvement in self regulation and independence.  The children have done a lot of work in teams which has had its ups and downs. However the children have wised up to who they choose to work with and have learnt new skills on how to work collaboratively with children who they may not normally work with.  

I know at the start of next year we plan to get the children to do more work on working in teams at which should set them up good for the year.

PBL- Project Based Learning

I have recently had the pleasure of experiencing a PD session with Thom Markham from America on PBL. This is an approach that this year I have been attempting to do, which has been a challenge but I am liking this approach so far. 

I liked many of what this man had to say especially about the way education is changing and in my view needs to happen. He did bring up an interesting point and that is children can access many things on their phone so how important is content when we can look that up? I was listening to a podcast where Ted Dintersmith spoke about how  we are training children up for different jobs from 20 years ago and we need to consider this when teaching. This did make me think how content is important but I agree strongly that certain skills are essential in the 21st century and maybe we need to look at this more. The three C's are mentioned Creativity, Collaboration and Critical thinking  which are definitely skills the children need. The PBL approach helps to gain these important skills.

The driving questions is very important to gain the best out of the PBL experience. Although the process can be challenging to come up with a driving question it is worth it to get a good one. When I looked around it was great to see all of the teachers working at the PD session in what I would call a very collaborative approach to working out these driving question. The guidance from Thom during this process was invaluable as he guided us well to come up with driving questions easily due to his vast experience. 

I feel more confident after the PD sessions to come up with a driving question and what this looks like. 

Poor Maths Results

This article on Poor Maths Results was interesting as I heard of this way of teaching maths and came across this article. I found it interesting in that they have done studies to say that ability grouping does not work. During my last few years I have had another look at reading groups as I don't always think that reading abilities groups work, so adjusted my reading programme with good success. However for maths I had not really considered it. I think when they stated that if children are only exposed to lower curriculum than the expectation is low. I question this a bit as  I expect they have to have a certain amount of numeracy knowledge in the first place. With  ability groups they do move on to other levels and I don't think the expectation is low.
 The article also talks about how teachers have to be trained in the way they teach this way without ability groups and I get that. After having a bit of a think about this I think that having the right type of open questions could work. I have many questions though like do you pair them up when attempting these open questions so you get different view points from different levels. How do you ensure that the lower leveled children share their ideas and don't get overwhelmed with the higher ability child's work and just follow their thinking completely or is that okay.
Problem solving in maths is important and can be challenging and a lot of fun for the children and really puts the children's maths skills to test. I need to find more information on this type of teaching to fully understand the practical approach to it.