Thom Markham PBL Staff development

We embarked on staff development with Thom Markham PBL Global.

He began the day by talking about the big picture of PBL and spoke about Deeper Learning Competencies.

I later reflected on these and this lead me to looking at the following link: Deeper Learning Competencies

Character and work Ethic are significant contributors for students when working with the PBL model.
Something that gets in our way of moving forward is mindset. Once we can overcome this we can move forward positively. It is interesting that this can be a big road block for parents as well as understanding the fundamentals of PBL.

Thom spoke about how PBL works better when we shift some control to the students. Not too much. It's like a dance of control shifting and finding the perfect balance at the right time. This requires lots of flexibility with groupings, spaces in which we work and informing parents of what we are doing and why.

Next we touched on the Design process: Why are we doing the project? Why would students care?
The why in the project is a key question . Teachers should be able to answer this question well.
The best projects come from challenging students. This requires purpose and passion.

This then lead on to establishing the Driving question: this is essential to get right. It is often the trickiest part of PBL. Our job as collaborators when writing the driving question is to be design consultants.
When creating the driving question, Thom challenged us to think about this:

If it doesn't challenge you

It doesn't change you - Fred Devito

The process of creating a good driving question comes from first surfacing the question, getting some feedback and digging down with your colleagues to rework ideas. Talking about it will help the right question pop out. The driving question requires lots of re-working. 'What' questions are, generally speaking, red flags in PBL. They don't really work or lead us where we want to go.

Next we discussed the importance of creating an authentic product is. This should relate to the real world or have connections to the child life. Getting assessment right is also key. It is important to ensure students agree with the project and purpose. They should be able to see why the project is important.

Getting the teams right that students work in is significant, as are Team work skills. Rubrics are important. The way we end is also important and students feeling good about the end result. A really good project matures a child and puts them in touch with themselves. When parents see this they often believe in the process. When done well PBL does have the ability to raise some old distinctions...the highs and lows of who will do what. Children do surprising positive things with PBL and this can take them out of categories that systems used to put them in.

PBL isn't driven totally by interest.
PBL is a human centered system, a human performance system. Letting go of old ways of assessing intelligence like IQ testing as IQ tests simply don't have the weight they once had. People can be smart in so many different ways nowadays. We are looking for a broader skill set of intelligence. This brings others challenges in terms of assessing where students are. If we are thinking PBL, as teachers, we are no longer lesson planners we are now needing to think of ourselves as designers.

In terms of telling parents how we are improving student outcomes. We need to focus on some of the following aspects:

• We are looking for more questions from students.
• Greater engagement from students leads to positive behaviour changes.
• Students doing things differently.
• Listen for parents sharing what students are going home and discussing.
• Intellectual discussions.
• Just because we cover something doesn't mean students are learning it.
• Look for visual indicators for commitment to learning. Anecdotal data- someone finding their niece. It is a little bit hard to describe...students being present in their learning. For now it is the best we are going to do.

We need to be real and reflective with our PBL journey. We are heading somewhere we haven't been before, so how can we best say in this moment how to assess this!

Thom is indeed a PBL guru who has enlightened us on our PBL journey. He was fantastic to work with insightful with his ideas and in tune with or journey at St Francis. An interesting thought from Thom's day with us was his statement:

What sends the strongest message to the brain is appreciation.

The most powerful force is gratitude and appreciation.

We need to be mindful of this as we work with students colleagues and parents.