Reworking Writing Driving questions

As we worked with Thom Markham we discussed what makes a good driving question for Project Based Learning. In a previous blog post I discussed Thom's insight into sharing this part, the trickiest part of PBL. We have to be kind to ourselves as collaborators and design consultants. We also need to allow adequate time to give to this important part of PBL. When contemplating driving questions, I like to reflect on Fed Devito's thoughts:

 If it doesn't challenge you, It doesn't change you.

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.

Here is an example of a first step to writing a PBL question that our staff worked on with Thom Markham:How do we stay safe in a digital world?

Thom suggested that at first we might establish a question that is ok .The next step would be to consider: What is the authentic question? Teachers may consider this: Let’s have our students create and effective marketing to team….and eventually the question can be reworked.

How can we effectively communicate to teams about how to stay safe in a digital world?

How can we teach our peers to be digital citizens?

How can we teach our parents how we can be responsible digital citizens?

Students need to know what it means to be a good digital citizen. There are varying standards with how we interpret this.

How can we predict what good digital citizenship will look like in 20 years?

Students could create a good profile for 2025. Looking at predictions for the future is a good way of approaching.

Thom unpacked some of our previous PBL driving questions and looked at other ways of reworking these questions. Thom considered that focus is important and suggested we try to avoid short circuiting the question. Below are some questions in bold that we reworked for greater impact/ higher quality PBL:

Another initial PBL question created for Juniors: How can we design a happy home for an animal.

Other ideas:

This question can work if each team takes a different animal and each designs the habitat for an animal.

You need to drill down into the word happy. Each team needs to meet the standard for happy. You could do vocabulary building around this.

How could you design an environment that maximises….

How could we design an ideal environment…..

This pushes the students further. What do we consider to be an ideal habitat. What is our ideal habitat?

Another initial PBL question created for Year 5 and 6 students: How can a building be the heart of a community?

Other ideas: How can the building be authentic to the culture?

How can we design a building that reflects the traditions and values of St Francis?

As a team for we have previously come up with our term focus. It's interesting that even during holidays we can find ourselves caught in moments of ideas, thoughts about how we can better write a driving question. One aspect of writing driving questions that seems to be prominent is that when creating them for our specific groups of students we work and rework these questions best together and overtime!
We must constantly strive for authentic questions that assist our students in the right direction for their learning and that provoke interest and challenge.