Project-Based Learning

At a recent workshop on Design Thinking, someone asked the presenter to explain the difference between Design Thinking (DT) and Project-Based Learning.  This led me to reflect on Project-Based Learning (PBL), DT, and inquiry science, in general.  All three have much in common and how you go about doing each of them involves many of the same steps, same mindset, and same values.

At its heart, PBL is an approach to teaching that fully embraces the well-established principle of active learning (see How PeopleLearn and many, many other authoritative sources).  PBL puts authentic student projects at the core of the curriculum.  Students learn by working together, learning what they need as they go along and from the project.  Teachers plan rich, interesting projects that lead students to learn important content and master important skills, drawn from key standards. 

For example, a middle school science teacher might pick up on the interest of her students in the quality of water in local ponds and streams.  She would then map out a project to learn about local water quality and simultaneously meet NextGeneration Science Standards (NGSS) for chemistry in the Disciplinary Content I   (DCI), as well as the very important Science and Engineering Practices (Practices), such as Asking Questions and Defining Problems (#1), Planning and Carrying Out Investigations (#3), Analyzing and Interpreting Data (#4), and Obtaining, Evaluating, and Communicating Information (#8). 

The class might learn how to use water test kits and then take a field trip to a local lake.  Using the test kits, the students could collect data on water quality, and draw conclusions about the overall health of the lake in terms of acidity, phosphorus levels, turbidity, and dissolved oxygen, among others.  They could collect macroinvertebrates from the lake to identify and classify, using the types of species present as another indicator of overall water quality.  They might also observe other plant and animal life, taking photos and writing field notes.  Perhaps back in the lab, they conclude that the overall health of the lake is poor. 

But why is that?  This could lead teams of students to explore each factor.  Some students might want to understand how the chemical tests work, which could lead them in a different direction.  Perhaps the students want to DO something about the water quality.  This might draw in their social studies teacher to learn about community action, their English teacher to help them with persuasive writing, a technology or art teacher to help them make a student-written and –directed documentary to present at a town meeting.  In this way, a well-conceived PBL unit, not only teaches important school content, but also develops major life skills, often in the service of improving the world.  The Buck Institute and Edutopia  are  great resources for PBL.

Games as Models

I just got back from the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) annual conference in Nashville TN.  The NSTA conference is huge and there are many, many good choices of sessions to attend. This is the largest gathering of science teachers in the US, and probably the world, with over 10,000 attendees.  This year I decided to go with a particular objective to focus on since there is no way to glean everything of value at a conference of this size.  I chose some sessions in advance and then left room in my schedule for interesting opportunities.   

Since I’ve been thinking more about the new Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) practice of modeling, I have begun to see models everywhere in my teaching.  As part of my objective, I chose a workshop on using games to teach environmental science. This workshop looked like a good fit with a curricular area I want to emphasize more and I also wanted to explore the connection between games and models.

When I first saw that models and modeling would be part of the NGSS, I was concerned.  How well would this standard apply to the work I was doing with middle school and elementary school students?  Sure, a globe was a model, and so was the anatomical model of a human torso that let students take out and reassemble organs like the heart, lungs, intestines, the stomach, the liver, and so on.  But wasn’t model building in the scientific sense a pretty sophisticated activity?

The section of the NGSS site discussion Modeling as a Science and Engineering Practice explained that: 

Models include diagrams, physical replicas, mathematical representations, analogies, and computer simulations.

Somewhere else I read that someone had included simulation games in the category of models to use in science instruction.  Surely not all games are models, but many simulation games, computerized or not qualify using NGSS criteria, which includes:

·      Physical

·      Conceptual

·      External

·      Analogs

·      Shared

·      Clear

The games we tried out in our workshop were all clearly physical, external, and shared as we used game boards, game pieces, cards, and our own bodies to enact scenarios.  Games like Oh Deer and The Power Plant Game were definitely conceptual and a key part of their value was their abstraction and simplification of a complex underlying system.  These games help us focus on a limited set of essential elements and learn while having fun. 

NGSS Developing and Using Models

Along with a group of fellow science teachers, I’ve been thinking about using models to teach science to my students.  I had always thought of models as like scale model airplanes from kits we used to assemble or as anatomical models where you can take out the heart, lungs, and liver and then stuff them back into the body cavities of a vacant looking plastic human model.  And, of course, the formal models that intrinsic to well-developed theories in science.  In fact, some sources believe that “the primary goal of science is the construction and evaluation of scientific models” (Jadrich & Bruxvoort, 2011, p. 12).

With this conception of models in mind, I hadn’t given much thought to the use of models in teaching science.  However, in learning more about the new Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), I began to realize that models were more useful and more prevalent that I had previously thought.  NGSS presents models as representations of actual objects, systems, or processes that help us understand these phenomena.  As such, they define models to include diagrams, physical replicas, mathematical representations, analogies, and computer simulations. 

So if this was true, then the small blue plastic “flippers” in the FOSS Variables kits we used were model catapults.  True, that were really simple catapults but, as the NGSS web site reminds us, “although models do not correspond exactly to the real world, they bring certain features into focus while obscuring others” in Appendix F.  We used these “flippers” to investigate the effects of angle of the flipper, mass of the projectile, and compression of the Popsicle stick used as a springboard on the distance, as the FOSS guide suggests.

Following these science investigations, I started having my students build catapults of their own design, not only to have fun, but also to help illustrate the relationship of science and engineering.  These too were models, I realized.  The two or three stages of prototyping we did before making a final version were also models.   When we watched a NOVA video from their Secrets of Lost Empires series about a group of master builders who reconstructed a trebuchet used to lay siege to a medieval castle, I realized that too was a model.  Suddenly, models were everywhere!

You Can See a Lot Just by Observing

Yogi Berra's famous malapropism takes on new meaning in learning and teaching science. Science really does begin with observation. Some recent work with a pre-kindergarten class that had become fascinated with fungus illustrated this for me. Their classroom teacher and I were taking them on a walk through a wooded area near their classroom to look more closely at the woodrat nests we had seen on an earlier visit. Looking for woodrat nests is a bit like looking for green cars; at first you don't see any, but once you start thinking about them, you see them everywhere.

There is an even earlier step when you first learn to recognize an object, such as a woodrat nest or a fungus. This too is a learning process. Usually when viewing something new, such as the woods, people see an undifferentiated blur. Then when someone points something out to you, shows you how that this thing, this rock, this nest, this lichen, can be separated from the blurry mass, it springs into reality. You can now see it where before you could not.

As we walked, one of the children pointed out a lichen on a tree and asked, "What's this?" We all looked at it and told the children it was a lichen. We told them that lichen was pretty interesting as it is a double organism, a partnership between an alga, which makes food, and a fungus, which provides the protective structure or home for the partnership. Most of them has seen algae on a pond and almost everyone knew about mushrooms, a very familiar type of fungus. Now that lichen had an image, a name, and some information connected with it, they started spotting lichen everywhere on our walk and wherever they went in the following days.

This strand of our curriculum emerged as the children began to see other organisms that resembled the lichen they had first seen. Some of these are lichen, too, we told them, but of a different kind. The first one we had seen was a foliose lichen. They were now looking at crustose lichen, which lie flat on a bare rock or tree trunk. Once you start seeing two types of something, you have a deeper concept or what the organism is, as well as what it is not. This is also the start of classification and taxonomy.

Crustose lichen. source:  Wikipedia

The PK class was on fire and the study deepened and broadened as they started looking at mushrooms as well and learning about the different types of mushrooms. The classroom teacher found nature books about mushrooms, as well as stories about mushrooms. We found that a husband-and-wife team of naturalists in our community that specialized in mushrooms and we learned the terms mycology and mycologists. They walked with the class in the woods and took the class much deeper into the study of mushrooms: how they get food, how they propagate, how they fit into the larger ecosystem. They class then delved into learning the parts of mushrooms and how these parts work together, structure and function. We dissected mushrooms in class and looked at them closely with our eyes and hand lenses.  We looked at slices of the mushrooms under microscopes, taking slices from caps, gills, stem, and any other part that looked interesting to them.

Observation is fundamental to all science.  All science begins with observation and it had long been the first among the process skills of science.  I like a great deal about the new Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), but I am puzzled why the framers left observation out of the new Practices of Science and Engineering.  I've heard it said that they just presumed that observation was so obvious that it needed no mention.  I would agree that it should be obvious, but so is Asking Questions, which made the cut.  So is Analyzing and Interpreting Data.  So I am still puzzled.   Meanwhile, I continue to teach my students to observe the world around them.  Woodrat nests and lichen are good starting points.