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By: Trisha Burns, Middle School Facilitator
CSA Central-Columbus Signature Academy Middle School
Columbus, IN
Today you completed your PBL Unit launch with your students starting with an entry event. You had them watch a couple of engaging videos and had a discussion with them. One student identified the problem and asked, “How can we help?” You smiled to yourself and said, “I’m so glad you asked,” giving yourself a little pat on the back for choosing the right videos and discussion questions to get them to ask.
You, then, passed out a letter from your community partner that you had written earlier in the planning stages of the PBL. The letter left a trail of “breadcrumbs'' (see highlights on document), a series of content and skill-related clues that the students need to know or be able to do during the PBL. You had hoped these “breadcrumbs” would lead your students to the questions you wanted them to ask during the collection of “knows and need to knows”. This process was meant to ensure that not only does your community partner get what they need/want from your students, but also that you are able to teach your content (standards) to help support their learning and solutions to the problem at hand. On your PBL Planning Form that you filled out this summer, you called these your “anticipated need to knows.”
Once you had passed out the hand-crafted letter, you instructed your students to underline what they know about the PBL and circle what they need to know quietly on their own for a few minutes. You even take a small group out to the hallway to read the letter with them to help get them started. Once they’ve had time to underline and circle, you use the Affinity Map Protocol to collect your students’ need to knows. You used these steps:
They write each item they circled on a sticky note. You remind them to only write one item per note and to use as many sticky notes as needed.
You have them, while seated in their small groups, combine and organize similar notes/ideas as their group members into categories. They are grouping items that have an “affinity” for one another thus the name of the protocol.
You have the whole class compile their need to know list based on the small groups’ organization of their notes.
Next, you have your students create the driving question answering these three questions:
Who are they in the project? (Role)
What are they doing? (Action/Creating/End Products)
Why are they doing it? (Purpose)
Then you are able to fill the template for the questions and you are ready to begin. ( Check out these samples of Driving Questions).
You sit down during your prep period at the end of the day, look at the pile of need to knows, check your PBL Planning Form from the summer and think to yourself, “Now what?”
Every PBL teacher gets to this place during the PBL process. You might have facilitated your entry event and know/need to know chart differently than me, but similar to me you know you want your PBL to be student-driven and inquiry-based. In order to achieve this goal, you gather a pile of students “need to knows” just like we do at CSA Central Middle School.
Here is a next step or one route we like to take to organize our students’ need to knows. We use the 6 Steps of Problem Solving. We lay out the following 6 Steps labeled on 6 different papers in front of us.
Define the Problem
Solution Criteria
Explore Possible Solutions
Choose a Solution
Create, Run, Inspect the Solution
Reflect on the Solution and Celebration
Then we pick up each and every sticky note group from the Affinity Map Protocol and decide in which step we would answer the need to know and move it to that paper. Below are some generic examples of need to knows we see often among our student need to knows and where we would place them:
Next you look at your benchmarks that you came up with during the summer PBL training and decide which of the 6 steps they belong to and if anything needs to be adjusted or added based on what your student need to knows are. It is VERY normal to have to add several things here that you didn’t think of that your students have questions about.
To begin with, I like to have one benchmark per step of the problem solving process. Think about what activity students could do to show they’ve answered the need to knows for that step and are ready to move on. They COULD look as follows:
End of Step 1: Develop the driving question (whole class)
Step 2: Group contract (small group)
End of Step 2: Activity to make sure they understand the rubric and solution criteria (small group)
Step 3: Content benchmark (relevant to project) (individual)
End of Step 3: Research complete (I like to use Who, What, When, Where, Why to help frame their research. I have one person from the group research each different “W'' and compile research on the same document. Here is an example of one of mine: Group Research
Step 4: Content benchmark to make sure math is correct for their proposal (small group)
Step 4: Decision Matrix to help the group make the best decision for their solution criteria. Here is a blank copy of one we use.
End of Step 4: Proposal/prototype (small group)
Beginning of Step 5: Give and receive feedback (Individual)
End of Step 5: Final product and presentation
Step 6: Reflection journal on how well they answered the driving question (individual)
Again depending on your PBL and your student need to knows this list may look different for you. And some people would disagree that you need that many benchmarks in a PBL Unit. But once you have your benchmarks, it’s time to build your scaffolding to support your students. When scaffolding I consider the following questions:
What workshops, discussions, protocols, activities need to happen to help your students meet their benchmarks and answer their need to knows?
When will you make sure you teach your content?
When will you give students work time?
What optional workshops could you hold to support those who need it?
When will your community partner come in to answer the need to knows the students have for them?
When will students get to see each other's work and give/receive feedback?
When is the best time to go on that field trip?
When is a good time to use stations to answer several need to knows at once?
Taking the time to organize your students’ need to knows at the beginning of the PBL will help you plan your PBL Unit Calendar, make sure you stay true to the PBL process of student-driven learning, and make sure it’s in a process that will help your students solve the problem you and your community partner presented to them.
As I’m developing my scaffolding and my workshops, I like to title them with the questions my students asked from the sticky note collection on Day 1. It helps them see that their questions are important and are what is driving the PBL process.
Most importantly, as Brinti Pascoe (my fellow Magnify Learning facilitator) likes to say, don’t write in pen in your teacher planbook! As you go along the process with your students, make sure to check in on their knows and need to knows. Starting or ending class by moving the questions over to the “know” column helps the students (and you) realize you are making progress in the PBL. But don’t forget to let the students add to the “need to know” section as well! A lot of times, more questions come up during Step 4 and 5 of the process. It’s like they “don’t know what they don’t know” until they get past the research phase. Then they have a lot of questions based on the solution criteria and research that they’ve done that they will need answers before doing their final work.
In conclusion, when you are sitting at your desk at the end of launch day and feeling like, “Now what?”, don’t be overwhelmed. Your students have asked the questions they need answered in order to do this PBL, so what do you need to do? Answer them! Find a logical order like the 6 Steps of Problem Solving and answer their questions. Then your project is planned and the students drive your planning.
How do you use your students’ know/need to know chart to facilitate learning? Let me know @BurnsTrisha! Also if you want to hear about a specific PBL I implemented and see the breakdown of it check out this PBL Playbook podcast episode: Lit for Learning.
For more resources around the 6 Steps check out this page: The 6 Step Process of PBL
Trisha Burns is an 8th grade math facilitator at CSA Central Campus in Columbus, Indiana. She is a certified teacher and trainer through the New Tech Network and certified through Magnify Learning to teach Project Based Learning in Indiana. She has taught in the classroom since 2009 and facilitates for Magnify Learning in the summer. When she is not developing and implementing projects in her class room she loves to hang out with her family and scrapbook their memories!
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