BACK TO PROJECT BASED LEARNING BLOGS
By: Anne Mikos, Director of STEM Education | Classroom Facilitator
Patel High School
Tampa, FL
From a literal perspective, a baby’s steps make very little progress in reaching his or her final physical destination. But from a parent’s perspective, those baby steps represent a massive achievement: challenging the norm of rolling or crawling, experiencing independence, and overcoming a fear of falling. Facilitating a math classroom can often feel like taking the role of a parent, hoping to encourage their baby to take those first steps. We know that crawling can’t carry our learners throughout their lives, but how do we encourage them to take those first steps? It can be overwhelming to think about your child running, jumping, or playing sports. The same is true for a math class room and implementing project-based learning. How can we take learners who are used to memorizing multiplication facts and get them to solve real-world community problems using critical thinking and algebraic skills?
The short answer: baby steps.
Baby Step #1: Reorganize
When I started teaching math, I was far from a PBL teacher. I covered one section of the textbook a day, I stood in the front of the room and directed students through a powerpoint show, then assigned homework from the back of the book. About halfway through a chapter, there was a quiz. When we finished that chapter, we had a test. I was replicating the math classroom that I experienced, one which was a good one in my own mind (I clearly turned out fine, I’m a math teacher now!). But I quickly realized that I was having to reteach myself the content before teaching it to the students. And I wasn’t always sure why I was teaching them what I was teaching them (it was in the book, so they must need it some time for something, right?). If all these concepts were so important for students to know, why didn’t I remember them? And how come I didn’t know where they would be used again down the road? Even worse than that, my learners were not remembering concepts as we moved from one chapter to the next. A cumulative final exam was their nightmare. How come my learners couldn’t remember chapter 2 when we were supposedly using those same skills in chapter 5?
I started my journey into PBL with this baby step, making easy changes that allowed me to dip my toe into trying something new. I started by naming units by the content covered and not just by the order we covered them in. For example, my learners now talked about Families of Functions instead of Unit 2. Now everyone in the room should be clear on the theme of our unit and build more content vocabulary along the way. When we need to build off of these functions, I can refer back to their family and not just “remember we did this in Chapter 2,” a grouping that holds no significance for the learner. It also allowed me to mix-and-match sections of the book into new groupings that made more sense to each unit title. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was building the skills I needed to create a PBL unit! Large-scale, real-world PBLs don’t often (if ever) perfectly align with a math textbook chapter of content. But they definitely include a chapter worth of academic standards. The tricky part is figuring out which standards to pull from where to create an academically rigorous experience. Pulling content standards and organizing curriculum maps in a way that makes the most sense for solving a problem is the key to academic rigor in a PBL!
Baby Step #2: Challenge Traditional Approaches
Now that I had fresh eyes on how I could organize the course content, I could think about fresh ways to teach the course content. Every time you do a routine or teach a lesson, ask yourself if you know why you are doing it the way that you are.
Is it because you have fallen into a habit? Is it because it is how you are taught?
Do you understand the content best this way?
Do you know of anyone who teaches this content differently?
Who is doing most of the talking in this experience?
Why did my classroom need to have straight rows of desks? Why did I need to be the only one explaining concepts and solving problems? I started by moving my classroom desks into groups of four, and providing group discussion time for each problem posed on the board. Seems like a ridiculously small, almost meaningless step, right? But what I saw blew my mind. When I would have solved a problem algebraically, my groups of students had shown each other graphical and numerical solutions. They asked way more questions to their peers than they had ever asked me. And they were making connections between representations that I had not thought to show them! I didn’t need to be the sage on the stage, I needed to be a facilitator! I needed to get out of their way. Allowing learners the freedom to tackle a problem in the way that makes most sense to them is pivotal to PBL! You can’t find solutions to community problems if you only believe there is one right way to tackle it. More than that, learners need to work together in groups of peers who see the world differently than themself to create the most vibrant solutions possible.
But how do we make sure that learners are actually mastering the content? The next natural step for me was to then write out and communicate to the learners what the content expectations were for them in each unit. Since I wasn’t following the textbook line-by-line anymore, I needed to make sure my learners had a way to check for themselves if they had mastered each skill within the unit. And more so than that, how to ask for help on a specific topic or skill (from me, from their group, from the internet, from a tutor, etc.). How often have we had a learner unable to answer the question, “what did you learn today?”? So I wrote out the new groupings of the content standards in a student-friendly format. At the start of each unit, learners were given the content standards grouped according to each lesson. Learners could now preview the content, reference the terminology, and review prerequisite skills on their own time, in their own way. This baby step was helping me become comfortable with Knows & Need to Knows in the PBL world! Helping learners translate content vocabulary and recognize their own comfortability with each topic. It provided my learners a tool to start building their agency with each topic. Do I know what I learned today? Am I ready to learn tomorrow? What have I mastered and where am I struggling? Learners need to be comfortable asking and answering these questions for themselves within a large PBL. Figuring out what questions to ask and which resources to use are vital to tackling an open-ended problem!
Baby Step #3: Math, All Day
It’s great to start building PBL skills with baby steps in general, but what does this have to do with being a math teacher? How could we possibly translate those skills into designing a rigorous, math experience? Looking at a long list of math standards doesn’t necessarily inspire real-world, community focused problem solving. So what baby steps can we take to make that happen?
This one is all about you, the teacher. Dedicate a day or a weekend to experience your day through a math lens. Consider even the most routine experiences as an opportunity to think about the math necessary to make it happen. Pick a notebook or app to log your experiences, anything and everything that you interact with in a day that has remotely anything to do with math in general. Write down moments in the day that make you happy, or better than that, note the things that frustrate or upset you. Do you see homelessness outside of the grocery store? What’s the correlation between inflation of food cost and homelessness? Is there a correlation between inflation of food cost and housing costs? Is there a connection in your school building to the school lunch cost?
Think about problems that you would like to spend time working on, local or global. For example, I often drive on I4 and one day paid special attention to white horizontal lines on the highway. I did a quick google and learned they are used to monitor speed by air. After a quick peek into that process, it dawned on me that this process is derived from Calculus! What started as a normal detail in my commute became the beginning of a unit-long PBL on the Mean Value Theorem and rates of change, partnering with local law enforcement on speeding tickets and corresponding law. Paying attention to details in my day and digging into any math connections spurred my interest into teaching teen drivers about the dangers of speeding while teaching Calculus. I had gone from baby steps to full-blown, authentic PBL! But it all came together from the baby steps we had been practicing all along!
Putting It Together
Letting your learners take these baby steps in the safety of your math classroom will make sure that they (and you too!) are ready to run a full-blown, math PBL with confidence. While making these small changes may seem like you are not making much progress toward your PBL goal in the moment, you will be shocked at how much easier the transition to the big-leagues will be!
As a fellow math facilitator, I challenge you to:
Rename and reorganize your course content
Challenge your current classroom practices
Take a day to dive into the math around you
Now take a deep breath, and try a full-blown PBL Math Unit!
Anne Mikos is the Director of STEM Education and a classroom Facilitator at Patel High School in Tampa, Florida. She has taught secondary math, science, and engineering through project-based learning for the last nine years. Anne is a huge advocate for the Share Your Learning initiative and a practitioner of Deeper Learning teaching practices. Her passion is introducing learners to a safe place to learn how to fail and see that failure is a crucial step in succeeding. When not in the classroom, Anne loves to spend time with her family and friends at Disney or a good coffee shop.
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