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Life is a series of solving problems. So is Project Based Learning.

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Life is a series of solving problems. So is Project Based Learning.

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PBL is student centered learning based on authentic learning activities that engage students.
Projects are constructed around a real-world question or problem.Students are motivated to learn 21st century skills because they are essential to research the components of the question or problem. It gives students a public voice because their answers to the question are shared with the community.
Read this article to learn why PBL is superior to the traditional organization of teaching and learning( Lamar, 2017; pbl-online.org. (n.d.))

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Characteristics of Authentic Learning Activities

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Characteristics of Authentic Learning Activities

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Students become college and career ready.              PBL teaches students how to be problem solvers and overcome challenges. In other words, how to be a valued employee in a global workforce.

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Students become college and career ready.              PBL teaches students how to be problem solvers and overcome challenges. In other words, how to be a valued employee in a global workforce.

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Employers want workers who can work effectively with others, efficiently sift through an ever-expanding body of knowledge and come up with solutions that benefit everyone. PBL teachers many of the skills used in the global workplace. Students must master rigorous content through research. Students collaborate with others; an essential an essential skill to solve the problem. Students make judgements about the correct actions to take. Research shows that engaging in relevant projects develops 21st century skills and is best practice for literacy. Watch the short video below for an introduction to PBL(Buck Institute, 2010)

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PBL promotes literacy and language development within my content area of social studies.

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PBL promotes literacy and language development within my content area of social studies.

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There are many words in social studies that must be defined precisely, for example, the words "usurpation" and "tyranny" in the Declaration of Independence have to be defined. Students must define technical terms to understand them if they are to formulate coherent problems and define steps to solve them.
Additionally, students have options in what they choose to read. Because students work in teams there will be varying levels of reading proficiency. This means that students are able to select the level of text complexity that is right for them, while having the benefits of Zone of Proximal Development (ZDP) help from higher proficiency students (Vygotsky, 1978). For example, a student at the NAEP basic level might choose to glean facts from a website, while a student reading at the proficient level may be reading scholarly articles and pointing out his thinking while reading to the basic level student. Thus, both are strengthening their reading proficiency.

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PBL benefits students because it makes use of UDL principles. 

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PBL benefits students because it makes use of UDL principles. 

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UDL is incorporated into PBL by it's very nature. UDL principles are baked-in to the projects PBL gives students voice and choice of roles, and it provides multiple means of engagement, representation, and expression. Watch this video for explanations from a teacher who used it in her 9th grade ELA classroom (Cast, 2016). Because students are engaging with so much material in authentic ways, they are able to choose what works best for them in the three areas of engagement, representation, and expression naturally.

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Project Based Learning and Universal Design for Learning

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English speakers at all proficiency levels benefit from instruction that raises their literacy levels in all four domains of listening, reading, speaking and writing. PBL offers a way to capture high student interest so that they can learn and practice strategies that help them develop in these domains. Read this article to learn more about how engaging in PBL to solve problems gives students  the motivation to hone their speaking skills to present their solutions to the community (Buck Institute for Education, 2011). If they don't, they risk their ideas being ignored.
This is a long video but it is packed with a lot of practical information for teachers who want to incorporate literacy learning that really helps students (Buck Institute for Education, 2012) .

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Benefits for English Language Learners (ELLs)

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Benefits for English Language Learners (ELLs)

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Students who are ELLs need access to content specific language that helps them meet the same standards as every other student. There are many challenges to this, one of which is motivation to keep working through difficult texts with unfamiliar vocabulary. PBL is incredibly motivating for students because it connects with their lives. Making learning activities that are relevant to students is especially important with ELLs. Read this article to learn how one teacher engaged her Mexican American students to their learning (Branvold, 2018).

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Standard English learners speak English, but they need support to learn the Standard form of English that they need to succeed in school and the workplace. These learners should not be made to think that the language they speak at home or in the community is wrong or that teachers are trying to force them to change who they are. Teachers must foster the attitude that Standard English is a language form to add to their existing linguistic toolkit. PBL's emphasis on solving a problem that meets a community need keeps students focused on the fact that they will be presenting their solution to the larger community. They need to present their solution using Standard English forms of writing and speech. It is a meaningful application of learning (Terrance, 2018).

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May 16, 2018
How I Meet the Needs of Students from Disadvantaged Backgrounds with PBL

How can we keep students who are disengaged from school excited about learning? How can we reach students who struggle in and out of the classroom and who many would say are hard to teach? How can we effectively educate students from disadvantaged backgrounds? Well, those are my students. In order for me to close their wide achievement gap, it was necessary to recognize the students' varying background knowledge, academic readiness, learning style preference, and interests. I also had to discover a method of teaching that would adapt to my students' needs and engage them, which led me to Project Based Learning.

Let me share a project that was completed with outstanding results, with my eighth grade science students. The objective of the project was to discover why so many local citizens were getting sick with cancer. Many of the students were always sharing a story about a family member being diagnosed with cancer, so we used this opportunity to inquire more about the environment around us. After collecting research on the entire city, we focused on which area had the highest percentages of people with cancer. We discovered that the most affected area was where the students lived. Local air quality tests showed that harmful chemicals were being released from the neighboring chemical plants. At the end of the project, students presented proposals to local plant workers on actions the plants could do to help lower the risk of the citizens getting sick.

Another project that resulted in effective use of PBL strategies began with collaborative planning session with an ELA teacher. Students wrote a play on renewable energy resources and how they could contribute to saving energy and keep the world's energy supply from running out. This led to the students' building scale models of solar powered homes as their final product. They were interested and motivated to contribute new home designs to their community and were actively engaged.

Why I Chose PBL for My Students
Why do I choose doing projects like this with my students? Because they are authentic, very engaging, and relevant to the students.

To help you better understand the students in my school, they are from an underprivileged community, as it relates to family income and exposure to different opportunities to participate in social events. Over fifty percent of their parents did not have a high school diploma and only a small percentage had a college degree, so the interest for being successful in school was really low.

In my experience, I have learned that lower socio-economic students are often disengaged at school, because of many factors such as negative environmental impacts, family and social issues that many of them deal with on a daily basis, wide achievement gaps in their academic skills, having little engagement in lesson strategies, lack of intentional strategies to build self-confidence, and having difficulty adjusting to restrictive classroom environments that do not encourage communication. I recognized the importance of addressing each of these critical components to connect with the students and motivate them to try, so engaging them through PBL was key to my success.

Here are some tips for using PBL with students from lower-income backgrounds:

1. Make the activity challenging and the standards aligned, but provide enough scaffolding to meet the students where they are. In my classroom, PBL allowed for the accommodation of different learning styles through various teaching styles. Both of the above projects were challenging to the students, but instructional strategies used by many teachers such as workshops (centers), individual and team assignments, and small group and whole group learning opportunities helped me ensure I was keeping aligned with the standards and students were gaining knowledge of the content. Incorporating these strategies consistently in my teaching yielded 98.5% mastery in achievement on state test scores and 90-95% passage scores in classroom assessments-which included 504 students, many in Special Education.

2. Include collaboration with peers and experts. PBL encourages expert collaboration to give students a deeper understanding of the learning. In the cancer project, students interviewed community partners, an environmental specialist, and chemical plant workers. Inviting experts into the classroom gave value to the students' perception of the content. Having those high quality conversations with their peers increased engagement, but more so student knowledge.

3. Use protocols. We used protocols throughout our projects to ensure students were focused and guided in an appropriate setting. Protocols are defined by educators as structured conversations and/or learning experiences, and help make collaboration efficient, purposeful, and productive. I use the tuning protocol often as a peer assessment. In the cancer project, students used the protocol when planning their final presentations. In groups of three, others would listen, respond, and discuss components of the project needed for presentation day.

PBL celebrates student differences instead of hiding or ignoring them, and it provides the forum to meet students where they are and help them grow. In my projects, I was able to teach students how to manage their learning constructively and allow them to deconstruct the content based on their understanding, which increased their motivation and engagement. My ability to reach students at all academic levels has improved drastically by incorporating Project Based Learning.

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How can we keep students who are disengaged from school excited about learning? How can we reach students who struggle in and out of the classroom and who many would say are hard to teach? How can we effectively educate students from disadvantaged backgrounds? Well, those are my students.

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Benefits for students with special needs

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Benefits for students with special needs

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Does PBL work for students with special needs? Yes! In fact, this study by the National Center for Learning Disabilities shows how well-designed PBL that provides sufficient accommodation for students results in learners exceeding expectations (National Center for Learning Disabilities, n.d.).

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August 28, 2017
PBL for Equity & Inclusion of Students with Disabilities

How do we respond to struggling learners, including those with disabilities, when they just can't seem to get it? The unfortunate fact is that we too often double down on ineffective "skill and drill" approaches that fail to engage them, rather than considering different routes to learning. The consequences are profound: struggling learners experience cumulative frustration with no relief in sight and schools perpetuate different tracks of education for students, one focused on the development of foundational skills and the other attending to content learning as well as to the full range of knowledge, skills, and dispositions essential for 21st century success.

There is a better way. We don't have to preserve a dichotomy between foundational skills and the knowledge and behaviors that position students for success in school, in the workplace and in the community. We know from research in learning sciences that opportunities to facilitate educational transfer in relevant, engaging projects not only develops 21st century skills like critical thinking, problem solving, collaboration, and communication skills, but also reflects best practice in literacy and math instruction. It is simply a choice that we make as a society in how we think about learners and learning; Do we believe that approaches like project-based learning should be prioritized as interventions of choice for all learners and not just our high-flying students? Should we think about project-based learning as best practice for students with disabilities?

The answer to this question should not be a simple yes, but a "yes and." Yes, we can leverage project-based learning and more rigorous hands-on learning opportunities for all students and we must create the essential supports to ensure that students with identified disabilities and other traditionally struggling learners can thrive in classrooms where these approaches are implemented. We needn't modify our expectations of what students with disabilities and other struggling learners can achieve through these approaches, rather, we must take steps to accommodate their needs. Whether a student struggles with reading, writing, math, executive functioning or a combination of these issues or a physical disability that inhibits their capacity to engage a project in a pre-conceived way, we need to guard against the mistaken notion that something within the child is broken. Our challenge and opportunity is to see that hurdles to learning focus not on the intrinsic weakness that students face by virtue of their disabilities but rather on the ways we conceptualize, design and implement learning experiences.

A High School Accommodates Struggling Learners
In a recent case study, I highlight how a rural high school, Warren New Tech High School in Warrenton, North Carolina, and a teacher, Michael Williams, took steps to intentionally create greater accessibility in project-based learning experiences for their students with disabilities. Steps they took included collaborative planning between special and general educators in the initial design of projects, sufficient accommodations to help students with disabilities access supports in the implementation of projects, and explicit checkpoints in the life of the project to ensure students were able to access underlying content that the project is based on. The results they achieved met and surpassed their expectations, proving that a little intentionality on the front end goes a long way.

The challenge, though, goes beyond how we create space for these sorts of accessible project-based learning experiences in a single school, but how do we build greater accessibility and inclusion throughout the system? On this point, states and districts would be wise to build system capacity for inclusion through ensuring preparation and professional learning for both teachers and leaders. Keys to systemic change must consider strategies that focus on specific skills like implementing project-based learning through a UDL lens, setting high expectations, being explicit and proactive about addressing adults' underlying biases that would undermine high expectations for all students, and providing flexibility and supports to educators through structures that contribute to strong systems. Leveraging common planning time and strong PLCs, flexibility in roles of educators, and overcoming constraints in master scheduling to enable this work are also immensely important. There's a lot that goes into this endeavor and it's work that can't be left to chance.

The scale of our challenges in education go beyond tinkering and the seriousness of this challenge demands more than generalities. If we are serious, we have to attack both narrow mindsets and narrow practices. That's the only way we will meet our commitment to a stronger, more just and inclusive world.

Read the case study at the National Center for Learning Disabilities.

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How do we respond to struggling learners, including those with disabilities, when they just can't seem to get it? The unfortunate fact is that we too often double down on ineffective "skill and drill" approaches that fail to engage them, rather than considering different routes to learning.

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How do I know I am designing an effective PBL?

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How do I know I am designing an effective PBL?

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All projects are not PBL. PBL requires specific elements incorporated into planning and execution. These include being an authentic, real-world challenge or question, allowing students to take the lead while providing appropriate scaffolding. Here is a rubric from the Buck Institute of Education that shows the CCSS standards.

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Reflection and implications for instructional practice.

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Reflection and implications for instructional practice.

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The benefits of using PBL for all learners when it is designed properly are myriad. They include strong student motivation because they are working on real-world problems that they evaluate as important to them. UDL principles are baked-in to the projects PBL gives students voice and choice of roles, and it provides multiple means of engagement, representation, and expression. UDL principles must be used when planning instruction because there is predicted learner variability that teachers can and should plan for in every lesson. Learner variability means that teachers must differentiate not only instruction but also accept multiple means of expression from students. In my case, I had to overcome the mindset that a long text essay was of more worth than a presentation. While I need to help all student become stronger in many forms of expression of mastery of content, I also need to truly believe that text is not inherently better than graphic representation of knowledge. Honestly, I am still working on this. But that's okay; I am an expert learner and will not give up until I have grown and improved my attitudes and behaviors.

PBL also requires students to use the six major categories of thinking and learning skills of Bloom's taxonomy. This is what adults do at work all the time. It is good that students can practice being successful at it (Armstrong, n.d..

I am convinced of the value of PBL, now the challenge is to implement try PBL, not just a project. Going forward in my growth as a pre-service teacher I need to create a PBL and check it against the CCSS aligned rubric. I will then assess the strengths and weaknesses of my PBL and apply the necessary corrections. I find that writing clear objectives that contain observable and measurable student behaviors is essential if I want a coherent learning map. I believe that writing a PBL will include dozens of objectives. This is a bit overwhelming, so I will take it bit by bit and do backwards lesson plan design.

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Cite this guide: Armstrong, P. (2010). Bloom's Taxonomy. Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching. Retrieved [todaysdate] from https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/blooms-taxonomy/.

Background Information | The Original Taxonomy | The Revised Taxonomy | Why Use Bloom's Taxonomy? | Further Information

The above graphic is released under a Creative Commons Attribution license. You're free to share, reproduce, or otherwise use it, as long as you attribute it to the Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching. For a higher resolution version, visit our Flickr account and look for the "Download this photo" icon.

Background Information

In 1956, Benjamin Bloom with collaborators Max Englehart, Edward Furst, Walter Hill, and David Krathwohl published a framework for categorizing educational goals: Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. Familiarly known as Bloom's Taxonomy, this framework has been applied by generations of K-12 teachers and college instructors in their teaching.

The framework elaborated by Bloom and his collaborators consisted of six major categories: Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation. The categories after Knowledge were presented as "skills and abilities," with the understanding that knowledge was the necessary precondition for putting these skills and abilities into practice.

While each category contained subcategories, all lying along a continuum from simple to complex and concrete to abstract, the taxonomy is popularly remembered according to the six main categories.

The Original Taxonomy (1956)

Here are the authors' brief explanations of these main categories in from the appendix of Taxonomy of Educational Objectives ( Handbook One, pp. 201-207):

Knowledge "involves the recall of specifics and universals, the recall of methods and processes, or the recall of a pattern, structure, or setting."

Comprehension "refers to a type of understanding or apprehension such that the individual knows what is being communicated and can make use of the material or idea being communicated without necessarily relating it to other material or seeing its fullest implications."

Application refers to the "use of abstractions in particular and concrete situations."

Analysis represents the "breakdown of a communication into its constituent elements or parts such that the relative hierarchy of ideas is made clear and/or the relations between ideas expressed are made explicit."

Synthesis involves the "putting together of elements and parts so as to form a whole."

Evaluation engenders "judgments about the value of material and methods for given purposes."

The 1984 edition of Handbook One is available in the CFT Library in Calhoun 116. See its ACORN record for call number and availability.

Barbara Gross Davis, in the "Asking Questions" chapter of Tools for Teaching, also provides examples of questions corresponding to the six categories. This chapter is not available in the online version of the book, but Tools for Teaching is available in the CFT Library. See its ACORN record for call number and availability.

The Revised Taxonomy (2001)

A group of cognitive psychologists, curriculum theorists and instructional researchers, and testing and assessment specialists published in 2001 a revision of Bloom's Taxonomy with the title A Taxonomy for Teaching, Learning, and Assessment. This title draws attention away from the somewhat static notion of "educational objectives" (in Bloom's original title) and points to a more dynamic conception of classification.

The authors of the revised taxonomy underscore this dynamism, using verbs and gerunds to label their categories and subcategories (rather than the nouns of the original taxonomy). These "action words" describe the cognitive processes by which thinkers encounter and work with knowledge:

Remember

Understand

Interpreting

Exemplifying

Classifying

Summarizing

Inferring

Comparing

Explaining

Apply

Analyze

Differentiating

Organizing

Attributing

Evaluate

Create

In the revised taxonomy, knowledge is at the basis of these six cognitive processes, but its authors created a separate taxonomy of the types of knowledge used in cognition:

Factual Knowledge

Knowledge of terminology

Knowledge of specific details and elements

Conceptual Knowledge

Knowledge of classifications and categories

Knowledge of principles and generalizations

Knowledge of theories, models, and structures

Procedural Knowledge

Knowledge of subject-specific skills and algorithms

Knowledge of subject-specific techniques and methods

Knowledge of criteria for determining when to use appropriate procedures

Metacognitive Knowledge

Strategic Knowledge

Knowledge about cognitive tasks, including appropriate contextual and conditional knowledge

Self-knowledge

Mary Forehand from the University of Georgia provides a guide to the revised version giving a brief summary of the revised taxonomy and a helpful table of the six cognitive processes and four types of knowledge.

Why Use Bloom's Taxonomy?

The authors of the revised taxonomy suggest a multi-layered answer to this question, to which the author of this teaching guide has added some clarifying points:

1. Objectives (learning goals) are important to establish in a pedagogical interchange so that teachers and students alike understand the purpose of that interchange.

2. Organizing objectives helps to clarify objectives for themselves and for students.

3. Having an organized set of objectives helps teachers to:

"plan and deliver appropriate instruction";

"design valid assessment tasks and strategies";and

"ensure that instruction and assessment are aligned with the objectives."

Citations are from A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing: A Revision of Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives.

Further Information

Section III of A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing: A Revision of Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, entitled "The Taxonomy in Use," provides over 150 pages of examples of applications of the taxonomy. Although these examples are from the K-12 setting, they are easily adaptable to the university setting.

Section IV, "The Taxonomy in Perspective," provides information about 19 alternative frameworks to Bloom's Taxonomy, and discusses the relationship of these alternative frameworks to the revised Bloom's Taxonomy.

This teaching guide is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

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by Patricia Armstrong Print Version Cite this guide: Armstrong, P. (2010). Bloom's Taxonomy. Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching. Retrieved [todaysdate] from https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/blooms-taxonomy/. Background Information | The Original Taxonomy | The Revised Taxonomy | Why Use Bloom's Taxonomy? | Further Information The above graphic is released under a Creative Commons Attribution license.

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APA sources week 1 assignment Project Based Learning and Literacy.docx