Some questions to consider for your diary entry (you do not need to answer all of these): What teaching strategy do you use most commonly? What do YOU do most of the time in the classroom? What do the students do most of the time? Do you feel your current approach could be easily complemented with a PBL approach? Do you sometimes have the problem that students don't remember what they "learned" the day before? How do you address this? Do you already use some of the PBL approaches mentioned in the video? What works, doesn't work? Why? How do you find out about your student needs and how do you incorporate this knowledge in your teaching? Finish your reflection by identifying a class and a subject topic that you teach which you can use to experiment with PBL.

The quote by Benjamin Franklin at the beginning of the module pretty much catches the essence why PBL is such an effective pedagogical approach. However, let's look at this in a bit more detail. What type of skills & competences are developed in students as a result of PBL? The video below is a bit longer but it's really worth watching, as it oulines with very concrete examples how students benefit when engaged effectively in the PBL approach. After watching the video identify in the Tricider below why you think PBL is not used more widely in our education systems? What is stopping us from achieving what is outlined in the video? What are the biggest challenges we as educators face and who is stopping us from adopting the PBL approach in our classrooms? You can also upvote the responses from other participants.

by Maria ,Greece

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Vote

When you have come up with a good driving question post it in the peer review activity text box below, together with a bit of context about where you plan to implement it, such as the student age-range, subject, etc. and the learning goals you would like to achieve with the class (what skills, knowledge, etc. students should acquire). In order to provide some context you could also post your Learning Diary entry reflection from section 1.3 together with your driving question. Please make sure that all information is provided in English language as otherwise the peer review process does not work.

Once you have submitted your question, it will be sent to two other random course participants. Around 24 hours after submitting your question, you will receive 2 questions of your peers. Provide some brief feedback to them and possibly some suggestion of how to improve the question. As criteria for the feedback use the 4 aspects mentioned here:

1. Hand in your work > 2. Review your colleagues > 3. Reviews received

The time for handing in ends on 16-11-2017 00:59:00

KEEPING TOGETHER IS PROGRESS,

WORKING TOGETHER IS SUCCESS

Henry Ford

This quote by Henry Ford already hints at the essence of this module, effective collaboration is not easy! It is an activity that rarely happens overnight and that requires careful scaffolding and preparation. That's what this module is all about. At the heart of the PBL process is collaboration, be that as part of a group of students exploring your driving question or be that as part of working with outside actors who can provide meaning and feedback on the students' work. In this module the learning objectives are therefore:

Share a picture that shows or represents collaboration for you, together with a brief explanation of why you have chosen this picture. It could be a screenshot from an online chat where you have successfully collaborated on a project, a picture of your students at work as part of PBL, an abstract drawing or diagram, or any picture you have found on the internet that you feels shows collaboration happening. If you share a picture that is not your own please take into account the sharing permissions or provide relevant credits. Please, always remember to mention your first name, last name and country of origin. Anonymous comments do not encourage dialogue.

You have already done the survey

by Maria ,Greece

As part of this we explore two different types of collaboration with outside actors. The first is about organising projects together with another class, where students collaborate not only with their immediate peers but with students at another school. For this type of collaboration there is simply no way around the eTwinning network, an online network of more than 400,000 teachers in Europe and beyond, designed so that you can easily find project partners and organize joint projects. At the core of eTwinning's pedagogy stands the PBL approach so if you are not yet part of this network, make sure to check out the below video to see how the PBL approach of running an eTwinning project can benefit your students' learning. You can also find a great getting started walk-through of eTwinning here.

As a concrete action here we would encourage all of you, new or old eTwinners, to use this course community of learners to find like-minded colleagues who you could run a project with. For this purpose you will find in the Forum under Module 2 a special category for finding project partners.
The second area to consider here is about involving people from the community in students' work. Getting professionals from the "real-world" to come and work with the students creates an entirely new meaning for their work. Of course, engaging people from the community is not always easy. It requires time, patience and good communication skills to foster good relationships with such individuals. But herein also lies the opportunity if students are involved in the process of engaging such people from the start. 

Take a look at the below video for two examples of successful engagement of outside professionals in the PBL work of students and then add an entry to your Learning Diary reflecting on which people from your community you or your students could engage with. Think about if you have contacts to or knowledge of networks of local professionals? Which organisations or people engage with the school on a regular basis? Are there any businesses working with the school such as caterers, IT companies, or sports organisations? Who are your school's neighbours? Could they be approached? What about school alumni? And who could you or your students ask for support in identifying the right people? Think about these questions as you draft your Learning Diary entry and then post your entry also in the below Padlet to share it with your peers. For some further inspiring ideas about community engagment make sure to also check out these two blog entries, here and here.

The great thing about the web is that there are so many tools out there that can help us, as teachers or students, to collaborate in more effective or even entirely new ways. However, here we can only introduce you to one example and it will be up to you, the community of learners on this course, to share your knowledge of tools that you and your students can use to collaborate as part of the PBL process. 

The tool we would like to introduce here is a tool that can help you not only for forming teams but also for ongoing assessment of students' PBL work. The tool is called TeamUp and you'll find a brief introduction to it below. Make sure then to share with your peers other collaboration tools out there by posting their name, a brief description and a link in the Padlet below the video. Before posting any suggestions however, make sure you take a browse through the Padlet to check the tool you would like to suggest isn't already there. 

IT'S JUST THAT I STAY WITH PROBLEMS LONGER

Albert Einstein

Next to developing collaborative skills of students, another key part of PBL is for students to take ownership of tasks, initiative at solving problems, and most importantly to stick with these tasks and problems until they have come to a satisfactory conclusion. In other words, we try to develop a student-driven environment in which the energy and persistence of what is happening in the classroom does not primarily come from us but from the students. 

Albert Einstein's quote above captures one of the key essences of this module: getting students' to develop grit and resilience to stay with a problem or project even though they have failed previously is one the most difficult parts of PBL and at the core of developing a student-driven environment. As an example and at a quite simple level, when students work for the first time in a group as part of PBL, the first attempts at collaboration might not be successful. It is essential that students don't become frustrated and demotivated but rather excited and motivated to try again and improve, again and again and again. Creating an environment that allows and promotes this, is what the module is all about. 

The learning objectives for this module are:

As a starter activity, briefly describe a situation in your professional or personal life where you were first unsuccessful but because you stuck with it you succeeded in the end. Finish by identifying why you stuck with the problem/task and did not give up (and make sure to copy your entry also into your Learning Diary).

Working in teams and pursuing a complex question or problem over a longer period of time as part of PBL will require student resilience. We know that it is possible to develop resilience in our students through a combination of setting out the right environment, building positive relationships, and offering space for independent decisions. Take a look at the video below developed by course moderator Kornélia Lohyňová for a series of strategies to develop student resilience and see here for a nice video focussing on building confidence.

If you are unfamiliar with the term and its counterpart, summative assessment, check out the diagram on the right. To see it in large just click on the diagram. Please note that the diagram's examples can be a bit confusing as some of them could work for either formative or summative assessment and it depends more on how they are used (for example a test would be summative not formative if done at the end of the year to assess what knowledge has been attained). 

Take a look at the video below which gives you some nice and simple examples of how you can formatively assess learning throughout the PBL implementation. The video also identifies the opportunity of inviting outside audiences to be part of the assessment process, something which unfortunately we don't have enough time to look at in more detail. However, if you remember back to this video here from Module 2, it provided an excellent example of how the engagement of an outside audience was used as part of the assessment process. 

In the video below, one of the teachers mentions the "quick-check" technique which simply uses a thumbs up approach to assess if students are progressing. There are many more such simple formative assessment techniques so share any other such techniques that you are aware of or can think of in the Tricider below. You can also check out here for some more ideas to experiment/adapt with.