"if this is the direction teachers are supposed to moving, why isn’t there more support?"
On August 28, 2012, I attended my school district’s Implementation Day. This is a day where all teaching staff in the district get together and are enrolled in the initiatives the leadership team outlines for the school year. This year was particularly exciting. We had a new Superintendent, and the provincial government was rolling out the new BC Education Plan. Change was imminent. The plan was simple: Teachers were going to revolutionize their classrooms! Gone were the days of teacher driven lectures and textbook homework. We were launching into a new era of constructivist teaching. Education was to become student-centered. Casting aside old curricular demands, students must now learn 21st century skills. They need to collaborate, think critically, contribute, create and innovate – within the context of learning some of the prescribed learning outcomes. How was this to be done? Project Based Learning! Constructivism at its finest. Throughout the implementation day, teachers were provided with compelling research heralding the advantages of PBL, promising this new direction in teaching will be rewarding for not only students, but for teachers and parents too!
Once we were all on board, the district announced that they were going to help us get started. They brought in the Buck Institute, all the way from California, to help train teachers in PBL. They provided us with a workbook, and walked us through how to design inspiring driving questions, gave us templates for presentation rubrics, reminded us about our stellar assessment for learning practices, and we were off! Ready to change the face of education, one project at a time.
Except...a few days later, we were back in school. Faced with the usual start-of-the-year challenges, and the general chaos September brings, we had no time to work on our projects. With no collaboration time, teachers quickly fell back into their old routines and survival mode. At our October Professional Development day, we were again reminded about the virtues of PBL, and felt guilty about not putting more effort into giving it a try.
I went home that day and thought about PBL. I wanted to be a leader in my school, and had the perfect Science 8 class to test it out. I looked over the density PBL unit I had started in August, and my hope quickly faded. It was terrible. The project was unclear, I didn’t really know myself what I wanted the students to do and the final presentation of learning was a mess. I was overwhelmed trying to fit in my learning outcomes. I was discouraged. I did some quick math and realized that it would take me well over 40 hours to create a quality PBL unit. By October, in a semestered school, I am in the thick of teaching – I don’t have that kind of time. And by the time I finished building it, I’d be on to teaching something new! So then I thought, maybe there are some projects online I could use? I spent the rest of the day searching, and found nothing. There were some ideas, but only ideas. And all of the ideas were based on American performance standards. There were no teaching resources to support the ideas, no rubrics to help me figure out what I was looking for. I was on my own. So then I thought, if this is the direction teachers are supposed to moving, why isn’t there more support? Why isn’t there a database of PBL packages to choose from? And ConstructWithUs was born.