Category Archives: Written by: Judi Fusco

Learning Something New

Learning, Student-driven Learning, Uncategorized, Written by: Judi Fusco

By Judi Fusco

TLDR: When you really don’t want to do something, having a friend help you learn can make all the difference. Emotions and learning drive the learning process.

Today’s post, is a reflection piece. I usually ground everything I write in research, but I have so much swirling in my head based on a lot of reading, and on an experience I had while learning something new.

Have you ever said something like, “Nope, no way am I ever going to do _______.”?

I said it repeatedly, and over the course of many months, to a person. She was persistent and kept asking me to learn this new thing for at least 6 months. I said no a lot, however, wait for it…. now I am doing it.

Why am I doing it?  Because the person who asked me (repeatedly) to do it means a lot to me. She wanted me to learn something new–that new something was out of my usual area of interest and something I never saw myself doing. Two strikes against her and the new thing, but somehow she got me to try it, helped me until I felt comfortable on my own, and now, almost 6 months later she is still my mentor and helps me understand more. She comes and talks to me about it and we work on it together so that I can learn more. We also have a lot of fun doing it. This post is a reflection on how this person got me to do _______. (I will discuss what I learned a little later in this post. First, I want to discuss the learning process.)

I see similarities in what my “coach” did and what instructional coaches do to motivate teachers to incorporate new technologies and pedagogies into their classrooms. When I talk with teachers who are being coached as they integrate technology or some new teaching method into their classroom, I hear many things about relationships between them and their coaches. Where we see coaches having success in getting teachers to try new things and make changes in their classroom, we usually also see strong relationships between the coach and the teacher with trust, respect, and sometimes friendships (not required). We see the coach supporting the person until their own interest develops and their identity changes. This is similar to what I experienced. Honestly, my relationship is the only reason why I was willing to even think about learning the new thing. My coach was patient and persistent when I was resistant. She encouraged and motivated me.

Relationships and emotions are an important part of learning, and for the past couple of years, I’ve been thinking about them more. I recently read the new brief on how emotions and relationships drive learning by Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and Linda Darling-Hammond. While the brief is written about children, emotions and relationships are very important in the learning process for adults, too.

Relationships bring so many things to the learning process. A relationship that helps support the learning process includes at least trust, respect, and motivation. For me, I definitely needed that motivational piece as I learned. Trust and respect are essential, but not enough when learning something new takes a lot of time and effort. A trusted coach helping with every step of the journey and giving that motivation can really make a difference. (Note, the journey can be longer or shorter depending on the person being helped, their interest, and the new thing being learned.)

I imagine that most people don’t really invest in learning something that they don’t like at all. For me, I didn’t want to do _______.  What is ___________ you may ask? It’s Pokémon GO. There’s a lot to learn as you play. There are strategies involved. There are lots of rules and tricks. Also, remember, I didn’t want to play it at all. I didn’t know anything about it and I wanted to keep it that way. I thought it was a useless waste of time. But I liked the person who asked me and she took the time to show me what I needed to know.  “She” was my 12 (now 13) year old daughter. She was asking me to hang out, and if a tweenager wants to hang, you should do it! However, despite the fact that I wanted the opportunity to spend time with her, I still didn’t want to learn the game.

As I mentioned before, playing this game was big identity change for me. Part of my identity is that I don’t play games. I imagine that teachers who aren’t interested in using technology in their classes or don’t see themselves as technology people also go through a similar identity change as they start using technology. (I’ll explore more about interest, identity, and learning in the near future, in another post.) Here, I really want to stress that without my relationship, I wouldn’t have learned. My coach took the time to show me what I needed to know. She answered all my questions and she never made me feel bad for my questions. I wouldn’t have ever been interested, much less chosen to learn on my own. I needed her to provide external motivation for me. In fact, in the beginning, I needed so much that she was kind of dragging me along in the learning process.

As teachers, we try to help students with this kind of support, but we may not get it ourselves. With a coach, the odds increase for this kind of support. Making changes in a teaching practice is difficult because a teaching practice affects other people, students and future students. Most teachers are cautious about wanting to make a change to something that generally works in practice because of all of the people who depend on it. That’s where a colleague or a coach can really help. There are times when a teacher is so interested in making the change that they can do it on their own, but most of the time, it’s so much easier to make a change with the help of someone else.

In this post, I’ve been thinking a lot about teachers and changes in practices, but I think we could insert any age learner in a scenario of making a change that they aren’t interested in making. Relationships strengthen the learning process at any age and are something we should think more about in the learning process. What do you think about the importance of relationships in learning? I’d also love to hear about changes you’ve made to your practice. How’d you do it? Did you have support or did you do it on your own? Have you ever had an instructional coach? Would you want an instructional coach?  Are you an instructional coach? We’d love to hear from you — Tweet to @CIRCLEducators or use #CIRCLEdu.

Computational Thinking Webinar

Computational Thinking, Webinar, Written by: Judi Fusco, Written by: Pati Ruiz, Written by: Sarah Hampton

By Pati Ruiz, Sarah Hampton, Riley Leary, Judi Fusco, and Patti Schank

For the last few months, we’ve been  reading, thinking, and talking about computational thinking (CT) in preparation for three Webinars for Teachers and Parents on the topic. The webinars are on January 30, February 6, and February 13. Go to the link above to sign up for the webinar and get all the details.

ct

A lot of the websites and articles we reviewed about computational thinking for teachers gave us only a brief introduction to it.  We’ve read about what researchers have been doing and how they have been thinking about CT, and using their research, we’ve been trying to think about what CT means for and looks like in the classroom. We also know that it’s a new topic for parents, and that parents may want to think about what it means and what it can look like at home.

The term computational thinking was made popular in a paper in 2006 by Jeannette Wing, and since then, researchers have expressed different understandings and definitions of the term. There wasn’t a common understanding of what it was then, and exactly “What is it?” is still a fair question today. Some people equate computational thinking with coding, but others do not. We agree that computational thinking is a much broader set of skills than just coding or programming, and that it’s not the same thing as computer science. Computational thinking skills include abilities that help people use computers to solve problems. Being able to program is one way of interacting with a computer, but there are other ways that one can work with a computer, and computational thinking is needed in more than just programming classes. For example, when researching for a history project, students may need to use data to strengthen their arguments. Students are using CT when they locate, evaluate, analyze, and display data. Learning to program is an advantage, in terms of learning to think in a new way, but we believe that programming is not the only way to incorporate CT into classes. We’ll explore these things in our webinars.

The first session will be an overview of CT. The second session will be geared toward what CT can look like in K12 classrooms. At our third session––a special webinar for parents or other caregivers––we will think about projects and practices that can be done at home with kids to help them learn and think in this new way. Come to the webinars to learn and think with us about computational thinking and what it looks like in K12 classrooms and at home! Please share this information with interested colleagues and parents as well. We hope to see you there!

The Cyberlearning Report goes to school

Cyberlearning, Cyberlearning Report 2017, Teachers & Researchers, Written by: Judi Fusco

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​By Judi Fusco
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The Cyberlearning report will be going to school! I teach Ed.D. students at Pepperdine University, many of whom are K12 practitioners. When I next teach my class on learning theories, I will share the Cyberlearning Community Report: The State of Cyberlearning and the Future of Learning With Technology. Because technology use is so common in K16 classrooms, I like to think with my students about how learning theories can help them use technology in deep ways to support learning. I don’t want technology just to be a substitute for pencil and paper. I love concrete examples and this report shows many new ways technology, grounded in learning theories, can augment or help the learning process. Here’s a little background.

What is Cyberlearning?                  
“Cyberlearning research is the study of how new technologies, informed by what we know about how people learn, can be used to advance learning in ways that were never before possible.”  (from the report p. 6)

So why do we have this report and who created it?
Cyberlearning is a funding area of the National Science Foundation. This program has funded about 270 projects since 2011. From all of these projects, 22 researchers came together to write about exciting new directions and themes found in these 270 projects.

What else should I know about Cyberlearning?
As we’re starting, there’s one more thing I’d like to discuss before diving in to the report — something that teachers who read early versions of the report asked. They wondered if cyberlearning researchers were trying to replace teachers with technology. My answer is a resounding NO! Please know that cyberlearning projects are NOT trying to replace teachers, or other human beings. Often, they are trying to give information to improve the understanding a teacher can have about a situation or support students learning a difficult concept. Technology should not replace a teacher during the learning process. But usually, in classrooms, there’s only one teacher and a lot of students. Many projects are trying to support the teacher and give the teacher more eyes and ears to see what is occurring in parts of the classroom where they can’t be. A teacher may be able to do many things at once, but no teacher can support all of their students at all times. 

As an example, let’s think about a virtual learning environment for science inquiry (see INQ-ITS in the report). In the virtual learning environment, students do their work and get instant feedback from the system about how they are doing. The teacher also gets a report from the system that tells how each student is doing. From the report, a teacher can learn who needs what kind of help. Some students would not need help and some would; this kind of information could help a teacher more efficiently target the students who need help. It could also help relieve the teacher of some of the mountain of grading they have as the system is monitoring the work in real time and summarizing it. The virtual environment would support and augment the teacher so that the teacher could have a good understanding of how to help students very quickly (nearly real time) and without creating more work for the teacher.

Right now, in a physical  science lab, a teacher has to grade lab projects to understand how students are doing and can’t give feedback to all until the grading is done. If a middle school teacher has 5 labs of 30 students, the time to get all the grading done is significant. If students were in a virtual environment, a teacher could be alerted how each student was doing before the class period was over. If a student was having problems the teacher could give a quick intervention and help students correct their misconceptions. 

Despite how helpful a system is, no system should or could replace the teacher. A teacher is irreplaceable and knows so much about how to help each student. Teachers bring the human touch to the student and so many students desperately need a caring adult in their life. In addition, students are not just empty heads to be filled with one-size-fits-all knowledge. Students come with their own interests and desires and a teacher can help inspire a student. We need to be really smart as we think about the future and make sure that technology is used in ways to support a human teacher in the classroom. Ultimately, we want students to be able to work with other people and having a human teacher will help to ensure human interaction. Of course we want technology to help us and we want students to understand technology — how to use it, and how to make it — but human interaction should come first and be placed as a priority. (In addition, in my opinion, a virtual environment shouldn’t replace all laboratory experiences as there are so many things to learn in a physical lab, too. )

Many cyberlearning researchers are trying to envision new technology products and activities that might improve learning. Cyberlearning research is typically exploratory, and as it is designing for the future, it is essential to have practitioners involved in the process. We need the wisdom of practice with all that is learned from working with diverse students with needs, interests, and experiences to create more inclusive designs in cyberlearning. Many projects do involve practitioners, but hearing from even more will improve the project, and give the projects new life and directions. We need to hear what makes sense to practitioners. Some of the best (in my opinion) cyberlearning research adds new thinking about equity, affect and emotion, and learning with the whole body (embodied learning research). We need researchers and practitioners working together to make sure cyberlearning research is useful for a wide variety of students.

I’m going to end this blog post with a hope that you’ll go download the report now and that you’ll come back to think more about it with me. I’d love to hear about how you think technology can help or hinder learning and what you think of the report. I’ll plan to post a few more blog posts about the report and some of what I am planning for my class.  I’ve talked about the opening section here. Read up to page 11 and then come back for more. I’ll continue to discuss the report in several future blog posts.

P.S. If you’re teaching graduate students, please comment and let me know if you would take the report to your class, and how you’d use it.  I’d love to hear more.

The Brain and Cyberlearning

Educational Neuroscience, Learning, Written by: Judi Fusco
By Judi Fusco

One of the topics we learned about at Cyberlearning 2017 was the brain. Cyberlearning researchers are not typically neuroscientists. Many cyberlearning researchers are learning scientists, but there is a gap between neuroscience and the learning sciences. As we planned Cyberlearning 2017, we decided to try and address this gap so we invited Mary Helen Immordino Yang, a social-affective neuroscientist to give one of the keynotes. In this post, I’m going to introduce one of the topics she talked about and give you the link to her talk.

In much of the work we do in helping people learn, we’re trying to make sure they are engaged in a task and paying full attention to it. However, as with most things, there’s another side to consider. Neuroscientists have discovered that the brain has a “default mode” that takes over and is active when the mind is wandering. This default mode network (DMN), that takes over when a person looks like they are engaging in off-task behavior, may be important for social emotional well-being, and it may serve to help “recharge” the brain for better focus in attending to tasks.  

I’m grossly oversimplifying, but as we learn more about the DMN, we may need to consider the importance of downtime in the design of learning environments so that brains can work really well. Our brains are never idle and some of what they do when we look off-task might involve using our imagination to help us plan or think about what we are learning and better relate it to ourselves. Mary Helen Immordino Yang calls what is happening when the DMN is active “constructive internal reflection.”

While we know that it’s important to pay attention during tasks, without time in default mode, it may not be possible to focus as well as we should; it may not be possible to really internalize and personalize learning without this network. “Off-task” time may be key to deep learning.  Of course, there is much work to be done to understand the balance needed between time for activities requiring focus and attention and time for the DMN.

Below is the Cyberlearning 2017 Keynote by Mary Helen Immordino Yang.  

Here are some additional readings if you’re interested:
Why we shouldn’t worry about our wandering minds
Rest is not idleness an article by Mary Helen Immordino Yang 
Why your brain needs more downtime

 I’d love to hear your thoughts and questions as you look at this research.  I’ll be looking more at neuroscience, emotion, and learning in future blog posts. Please let me know if there are things you’d like to think about or questions you have.

5 videos from the STEM for all Video Showcase

Video Showcase, Written by: Judi Fusco
By Judi Fusco

I just watched this video about mathematics educators and Makers.  If you’re interested in either topic,  I suggest stopping by the STEM for all Video Showcase and watching.  The videos from the video showcase will be available after the showcase ends, but right now you can participate in the ongoing discussions and give feedback.  You can also VOTE for your favorite!  

There’s a lot over there so you may feel like a kid in a candy store.  I’ll share some of the others I have watched and enjoyed.  If you tweet, take a look at the twitter hashtag for the showcase to see what others are saying. ​

The image on the right shows what you see when you get to the showcase.  You can filter by keywords, age/grade level, and 5 other ways.  

I started watching in the Cyberlearning area (filtered by keyword) and then went to the Teacher Audience type.

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There seems to be something for EVERYONE in the Showcase.  There is EarSketch: teaching coding through music.  As I watched it, I became very interested because it has curriculum aligned with AP Computer Science test, and it seems to be inspiring to students.  If kids are inspired they often go further than is required of them and it makes their learning fun.  

I spent some more time watching videos and I want to go to the K12 Engineering Scholars Program! It looks like such a great experience!  I would love to see these in other states!  

​I also watched the TechFit Video as I think keeping our kids active is very important.  I love what I saw in the project!  

And finally, number five (the first video is linked in the first line of the post) is the EcoXPT video — it’s a virtual environment for students to learn about field research in biology.  It seems like it would give great experiences and help students learn. 

I tried to share a diverse set of videos in this post to show how much ground the STEM for All Video Showcase covers.  I hope you’ll take some time to explore and watch!

Cyberlearning 2017 Recap

Educational Neuroscience, Learning, Teachers & Researchers, Virtual Reality, Written by: Judi Fusco

 

By Judi Fusco

Cyberlearning 2017 was an inspiring event in April.  You can see a storify (a record of the tweets during the meeting) that documents many of the topics and technologies presented. In this post, I’m going to share a little about the 4 keynotes and give you the links so you can watch them.

The four keynotes kicked off with a future thinking one about virtual reality (VR) by Jeremy Bailenson. The VR discussed in this keynote isn’t ready for the classroom yet, but we’ll have new technologies soon that will be classroom ready. The keynote by Jeremy Bailenson describes his work and helps us think about what we need to investigate to understand about learning and VR. Cyberlearning researchers and teachers need to be thinking and planning now for the future.  (We’ll do a post soon about VR that is in the classroom.)  ​

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​The second keynote by Mary Helen Immordino Yang focused on the link between emotions and learning and what we know from neuroscience. Most of the good teachers I know intuitively understand how important the emotional connection is in the learning process, but the keynote talk helps us understand reasons why emotion and cognition are so intertwined and has helped me think. I will share more in another post.

The third keynote talk by Eileen Scanlon was on the challenges of creating and sustaining a meaningful  program of research. Eileen does research on Citizen Science; you can learn more about it in a CIRCL Primer on Citizen Science.

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The final keynote, given by Karthik Ramani, discussed computational fabrication as a way to engage students and help them learn.  He is also creating new technologies and interfaces to technologies. He describes his work and lab. His students showed off cardboard robots! In the photo on the right, one of the  CIRCL Educators checks out the robots.
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​I highly recommend watching each of the four keynote videos at some point. Each keynote is one-half hour and if you watch, leave a comment and tell us what you think and if you see any implications for your practice. You can read reflections on the meeting by Jeremy Roschelle, one of the co-chairs of the conference.

Cyberlearning 2017: What’s Next? Making Connections to Shape the Future

Cyberlearning, Written by: Judi Fusco

By Judi Fusco​

Every year, CIRCL hosts a meeting for the community–this year it’s April 18 and 19. If you’re not coming, we have a portion of the meeting that gets webcast; we encourage you to sign up and join us virtually. Our keynote speakers will all be webcast and they are:

Jeremy Bailenson:  Experience on Demand: The Opportunities (and Costs) of Learning in VR
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang:  Why Emotions are Integral to Learning: A Neuroscience Perspective
Eileen Scanlon:  Technology Enhanced Learning and the Science of Citizen Science
Karthik Ramani:  Lowering Barriers to Engagement through Computational Fabrication

At the meeting, Cyberlearning researchers come together to share their work and think about the direction of the field–pretty normal for researchers. But in addition, we are lucky because we also have students, educators, designers, industry experts, and other stakeholders at the meeting–we call these folks the CIRCL of Influence. Among the many things, the CIRCL of Influence helps us think about what is happening in the field, what is needed in practice, and how we can share our findings and ideas with industry and make an impact. Since the beginning of CIRCL, we’ve placed a priority on making sure we have many voices in our community.  

One of the things we’ll be doing is thinking about some of NSF’s Big Ideas and how they relate to Cyberlearning. Specifically, we’ll be thinking about:

  • INCLUDES – Diversity / Broadening Participation (see the INCLUDES video showcase)
  • Data science for 21st-C STEM
  • Human-Centered Design
  • Convergent Research
  • Media & Computational Literacy
  • Smart & Connected Communities (see the Primer on SCCL)

Since the meeting hasn’t happened, I can’t tell you about it, but after the meeting I will (and I hope some of our CIRCL of Influence will guest blog here, too)! In the meantime, I will point you to a Storify documenting last year’s meeting, with images and links to videos of last year’s keynote speakers.  Take a look to learn about what Cyberlearning meetings are like and what kind of work is happening in Cyberlearning;  follow us @CIRCLCenter to keep up to date.  Leave us a comment and let us know what looks intriguing and what you’d like to hear more about.  

Active Learning Day, 2016

Constructivism, Mathematics, Science, STEM, Written by: Judi Fusco
By Judi Fusco 

Active Learning Day is Today, October 25!  What are you doing for it? What will active learning look like in your classroom? In active learning, students work on meaningful problems and activities to help them construct their learning. This includes inquiry activities, discussion and argumentation, making, solving problems, design, and questions.

Last month, we had the pleasure of helping organize the Active Learning in STEM Education Symposium, sponsored by NSF as part of the activities honoring the Presidential Awards for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching awardees. The keynote speaker, Bill Penuel, focused on “talk” — particularly “accountable talk” — as an important activity to support Active Learning. 

If you want to know more about accountable talk, take a look at the Talk Science Primer by TERC. There are many great tips for teachers of all subjects in there. For Math Classrooms, here’s a link discussing Creating Math Talk Communities. For general information about it see ASCD’s Procedures for Classroom Talk.  
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In the Active Learning in STEM Education Symposium, one of the presenters, Joe Krajcik, discussed Interactions, a curriculum aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) to make science an active endeavor in a classroom.  (Visit the Interactions project page and click on the curriculum tab to learn more.) Language and talk are essential in NGSS. You may want to check out the videos on the NSTA site where you can see what NGSS looks like in action. You can also see what NGSS looks like in a 4th grade Science Classroom; this video was shown in the Active Learning Day in STEM symposium by Okhee Lee as she discussed NGSS for all Students including English Learners.  

Other presentations at the symposium included Jennifer Knudsen on Bridging Professional Development and the idea of using Improv in a Math class, Eric Hamilton on collaborating with a cyber-ensemble of tools, Tamara Moore on using mathematical modeling to engage learners in meaningful problem solving skills, David Webb on AgentCubes as active learning, and Nichole Pinkard on Digital Youth Divas and making eCards to learn about circuitry.  (See links to the presentations of all the speakers on the site. ) 
Active Learning Day is officially today, but there’s no reason why you can’t do more in your classroom at any time.  Leave a comment and tell us about what active learning looks like in your classroom!

PBL in the classroom

Written by: Judi Fusco

 

By Judi Fusco


Project Based Learning (PBL) is an active, inquiry-based method that helps students construct their own understanding. PBL can be used in any subject area. Content and learning goals should be central in the work, and projects should have students demonstrate their learning as they create a artifact. PBL is a great approach in classrooms when it’s done right. Teachers often have a lot of questions about it, and sometimes there are misconceptions. Recently, I had the pleasure of speaking with Cassandra Kelley and Kristin van Gompel about Project Based Learning. Both are former elementary teachers and now doctoral students pursuing their Ed.D.s in the Pepperdine EDLT program.  (The picture shows them at the United States Department of Education during one of the doctoral program trips. Cassandra is on the left and Kristin is on the right.)  In addition, Cassandra Kelley is a member of the faculty in the CalStateTEACH Teacher Preparation Program. Kristin van Gompel works at an educational technology company and is also faculty at CSUEB in the Teacher Preparation Program. In this post, Kristin and Cassandra discuss an article by Krajcik and Blumenfeld (2006). The article outlines 5 design features for PBL learning environments that they see as key in the process to help with deeper student learning. The first design feature is:

1.  There should be a challenge in the form of a driving question or a problem to be solved. The problem should be authentic and meaningful to the students and created by the students, if possible.Sometimes teachers are unaware of the importance of students determining what problem they are going to solve, so the teacher merely assigns a project to the student. For example, a teacher may believe that assigning fourth grade students to build a Mission (something often done in California History projects for 4th grade) would be PBL assignment. However, if there isn’t an initial driving question or problem, these assignments become an exercise in just building. Students can even buy a kit to create a great Mission. Buying a kit and assembling it may teach something, but if the initial learning goals were to help students learn and think critically about history, just building a mission is not going to help students learn what was intended. In addition, the problem isn’t authentic; most students know that building a mission isn’t something that is typically done in the real world, especially if they go get a kit.   It can be difficult to get younger students to come up with an authentic driving question that will help with the learning goals, but teachers can help with this by providing background, and finding out what the students are curious about and what’s important to them.  Existing PBL lessons often have an introductory section that introduces the topic and helps the students get interested in the topic of study; existing lessons also often provide driving questions.After the students have their driving questions:

2. Students should explore their questions by participating in authentic inquiry and engage in collaboration to problem solve.

This exploration is important because it helps the driving question or problem become more deeply understood. For example, in the case of a Mission project, students might consider questions like: How can we choose a good location and design for a new California mission? What should we consider? Why do we see differences in the Missions that were built in the past?  (For more on a PBL Mission project see 22nd Mission — a project created by BIE.) As students spend time considering these questions together, they consider alternatives, discuss, and debate to more fully build an understanding of issues. A teacher may need to help students learn to productively discuss and collaborate with each other. Collaborative group work is not something that students just “know how to do.”  Teachers can help make collaborative time more successful by assigning roles for the students to take in their groups, giving expectations for what kinds of interactions are expected, giving suggestions on how to talk when there is disagreement, and providing students with an agenda or an outline where they can make an agenda for their work time so they can stay focused and productive. We’ll discuss collaboration more in a future post.

As students begin to work on the project, another element that should be included is:

3.  Students, teachers, and others should work together to discover the answer.

Having voices other than students in the project can provide expertise and lead to more discoveries, but other voices shouldn’t dominate the discussion. Besides the teacher, interested others could be a parent, a volunteer, an expert, or an older student. If the teacher can find an expert from the community, they can come into the classroom in person or through online video conferencing tools to talk or be part of the process. (Sometimes, an expert isn’t easily found or can’t make it to the classroom; in this case, previously recorded videos are very helpful to bring in expert perspectives. Students won’t be able to discuss with the expert but hopefully they can learn and then discuss with each other.) Older students in the school who have done the project before can be very helpful.  (We’ve had good experience with slightly older students helping younger ones learn. )

When working in groups with others, students have the opportunity to learn more about problem solving and watch others (classmates, parents, experts, or older near peers) engage in the process of developing the project. Teachers and others shouldn’t try to give a solution, but the groups should work together to figure it out. Teachers, especially, shouldn’t have all the answers. (When teachers give solutions, students follow the steps given, like a recipe, and then do not construct their own understanding.)

Also, in the process,

4.  Students and others should use learning technologies that help students do things they can’t normally do and learn new things.

For the Mission example, teachers may ask the students to do more research on the web to understand historical conditions. Students could potentially visit the missions through Virtual Reality or YouTube videos, and explore different topics based on the learning goal. (The teacher might also give them a worksheet or other tool that helps scaffold the research process or improve their questions in the process.) Teachers who use Minecraft could have students create buildings in Minecraft if it makes sense for the learning goals. If students are designing missions based on what they have learned, they could begin by creating the floor plans of a mission and later consider 3D printing or adding interactive coding elements within a virtual mission. Designing in 3D would incorporate a mathematical challenge; this is one way that STEM topics could be included in the project, if appropriate. (Of course, if building is important in the process and 3D printing isn’t available, a traditional paper or cardboard model to address the driving question(s) is a fine option.) While all of this could be fun for the students, care should be taken to ensure that the technology added to the project helps students achieve their learning goals. When PBL is incorporated across the curriculum, there are opportunities for multiple learning goals across the different subjects and this often leads to different opportunities for including technology.  

And this leads to the 5th element,

5.  Students should create an artifact or “project” that addresses the original driving questions and allows them to share an artifact demonstrating what they learned.
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The creation of a shared artifact often motivates students. However, sometimes, it seems like we (as educators) are too focused on the product. One warning sign that you may not be doing PBL is if you ask every student to create an identical project. Building a mission, even if students build different missions, probably isn’t sufficient if you want students to demonstrate their learning through the project. It is important to let students create, but what they create should not be dictated. Of course, for practical reasons, a teacher could give parameters for the project with each student doing something like a poster, video, or a brochure. It would be up to each student or group to decide what is included based on what answers their driving question and demonstrates their learning. The artifact doesn’t need to be elaborate if it helps the students answer their driving questions.

In PBL, we need students leading the work to develop driving questions, collaborate, and demonstrate their learning in their projects.  Teachers need to facilitate the process, to build in time for iteration, to think about what questions or challenges could excite our students, and make plans using the key elements of PBL so that the project helps the student reach the learning goals. We want the product of the project to be a representation of the learning goals rather than the main event where students are following a set of steps to create something. As the production phase of the project ends, the meaningful artifacts or findings from the project could be presented to a wider public community through a blog, website, local newspaper, YouTube, etc., providing more purpose to the research and final projects.

These five elements are very important in PBL. What’s not discussed above is how a teacher learns how to do effective implementation of PBL to enhance learning. Cassandra Kelley works with new teachers in the CalStateTEACH program. The curriculum in this program requires students to create their own PBL unit following the model provided from the Buck Institute for Education website. Using this curriculum, new teachers are actually engaged in PBL themselves, as they create example PBL lessons to implement in their clinical experiences (and ideally for later use in their own future classrooms). In the process, the candidates form collaborative teams in order to develop an authentic driving question, teaching/learning guide, calendar, assessment map, and design rubric. It’s great when the placement classrooms for new teachers are in PBL schools or in schools with a focus on PBL in their curriculum, or the teacher is working with a mentor teacher who understands and uses PBL effectively. They can learn so much more. When the new teacher is placed in a class with a mentor teacher who doesn’t know PBL, it can be difficult; we’ll share more in another future post.

Krajcik, J.S., & Blumenfeld, P. (2006). Project-Based Learning. In R.K. Sawyer (Ed.), The Cambridge handbook of the learning sciences (317-333). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
You can download the chapter listed; please note, it will download as soon as the link is clicked.

Here are some resources we find helpful in guiding thinking about PBL.  http://www.bie.org/object/document/project_based_teaching_rubric
http://www.bie.org/object/document/project_design_rubric
https://www.bie.org/object/document/pbl_essential_elements_checklist
http://www.hightechhigh.org/student-work/student-projects/
​http://design39campus.com/showcase/

Leave a comment with a question or your favorite PBL resource.

In addition to a big thanks to  Cassandra Kelley and Kristin van Gompel, thanks also to Pati Ruiz, Cynthia D’Angelo, and Patti Schank for their thinking on this post.

Invention Coach: A Cyberlearning Project

Cyberlearning, Written by: Judi Fusco

 

By Judi Fusco

Cyberlearning projects are quite varied as we often discuss on this blog. Cyberlearning emphasizes the integration of what we know from research about how people learn with new and yet to be invented technologies to create new learning experiences that were not possible or practical before. You can learn more about Cyberlearning at the CIRCL website. In this post, we share an interview about a project that helps students invent their learning and it helps teachers support students during the process.

What is the big idea of your project?

How do we we help students transfer, in a flexible, adaptive way, what they are learning in school to novel contexts and situations? Our project focuses on transfer of concepts at the intersection of math and science, and one thing that we’ve found to be very successful at promoting this type of transfer is a method we call “invention” (Schwartz et al., 2011).

Invention is an exploratory task where students engage in inventing conceptual ideas through an exploration of data, often contrasting cases. Contrasting cases are examples that have many similarities but a few key differences that relate to deep principles and conceptual ideas. By contrasting the cases, students come to notice  features that are important to understanding, but may not be obvious to novice learners.

As students explore the cases, they are asked  to “invent” fundamental equations such as those for density or speed. The process of inventing or even attempting to invent equations on their own (even if they fail) prepares students for additional learning. After the invention process, we follow up with expository instruction (i.e., lecture) on a topic important to the concept, such as ratio.

We are currently building the Invention Coach — a system that guides and scaffolds students through the messy and iterative process of Invention.  The picture below shows the Invention Coach’s main interface.  In this screenshot, a student is working to invent an index of “clown crowdedness,” which is a proxy for density (mass/volume).  

How do you use cyberlearning in your work?

Prior classroom studies with paper-based invention activities show that the process of invention is really successful in promoting transfer. The cyberlearning part comes in with the technology we are developing to support the learning. Invention works well for promoting understanding, but students often need one-on-one time with a teacher or facilitator to engage in productive invention. Unfortunately, it’s not possible to give a teacher to each student in a classroom to support the process. Our project is working to create a technology that can reduce the demands on the teacher by providing individualized and timely feedback to students throughout the invention process.

Before building our technology, we wanted to know what a human would naturally do to promote transfer. We started by observing the guidance a human invention coach (a teacher) naturally gives in one-on-one invention tasks with students as the students invent formulas for density and speed. Our initial research showed human invention coaches did help students learn (Chase et al., 2015) and that much of the work the coach did during the task involved asking questions and not giving answers. In fact, the more explanations a coach gave, the lower the transfer test score for the student. One might think that a human coach gave explanations because a student was struggling, and perhaps it was a poorer student to begin with and thus the lower scores aren’t surprising. However, our analysis showed that frequent explanations were not related to how a student was doing on the task, and that those explanations hurt the student’s transfer. It may be that the explanations “cut short” the time the student spends exploring and generating ideas, so the student doesn’t do as well on the transfer task.
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Our initial work helped us understand the human expertise we needed to include in the technological Invention Coach. Now we are working to develop that Invention Coach to support all students in the classroom so they can engage in a productive exploration and invention experience.
One of the design challenges we face is that we are essentially developing an intelligent tutoring system to scaffold the solving of ill-defined problems whereas most intelligent tutoring systems focus on well-defined problems (often in algebra) with clear steps to get to the answer. In our ill-defined problems it’s not clear what the goal is nor is it clear exactly what the path is to the goal. Thinking about how technology can scaffold students through that process without overly guiding is one of the critical challenges of our work.

Tell me more about the Invention Coach and what it looks like.
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The Invention Coach is an exploratory learning environment that follows a student’s trajectory through an invention task and provides adaptive feedback and scaffolding to help them engage in productive exploration to prepare them to learn from later expository instruction (Marks, Bernett, & Chase, 2016). We have designed the initial prototype (see figure above). The software gives students an invention activity and the students can ask for help, submit their solutions, and get feedback along the way. We’ve created a few different kinds of interactive modules that focus learners on diagnosing their own errors and thinking deeply about these concepts. Some modules focus learners on comparing specially designed contrasting cases. In the literature, there is a lot of research showing the benefits of compare and contrast activities for helping learners focus on the deeper features that novices often overlook.
The image below shows the “feature contrast module” where students are asked to compare the highlighted green “Crazy Clowns Company” bus with the highlighted blue “Bargain Basement Clowns” bus, to help learners realize that space (the bus size) is an important feature of density (e.g. “clown crowdedness”).  

If we walked into a classroom, what would it look like to have students using the Invention Coach?

We’re gearing up to do our first classroom study with the Invention Coach in the Fall, but right now, students work individually with the computer. As discussed above, there is a mentor character on screen that guides them through the process and provides hints and feedback (see first figure).

Invention can be pretty frustrating, because it is a very novel task for kids and it’s also an iterative task, where students frequently fail to come up with the right solution.  However, in our studies, we often see kids having “Aha!” moments when they come to discover critical pieces of a sensible solution.  Or more often, this happens during later expository instruction when they realize the sophistication of the canonical solution.  For example, after attempting to invent a ratio-based equation (Density = mass/volume), one student said during the post-lecture on ratio “Oh!  Now I finally understand division!”

In the future, we are open to the possibility of students working in collaborative pairs and are currently toying around with ideas for how to do that. David Sears has done some work with Invention and found that it’s much more productive when students work in pairs. In our work, they are paired with a computer-based coach. Supporting students working together may lead to more discussions, argumentation, explanation with a live partner and could be future work.

I’m also interested in developing more teacher-focused technologies that would engender classroom-based discussion around the kinds of mathematical models that kids are inventing and building. I want to understand when those models are effective or ineffective.

Is there more about the project you would like people to know?

People can visit our website to learn more or see our publications or they read about our Cyberlearning award Developing a tutor to guide students as they invent deep principles with contrasting cases.

Further Reading and References
Marks, J., Bernett, D., & Chase, C.C. (2016).  The Invention Coach: Integrating data and theory in the design of an exploratory learning environment.  International Journal of Designs for Learning, 7(2), 74-92.

Chase, C. C., Marks, J., Bernett, D., Bradley, M., & Aleven, V. (2015, June). Towards the development of the invention coach: A naturalistic study of teacher guidance for an exploratory learning task. In International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education (pp. 558-561). Springer International Publishing.

Schwartz, D. L., Chase, C. C., Oppezzo, M. A., & Chin, D. B. (2011). Practicing versus inventing with contrasting cases: The effects of telling first on learning and transfer. Journal of Educational Psychology, 103(4), 759-775.