James Fester on What Works with PBL
In this interview with James Fester, we discuss using informal learning approaches within formal learning spaces, what makes a learning experience engaging, how James’ experience in the National Parks Service’s Teacher Ranger Teacher program informed how he taught in the classroom, unpacking nuances of project-based learning, debunking common misconceptions of PBL, and so much more.
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Welcome back to another episode of the CSK8 podcast.
My name is Jared O'Leary.
Each week of this podcast
is either a solo episode where I unpack some scholarship or an interview
with a guest or multiple guests to discuss computer science education.
This week's
particular interview is with James Fester, and in our conversation we discuss
using informal learning approaches within informal learning spaces.
What makes a learning experience engaging?
How? James's experience in the National Park
Service's teacher Ranger Teacher program informed how he taught in the classroom.
We unpack some nuances of project based learning, as well as debunks
some of the common misconceptions of PBL and so much more.
There are several publications, podcasts and other forms of media
that are mentioned in this interview, and you can find those in the show notes
at Gerard O'Leary dot com, or by simply clicking the link,
the app that you're listening to this on while you're checking out the show notes,
make sure you check out the coding and CS content tab at the top of my website,
which has links to hundreds if not thousands of more resources,
including the free curriculum that I create for Boudoir PD,
which you can find at Buda P.D. dot org.
With all that being said, we will now begin with the interview with James.
Okay. My name is James Fester.
I am an educator, author and consultant who currently lives in the Twin Cities
area of Minnesota.
I started out as a public school teacher working in California, where I was
mostly working at the secondary level
until I transitioned into a role as an instructional coach.
And then just a few years ago, I moved to the Saint Paul area
working primarily in educational technology
for the first four years at an independent school,
and then gradually transitioned into a full time role with an organization
called PBL Works, which is really well known
for all of the work that they do in the project based learning area.
I work for them primarily part time up until very recently
and have since switched over to a full time position
working with teachers predominantly in the New England and Great Lakes
regions, just helping schools and teachers build their capacity
for student centered project based learning outside of all of that work.
I also work with a couple of other educational agencies.
I'm a National Geographic grantee.
I do a lot of work with the National Park Service as a volunteer
interpreter and educational curriculum developer
for a bunch of different parks across the country.
And probably most exciting, I have recently published an amazing book
with my good friend and coauthor Jorge Valenzuela, on how to use PBL as a vehicle
to teach environmental science, and it is published by SD
and has just been released for pre-sale and publication, which we're both
very excited about getting to share that work with other people as well.
That's awesome.
So I've had a variety of different like publication and collaboration
with other individuals.
I'm curious,
what's something that you learned through that process of creating a book?
That's a really great question.
One thing that I definitely learned and my coauthor
Jorge, was a really big help with this because he has already
had been a published author when we got to do this project together.
And one thing that I learned
was the importance of setting aside time, like a consistent time for writing.
As somebody who's a developing writer, sometimes I would inspiration strikes
it weird times, but if you don't have that happen,
then you're stuck kind of just waiting for something to come across.
And so unless you give yourself
specific time during a time of the day that works well for you as a writer,
you're not going to be able to keep up
with either a schedule that you have or some deadlines that may be coming up.
And so I turned out, and this was never the case for me
when I was in college or even first starting out in teaching.
Never a morning person.
And I have recently become one where the first couple of hours
after I wake up and go through my morning routine are the most productive for me.
And that's when I generally tend to do all of my writing
but me a little time to find that out.
And so I feel like that's good advice for other people is be open to knowing
that you do have certain times of the day that you may be more productive
as a writer
and try to figure out what those are so that you can consistently hit those
as you go forward with different projects you're working on.
Yeah, I like that.
That definitely resonates with a lot of advice
that I've heard from other like productivity people is like
make it so that your morning time is the thing that you need to dive
deepest on or like requires the highest cognitive load or energy.
I was going to say one thing that I learned, actually
having like many, many other people, I'm sure working from home is don't
stay in your pajamas all day,
like actually transition.
And it's funny because, like,
when I thought about when I was traveling to my school site,
when I was still working at a school full time,
I would get up, I would get dressed, I would brush my teeth, have a shower,
maybe not in that order. And then I would drive to work.
And there was that transition that I had from I'm at home to I'm at work.
And it really did help.
And a lot of what I've read about productivity
people is the same thing is like you have to still provide that transition
time to transition from I'm at home even though I'm going to be at home
the whole time to I'm at my working part and then back again.
So that's something that I learned and got a lot of advice from people
who had been working home long before it became.
The thing to do is don't work in your pajamas
because it really does mess with your productivity
for your brain work, which I thought was interesting.
Yeah, like that. Like setting that habit and whatnot.
One of the things that I would do is I'd flip my monitors.
I have two monitors.
One is straight on and another is at an angle.
And I would flip which one was which when I would switch
to like my leisure time versus my.
Okay, now I'm working on like creating curriculum time
that helped me at least like physically rearranging your workspace.
That's a cool idea. I like that.
So if we zoom out a bit and talk about just like education as a whole, can you
tell me a story about an experience in education that had an impact on you?
My educational journey has been kind of unique in the sense
that I have existed both in the classroom environment,
but also in what's mostly called the informal environment.
So I am the son of two career public school teachers.
I grew up understanding a lot of that life.
I grew up going to work with my dad and sitting in the front of his classroom
and distracting his students horribly when I was younger or
hearing about the things that were great and things that were struggles for them
when they would come home from work when I was getting older.
So I knew that world very well.
But equally well was another world where it was more informal education.
So we're talking about, you know, when you go to a museum,
when you go to a national park, when you go to a nature center or go on a,
you know, going to hike, and there's
those little interpretive panels on the side of the trail, not a classroom
environment, but still an environment where you are learning actively.
And I kind of have experience in both of those areas,
and they always kind of existed separate, like, you know, I had my classroom gig
and then on the weekends
I would go and do my volunteer work at the state park or the national park
when I was living in the San Francisco Bay area.
But my second year of teaching, my principal at the time
decided it would be a really great idea for me to teach sixth grade science.
I had never taught sixth grade science before.
This is brand new,
but he was trying to keep me at the school and fill up my schedule.
So I wasn't going to complain
because I wanted to keep my job and he gave me this class and I taught it
very much like I had been taught, especially in college.
Like, here's your lectures, here's your videos, here's your quizzes.
I taught the way that it worked for me in a classroom because that's where I was.
And then on the weekends I would go and I would do these very experiential audience
focused, facilitated guided programs working for the State Park Service.
And I never put the two together
until I had this one student who one day just in the middle of my class,
threw her hands up in the air and just said,
I can't do this anymore, and slammed her head down on her desk.
You just gave up. And I went over and I said,
You know, Ashley, I'm sorry to hear you're frustrated.
I'm getting that loud and clear, by the way, that you just chucked
your notebook across the room and are now head down and ignoring me.
But you know what's going on is there's something going on. She said.
I just don't understand why we're learning this.
Why does this matter?
And I was like, Well,
you know, the subject
we're talking about in this case, it was estuaries and rivers.
How they flow into oceans like the watershed is what we were looking at.
We were looking at the watershed. We live in.
And I was talking about how important it is to understand the environment,
because then we can understand our impact.
And I started basically pulling without really knowing it, pulling stuff
from that guided nature talk that I had just given that previous weekend
on Angel Island, where I was up with a group
and we were talking about all of the different
estuaries and tidal influences, all these things.
And I kind of went into what I called park ranger mode.
And then at the end of my little chat, she looks up at me and she gives me
this look and she's like, Well, why didn't you just say that
instead of making us take all these stupid notes?
And that
became a moment for me where I said, Well, why don't I do that?
Why am I not bringing these things that I do in an informal setting into
a classroom because it's all education and it might work
better for some of these students.
And so that really kind of brought me around.
I came to this conclusion early on in my career, thankfully,
thanks to this interaction with the student.
But you can't just teach the way you were taught.
You cannot just teach or obstruct in the way that works for you
because it's not going to work for all of your students.
You need to mix it up.
You need to think about different ways of bringing them to this knowledge
and helping them develop their understanding.
And I know for some people this is elementary stuff, but for me
it was this big aha moment that I had this entire set of tools
that I use on a weekend to great effect that I can be bringing in.
And so a lot of the work that I do
now is trying to bridge the gap between what happens in these informal spaces
and what happens in these formal classroom spaces and where are the connections.
So that for me, that was like kind of a big moment that's impacted
and really kind of changed the trajectory of a lot of the work I even do today.
So let's double click on that.
So what comes to mind when you think of an engaging learning experience?
So immediately the things that come to mind is
the focus is not on the teacher, the focus is on the student.
That's very broad. And what does that mean?
It was very easy for me also because I really enjoyed lectures.
I really enjoyed an engaging speaker.
That was the way that I learned best.
If the person that I was listening to was engaging, was knowledgeable,
the subject was interesting.
I was there hook, line and sinker.
But in that situation, it's a very standard or a very old school
classroom model, traditional classroom model, whatever you want to call it,
where the instructor controls what goes on in the classroom.
They are the focus of the lesson, they're the focus of the learning
and they're imparting this knowledge onto the students.
If we put that on its side, where instead of being the focus of the classroom,
you as the instructor are helping to guide the students towards their own work.
It definitely feels different.
In some ways it can feel more chaotic.
It feels maybe even like more stressful because now you are no longer
keeping the focus and keeping the reins tight on these students that you're
trying to also manage behavior, also trying to keep them on task.
You're trying to give remedial support to students who may need it one more time.
It feels different.
It feels more chaotic,
but ultimately it's much better for the students
because at the end of the day, in my opinion, the one thing that we want
all students of K-12 education to leave with is being able to understand
how to continue their education when they're no longer in a classroom.
Right?
We want to develop them as a lifelong learner
so they can solve their own problems.
They can figure out what they need, they can go on.
And whatever the problem is, if it's rewiring an electrical socket
or trying to finish their master's thesis, they know what they need to do.
Absent that guiding presence to continue their education and learn.
And so for me,
that's really what it boils down to is where's the focus of the instruction?
Is it on the teacher imparting the knowledge present
on the student and the teacher is facilitating them
getting that knowledge themselves.
So what is guiding that learning process like?
Is it through inquiry? Is it through projects?
Like what does that look like for you?
Ideally, yeah.
I think there's a lot of different ways that you can do it.
For me, just because of the way that I was trained
and the toolset that I brought to the classroom.
For me it really is inquiry based projects, project based learning
for me is a method of teaching where students are basically using inquiry
to move themselves through this process of eventually answering
this challenging question with an authentic, real product
that is presented publicly or is useful to somebody outside of the classroom.
So it is that whole process of here's our big challenge.
Here is our question.
Here is our overarching driving focus for this project.
What do we need to know in order to do this?
Because we're in this together.
It's not just new guys learning and me sitting back here.
It's an active learning process that the teacher is involved in as well,
and we're all going to do it together. I am bringing you this problem.
What do you need to know in order to solve it?
Is it you need to gain some knowledge with these different content standards?
Is it that there's a skill that maybe you need to learn more about?
Is there a tech tool? I need to go out, find it.
We need to figure out how to use together, what are we going to do?
And it is inquiry that basically leads you through that process and ends
with that final authentic product.
So for me, at least, an inquiry based project process is definitely
the answer to your question.
So you said previously that lectures work for you like it
worked really well for you, you really enjoyed it.
So how did you learn how to facilitate in this way?
So letting inquiry guide your process, like when you went to the classroom,
when you first started,
it sounded like you were repeating what worked really well for you,
but on the weekends you were doing something very different.
So how did you learn how to do that thing That was different?
Luckily, I had a lot of experiences
in those kinds of more informal methodologies.
When you go to, let's say,
a state or national park and there's a Ranger with the Smokey
the Bear hat and they're talking to you about plate tectonics or glaciers
or the critters that live in the forest and teaching you all about those.
That method is called interpretation, and it basically uses questions,
dialog, fog and provocations to help learners basically connect
to whatever resources they're using for educational purposes
that they might be interested.
And it's really important that you're creating instead of saying like,
This is what we're doing and we're following this path,
I may have an overarching idea of where we're going,
but we all are going to get there in this different way.
We may engage with different parts of this.
There may be one part of this program that you're more interested
in that you want to follow, and that's okay,
because eventually we're all going to get to the same place
that approach informed a lot of what I do
in the classroom, so it wasn't so much that I was really learning how to teach.
It was just that I had to be open to figuring out, okay, well,
what is this going to look like in a classroom space
when I don't have a tree or a lake or a fuzzy wuzzy to point at
how do I bring those resources in a way that students can utilize them.
For some of my students,
it was going to be love of the subject that turns them on and connects them.
For some, it's just wanting to get a good grade.
For some of them, it's wanting to be a part of a classroom community
where they're liked by their peers, and we have a good working relationship.
For some students,
none of those things are what it is, and for that it really needs to be okay.
Well, how do you want to go about
or what's a good way that your voice can be represented in what we're doing?
Is it better for you to do it this way, this way or this way?
When I'm asking for you to demonstrate your knowledge of this particular learning
goal, giving them more ownership, giving them more choice,
that was the engagement that they needed and that worked for them.
And so that's why I really needed to bring in some of those outside tools
into my classroom so that they could really find
the method that works best for them.
Yeah, that reminds me a lot of.
So there was a professor that I happened to take a class with,
and I've read several of his books, his name is James Paul G.
And so he talks frequently about how video games like
as a genre of entertainment needed to be inherently engaging and interesting.
Otherwise people would just leave like they would not play that game.
The way that he would frame it is in relation to education,
which resonates really well, it sounds like, with what you're just describing.
So if you're a park ranger and you are not engaging
somebody in their interest and they're just going to walk away,
they're going to leave and okay, now you get to try this again
with the next person and you try and find new ways.
But in the classroom, you don't really have that ability
because students are required to be there, even if they absolutely hate
the subject or hate the teacher who's facilitating or teaching it,
they're still required to be there.
So a teacher can fail year after year and not necessarily improve on
how they're engaging students
because the students don't have that ability to walk away.
Now if they did on the other hand, then that would be like
give a lot of feedback for the teacher, both positive and negative,
in terms of what they're doing well and what they could work on.
That's really interesting the way that you're framing that.
And like as somebody who formalized education worked really well for me.
Like I enjoyed it. I was that kind of a kid.
But once I realized that what I was doing in informal spaces
could inform what I was doing in formal spaces, and I had to treat it differently.
When students were required
to be in a class versus they signed up for it
versus like they're paying a lot of money to be in it.
Like those are all different groups and approaches that you need to take.
Yeah, I think it's an interesting point.
What you said is where students are required to be there.
There are certain requirements that, yes, if I was out leading a hike
in a beautiful state park and I said, okay,
everybody, we're going to start this hike and everybody can gather round.
People are free to come and go as they please.
They're choosing to engage with that way of work.
They don't have to. They could go to the visitor center and look at exhibits.
They could go and download an audio hike and lead themself.
There's no requirement for them to connect with me.
So what am I going to do to keep their attention?
But at the same time, the other students are there,
and I've had plenty of students that have been in my classroom
as they are required to be, and I've chosen not to engage.
And it's the same thing
as them walking away halfway through my remarkable nature hike.
And I think I'm doing a great job at.
But when I start to see them check out, just like in the classroom,
I start to see my students head down or what the different body
language that we can clue into that this is not working for them.
In a way, it's the same thing you cannot force a student to learn
if they're not really interested in even that.
They may just say, okay, well, what's the bare minimum I have to do?
Why should I try?
I don't understand this.
There's lots of things that they can do even if they're not there.
And some sadly choose just not to show up. Right.
And that's another thing that I think about a lot is
I know that the students that school works well for the high achievers,
they're going to do well at everything pretty much.
They're always going to do well,
even the ones in the middle, you know, depending on what day of the week
it is, they're going to probably succeed really well.
So I honestly have to ask myself, what is it that my students
who do not find as much success in the game of school need?
Because if I can bring them up, that's a really good effort.
So it's something that I find myself asking a lot is, okay,
what is going to work really, really well for this particular student?
Because I'll betcha that that will help other students as well.
It's something that I got recently turned on to by a colleague
of mine was I think it's actually called the curb cuts theory.
Curb cuts.
You know, those things that allow people to go from the sidewalk
down to the street and back up again that are really, really important.
They were
developed for people in wheelchairs because without that, they can't get up
from the street to the sidewalk when they're crossing the street.
But think about all the other people that use them.
We have people that are Amazon employees with dollies that use them.
We have people on bikes and skateboards.
We have mothers and fathers pushing strollers, all sorts of people
use that scaffold that was not meant for them.
That's kind of the same thing as who in your classroom is your column?
Extreme user, I think is the terminology is
who is the person who is going to require the most support in
order to overcome some of these challenges or be able to participate in this?
Let's think about them. What do they need?
What assets do they bring to the classroom?
First and foremost, Because you always want to start
from an asset base state of mind.
But what are the challenges
they're going to encounter that you might need to plan for?
Because those are going to create pathways for everybody else in the same place.
And so that's kind of I think that's a really smart way
of thinking about scaffolding, especially if you're stressed out
by all of the different kids in your classroom.
Who's the extreme user,
the one that you think is going to require the most support?
How can you bring them in your interests, strengths or addressing challenges?
And that'll help kind of bring the rest of the group up, too.
Yeah, that actually reminds me of
I was at the Worldwide Developers Conference for Apple.
I think this is like 2017 and one of the things they highlighted was
we design for the extreme users for the end cases
when it comes to disability because then it affects everybody positively.
And I thought that was a really smart way of doing it.
They had a blind deejay perform
for the conference and was using the interface
and it was showing like how while they were manipulating
the things, it would like read off like what it was that they're manipulating
so they could hear it.
So that way they could then actually manipulate the screen.
So really good idea. Yeah.
And it's really amazing when you start
to look at all of the different things that have been designed for people
with exceptional needs that we now take for granted.
I mean, texting,
that was originally for people
that were hearing impaired that needed that textual readout
so that they could communicate through phones and things like that.
And now I know among certain
generations it's the predominant method of communication.
And where would we be without it
if we weren't doing exactly what you're saying?
What are these different things that we're creating, these pathways
that we're creating for other people that are
then utilized by so many others of us as well?
Now, I'm wondering if we could dive deeper into what you're discussing
with like project based learning.
So you mentioned that inquiry will kind of guide
the exploration of answering a question or solving a problem, etc..
Project based learning can mean many different things
depending on who is saying it and in what context.
So it could be like a backwards design model like Wiggins and MC tie.
It could be more open inquiry driven model.
Like there's many different flavors of PBL.
I'm curious, can you elaborate on like what project based learning
looks like or means to you? Yeah, I absolutely can.
And then I can also,
I got a great resource
that I would love to share with everybody that's totally free
that they can check out because it is very true.
Like when you say project based learning, you got to be very cognizant.
Okay, what exactly does that mean,
what you're doing or what you say you're doing this project based learning
because sometimes it's just doing projects and I've worked with plenty of teachers
who when I started to talk about project based learning,
they said, Oh yeah, yeah, I do that all the time.
And then when we really dive deep into what they're actually doing,
what their pedagogy is, that there are some things that are missing
that are really emblematic of a tried and true middle model.
So some things that I would probably say right off the top
is that it has to be based around
learning goals or content standards that the students need to learn anyways.
You shouldn't be just doing projects for the sake of doing projects.
They should be focused on creating authentic pathways
to authentic applications of these content standards
that we're required by our state governments.
Whatever it is to teach, it should be focused primarily
around a driving question or a problem of some sort.
Students should be involved in the management process
and B building project management skills.
They should be learning to communicate, collaborate, to problem solve
all these things that are going to translate to college and career readiness.
There should be a demystification or an authentic connection to the college.
They should never be in a classroom wondering why on earth do
we have to learn about this particular thing in this class?
Like, why does this matter?
There should be a clear, authentic application or a connection to somebody
in the real world who is using the code that they're learning to do their job.
So they at no point can they say like, well,
this doesn't matter to anyone or this doesn't matter at all.
It should also be something that the final product either
is publicly presented or just matters to somebody outside of the classroom.
So it could be something as simple as you're publishing your work online,
it could be you're bringing in an authentic audience.
Another thing that I think is really important is that outside expertise
is brought in so that you are actually like reaching out.
Either to the community or to different educational institutions or whatever,
to bring in people who can speak to students at a very expert level
that maybe you as a teacher, not everything is your strong suit,
but you can bring in somebody who that's what they do
and they can talk to the students about why, how they're learning matters so much.
And then finally, reflection needs to be a part of it.
There needs to be a reflective aspect to that entire process
that works really well as a way of students kind of pausing,
taking in whatever they learned, considering
what their next steps are or the impact and why is important what they're doing
and where they go from there.
All of those things said
because there are a lot of different people
that do project based learning like I work for PBL works, I'm
pretty biased that I think that our model that we use is really, really good.
But you know, a lot of other people agree with it as well.
If you Google project based learning,
we're going to pop up pretty near the top for that reason.
But there's lots of other people that are doing great stuff
like the new tech networks that a great model project lead the way.
We've got a great model.
There's lots of people
that are doing really great high quality PBL
and because there were so many different flavors a while ago,
all the big practitioners got together and they said, okay, let's just agree on
what like every model has to have in order for it to actually be a PBL.
And they came up with something called the HQ, PBL model.
You can go on and Google,
I think if you go to HQ Pedalboard, it'll pop up right away.
And there are six elements that that framework includes
that 99% of the people that do PBL well out there agree should be included.
They may have like one or two extra that they add on, but
if you're looking for a place to get started or a resource to find out
like what am I doing in the classroom, that is project based learning
and where are the areas that I can grow and become an even better practitioner.
That's the first place that I would direct you. It's a free site.
You can download the framework in English and Spanish,
and it's a great way to kind of look for opportunities
to extend your own learning while affirming
the things you already know you're doing well,
and I'll make sure to include a link to that in the show notes.
So let's say we had 30 kids in a classroom.
I'm wondering if you could clarify, like how many different questions
or problems would you see in that particular class of 30 kids?
And then who determines which questions and problems are going to be explored?
That's a really great question.
There's a couple of different answers to it.
I don't think there's necessarily just one right way.
As a teacher who has facilitated PBL projects in a classroom
that size, I can say that the overarching question,
the driving question, the anchor question or whatever you want to call it,
that's going to be the same for everyone because you want to have a focal point.
And generally that question, it's very open ended.
It's also very focused on the standards, the learning goals
or the learning objectives in the course so that you can be sure,
even if we go off on tangents, which sometimes totally happens,
we're all trying to aim for an answer to this question.
And if we do that well, we will hit all of these learning goals
that I as a teacher required to make sure you leave this class with.
So it's important to have some sort of consistency there.
That's what I would say. Like, okay, everybody, we're focused on this one.
You may have more than one driving question or anchor question,
depending on how long the project is or if it's interdisciplinary.
There's no rule against that.
But those big ideas, those big questions, generally, they're the same for everyone.
It's to create
some sort of anchoring focus that we're all going to keep coming back to.
Outside of that.
And again, depending on how comfortable you are with facilitating student learning
and letting them have a lot of leeway or maybe not as much.
And a lot of that kind of sometimes depends on the age of the student,
because developmentally students at certain ages are might feel a little bit
more ready to kind of follow those independent inquiry processes themselves.
Well, older students are pretty good at that.
Younger ones sometimes need a little bit more structure
and there's nothing wrong with that.
So part of that, what questions are exploring
what should we not may come down to the teacher determining developmentally
what's best for the student or how many tangents they can handle.
But ideally, what students would do is they would come up with a big old list
of questions of things
they want to learn more about, of ideas they want to research.
And through that inquiry process, what they would do is they would
continually come back to that list and soon they would realize,
okay, there are some of these questions that actually they're not important
or it's not really going to contribute as much to answering that driving question.
But some of these,
as we're finding out, are very crucial or we really need to know more about.
They're more foundational
and those are the ones
that you want to kind of facilitate,
like some sort of process where they're after they come up
with the initial brainstorm or brain dump, whatever you want to call it.
They're really kind of focusing on
what are the big questions, the ones we really want to spend time on
and which ones are maybe tangential and not as important.
And that is something that can be facilitated.
There's lots of different ways of facilitating inquiry.
One one of the things that you can use is
a process called the key to your question formulation technique.
If you look that up, you can learn how to do that.
It's a great way for getting students to be able to identify and prioritize more
foundational, important questions and push past ones that are not as important.
So that's one way of doing it.
But there's a lot of different ways of coaching students
towards those questions that you recognize of the teacher.
Okay, this one's really important. We better go for this.
But it's a lot better if they explore that and discover that themselves.
And sometimes it's
there's lots of different ways of doing it that you have to do is one of them.
But there's many different ways of getting students
to help figure out and prioritize those right ones.
Yeah, I like the nuance is in your answer that you had there,
like having done projects with students, sometimes this one project
for the entire class, sometimes it's a pick a question
among these like five choices or sometimes as, Hey, this 30 kids,
you come up with 30 different questions
or problems that you're interested in solving,
and you can do that on your own really kind of depends on the context.
Like you're an understanding, especially if you're a CS educator who's
brand new and you're like,
I just want to focus on one thing that's very different
than if you've been doing this for several years and are confident
being able to facilitate several different projects at the same time.
What about some misconceptions
so that people often get with project based learning?
Ooh, that's a good one.
Okay, so one of the first ones that
I want to say right off the top is that project based learning
doesn't mean that the teacher is never the focus of instruction in the classroom.
There is this kind of myth out there that if I do PBL,
that means I never get to lecture.
That means I never get to
be the center of quote unquote attention or the focus in the classroom.
And I'm it's just
everything is the students are doing it and I'm really kind of hands off.
That's not true.
There's plenty of things that a teacher should be doing and there are plenty
of opportunities for the teacher who is the expert in the room
to really make sure that students understand
certain things before they get launched into this independent inquiry process.
For example, the school that I used to work at,
it was an independent school and we had 43 different feeder schools.
A lot of them were like tiny
two or three dozen students, you know, religious school.
Some of them were Waldorf, some of them
they came over and they were full on coding in multiple languages.
And I got to do a lot of the introductory lessons for new students in technology.
So I've got kids that are like ready to program the Hubble,
and I got kids that don't know what a spacebar is
because they went to a Waldorf and here I am.
We can't just say, Okay, guys, go have fun in the sixth grade, right?
They're not going to be successful or some of them are going to be so crazy
successful, they're going to get bored to tears.
And so I want to make sure that
my students, when they would come in, they had the basic level of knowledge,
the basic level of understanding they needed to be successful
in their classes with these technology tools.
That is one of the times that I, as the teacher, was the center of instruction
to make sure we're going to get you up to this level
and then you're going to be able to do all this stuff more or less on your own.
I would do the same thing in a project. This classroom.
You don't want students to not have
the basic foundational knowledge, vocabulary,
understanding, because then what we I mean, okay, go research.
What research?
What if you don't understand the key terms or what certain vocabulary terms mean,
how are you going to know to look for them if these resources are going to go?
So that's one that I would say is the teacher does have a very active role.
The other one I would say is that just having students work together in groups
is not the same thing as helping them learn how to collaborate.
If you put students together in a group
and there is not any kind of structure in place, you haven't provided them
with tools to help them be successful as collaborators, they are going to fail
and you will have kind of inadvertently set them up for failure.
And it's one of the reasons why I think PBL, which tends to be
not necessarily always group products, but a lot of collaborative
products are involved in a lot of PBL experiences.
It gets a bad name because of that, because the students instantly
think of, Well, if I put my students in groups,
there's going to be
this one kid who does nothing and there's one kid who does everything,
and then I'm not going to know who gets what grade.
Well, but that's not something that has to happen.
If you are structuring group work correctly, why can't you put them together
and ask them to look at a collaboration rubric for what kinds of things
you expect them to be doing?
Why can't they before they begin working in an unstructured work time session?
List out the list of tasks they're going to be accomplishing that period
and put their names next to the ones that they're going to work on
to create some ownership over who's doing what.
Why on earth, if you see that exact situation happening,
a student not doing anything while his partners do everything,
would you not intervene and say, Hey, what's the problem here?
Do you not understand?
Are you not being included?
Is there some sort of problem in this group?
Or do you just need me to come over and remind you
that you're expected to participate alone?
I think that that's another really big misconception.
I think it kind of puts a bad taste in some people's mouth about PBL before
they even really begin to understand that it's more than just group work.
There's a lot of other aspects to it.
But that one, I think, I don't know about you,
but I definitely can think back to my high school
and think that some
really awful experiences I had working in a group where people like
any James come work with us and I'm like, Oh man, they want to work with me.
They wanted to work with me because they knew I was going to do
the work and they wanted to sit there and just goof around and doodle
while I was putting together the research bibliography
and knowing that I don't want teachers to have to feel like
that same thing is going to happen, you know,
I don't want that to transfer over to their students, too.
Yeah, that definitely resonates.
I had so many experiences is that like group
work is almost like a dirty word for me.
I'm just like, Oh no, I don't want to do that
because like,
I always feel held back or feel like people are just like pulling down
the rest of the group
just because it was bad collaboration, it wasn't really collaboration.
Me and maybe one other person doing most of the work.
Yeah, exactly.
So one of the things that I like to do is think of counterarguments
for things that I agree with or I'm very passionate about.
So I'm curious for you, I totally agree with what you've been saying with project
based learning, but when would you not use project based learning?
One thing that's really good to point out is that doing PBL well does not mean that
you have to be a wall to wall PBL School or that's all you do all of the time.
You don't necessarily need to go from project to project,
project project, right?
If you're familiar with High Tech, the kind of flagship PBL school down
in San Diego, they have these immersive, massive semester
long interdisciplinary projects that just encompass
five different subjects and they're huge and that works really well for them.
Their faculty has been doing it for a really long time.
The students have bought into This is what you're going to do.
They're really good at doing that, but that doesn't necessarily work
for everyone.
And I never did that because, number one felt that sounded exhausting to me.
But number two, there were just some standards or some learning goals
that I looked at that I was like, There is no project here
in social studies, for example, Like I would look at
what are the standards that really lend themselves to number one
inquiry, or I have the time to devote some exploratory inquiry time to.
So if it's a standard that literally takes me
normally 20 minutes to teach my way through,
what am I going to do to put together
a two week project and then I'm totally thrown off.
So that's one thing that I would say is consider the standards.
If you look at them and you do not have the time to give your students
the opportunity to explore them through inquiry, not a good one.
You can sometimes
find those kind of mismatch standards or they're shorter, narrower standards
and bundle them together in a creative way to create those blocks of time.
But by themselves, they shouldn't be a PB all by themselves.
Not every standard is supposed to be that the other one too, is.
If you look at the standard
of the learning goal and you ask yourself, Who does this in the real world
and what do they do with it to solve a problem
or to take care of something that they have to do in terms of their job?
If you can't articulate those two things in your own head,
you're going to have no success articulating that to a group of students
who don't have the same expert level of knowledge you do.
So that's another kind of red flag, is
maybe that's not the best way until you can authentically demonstrate
why this standard is so important or how it's used in the real world.
If you can't think of that yourself, then that's another kind of a no go.
That being said, just because not everything is a project
in your room doesn't mean you cannot be doing the types of things
you would be doing during a PBL experience all the time.
You can always be encouraging students to reflect.
You can always be helping them develop skills to help them become
better collaborators and communicators.
You can always be providing facilitation, style experiences where they're doing
research for insight or getting into pairs or triples or whatever.
You can always be doing those kinds of things that you do
during a PBL project in your classroom, even if it's not building towards
an authentic project that's going to be publicly shared or whatever else.
So I think that would be what I would say in terms of when would I not do PBL?
Yeah, I really hope the listeners go back and honestly listen to that again.
There are so many good points that you're just giving in there.
I'm curious, what would you recommend for educators
who want to learn more about this approach or project based learning in general?
I mean, there's a bunch of websites I can direct them to.
I would obviously direct them to shamelessly PBL work forward.
We have lots of great resources,
not just the workshops and stuff we provide, but really
some of the best stuff that we have on our website comes in our blogs.
We have great blog posts that have been written by not just members
of our national faculty or practitioners themselves with tons of experience.
They're just teachers that have been doing it for a long time
that we've had the opportunity to work with that come on.
And they write about things specific solution oriented
here are strategies you can use to solve this problem.
I would definitely encourage people to look at those things.
I would definitely also encourage folks who are interested in learning more
to find a PBL framework that they really like
or that they think that they can then based their own approach off
and then look at it, say, What am I already doing well,
and what kinds of things
have I not considered doing that can improve what I'm doing?
So the PBL, PBL one is one, the Buck Institute Gold standard
model is another one,
but there are lots of ones like that because I think when people do that,
what they're going to realize is if what's going on in
your classroom is good teaching,
then what's going on in your classroom
is at least a lot of aspects, probably a project based work,
because as you've heard me kind of describe what I think it is,
I'm sure that the general
listeners are going, Oh yeah, I do that, Oh, I do that all the time.
Oh, well, I've always thought that made sense.
And that's really been my experience is when I go into a training
with a teacher who's never heard of PBL, but then I start to rattle off, Well,
these are some of the descriptors. Do you do this?
Here's an example of what one looks like.
They go, Oh, I kind of do a lot of that.
And then it just becomes, Well, how do you do that?
You know, And we're going to rearrange that stuff.
We're going to give you more opportunities
to put more of the learning responsibilities on your A Big Bang boom.
You're suddenly doing really high level, high quality PBL, right?
Yeah.
And I think one more thing that I would say is
there are lots and lots of people that share projects, great project
ideas out there that you can then take and then adopt.
But don't just try to copy what somebody else has done,
take what can find, take their idea and then think about,
well, will this work for my students?
Think about those extreme users.
What do I need to do in order to make this more engaging
or making this so that this student can be more successful?
Because you really want to focus on it.
You want to make sure you've got a lot
of student considerations in mind when you're doing those projects together.
Very rarely will you find a project that you can literally print off, download
and do exactly
like somebody else did it and hope for it to be exactly as successful.
Always encourage people
to be thinking about, well, you know your students
better than the designer of this project.
What do they need or what will they want?
Or is there a completely different tangent with on
that they're going to be really interested in based on their interest?
So that's probably the other thing, like find that framework, find the project
you're passionate about or that you think is interesting
and then go ahead and try to like that.
There's another potentially interconnect topic that I definitely want to dive into.
I'm curious, can you describe what is SEO and why is this important
for educators to know about?
Again, I'm going to do my best because my partner in crime,
George, is the expert, but I do know enough about it
where I can talk a little bit about what it means to me
and how it works in relationship to the work that I do.
So as the other social emotional learning, basically it is helping students
become more emotionally aware of their needs
so that they can be more successful in classroom in life, whatever it is.
We know that the social emotional aspects, especially in a framework like PBL,
you're going to be interacting with other students,
you're going to come in on days that you're frustrated,
your group is going to be depending on how do you dial in to what you need
or how you're feeling without it coming off as like,
Well, you're just negative and we hate having you in a group,
or if there's somebody else that you're working with on a project
that starts snapping at you, how what tools are you using
as a person to stop and pause and say, Is this really about me?
Or is there something else going on?
And I think that's why it is so important.
Lisa the PBL, because it does give students concrete
strategies and concrete thinking maps to be able to use
to dial into some of those things that can foul up a working
relationship or the culture in the room is definitely important later on in life.
I mean, I can't tell you the number of times as an adult,
you know, I've been in a social situation talking to a friend of mine, you know,
I go up and see somebody I haven't seen for a while,
like somebody that I work with go, Hey, how are you doing?
How's your day? That has been been a good day so far.
It turns around, snap to me, what's so good about it?
And I have to sit there and go, okay, I can take that personally
and I can just write off our relationship or I can say, Is it really about me?
And I can say, Hey, is something going on?
And then that leads into me finding out that he hit a deer on his way
into work, which happens a lot in the Minnesota, Wisconsin area.
It's a constant
hazard.
Deer is running across things.
But, you know, I find out that his reaction, which I could have taken
personally, has nothing to do with the ACL, provides those tools
to kind of deconstruct that whole thing and become more aware of his emotions.
My emotions and how the two were kind of playing together.
So that's kind of my long winded way of answering it, is that it's important,
especially for the work that I'm doing and the work
that I encourage other teachers to do in the PBL world.
Because so much of PBL is interpersonal, whether it's teacher, a student, student,
student, teacher or outside expert,
that you really do need those strategies in order to be able to be the best
facilitator, the best working partner, the best presenter you can be
for the other people in the room that are depending on let's dive deeper into that.
So the last year and a half in particular has been really rough
on educators, but in general it's a very hard field.
There's a very high burnout rate and it's just in general difficult.
So what are some strategies or tools or tactics that you use
to try and prevent the burnout that can come with working in education?
There are a couple of ones that I think are really important,
and I think that whether or not you're if you're a teacher in the classroom,
that's a really tough reality.
You're a teacher who is teaching remotely from home.
That's also brings its own difficulties as well.
So and a lot of what I'm going to share, I'm pretty sure other people
would share as well.
But one thing that I would definitely say is
this is something that I hear all the time from the mental health
provider that I work with, which has been great,
is making sure that you're taking time for yourself.
And that means after a certain and it's so hard to totally get it.
I totally understand in a world where we are like connected by the hip
to devices where people expect instantaneous replies
or you have a certain amount of hours to get back to me before X, Y and Z.
It can be very difficult, but I think it's important to draw some lines.
One thing that's really important for me because I work from home so literally
I never leave my working environment and that can be really, really
difficult sometimes.
Oh, somebody just emailed me.
I could just sneak into the other room
really quickly, even though it's dinnertime
and I really should be present for my family.
It's never going to end unless you draw a line
and you're the only one that can hold that line.
So that's the first thing I would say is you got to set aside time
for what's good for you or what you need to do if it's family
that expect you to be present after a day work, great.
If it's that you just really need
time to decompress, read a book, play a video game,
go on a hike and outside, whatever it is, you need to make sure you're doing that
because eventually, if you don't, it will impact the work that you do
and it won't matter how much time
you spend doing the work, you will get worse and worse.
The quality will go down.
We know that it's the same thing that I would say
to students to go home and get a good night's sleep.
Don't watch Netflix until 2 a.m.
because you're going to come in tired
and you will not have actually given your body what it needs.
The other thing that I would say strategy wise and I kind of talk
a little bit more about it, but I watched this great TED talk recently.
That was a TED talk that was given by a soccer referee,
and he gave this really great TED talk where he talked about
a very simple way to kind of de-stress and detach yourself.
Who better than a soccer referee to teach us how not to take things personally
or how to not be affected by outside stressors?
Right. Like it seemed like the perfect way.
And so what he said was that he basically says to
when somebody comes at him hot, when he encounters a situation that's very
stressful, when he feels himself getting really amped up or sad or whatever
it is, the first question I ask is, is this really about me?
Is it something else affecting you?
Is it something else going on?
Is it really something that I have done, or am I just kind of inserting myself
into your stress, assuming that I am the reason that can be really bad?
Then the second thing he says is if he can't figure that out, he says,
Well, maybe this is about me, meaning maybe he is internalizing it.
He interpreting it as, Now I've done something wrong.
It's both sides of the coin.
Where he first has to figure out, is this person coming at me
because of their thing or am I feeling like this
person is coming at me because of my thought?
It was really kind of awesome that it seems really simplistic,
but I really came away thinking to myself like,
this is really a great thinking tool
that I should be using every single time I'm feeling amped up about something.
Is this about some person's issues or am I putting this on myself
and it has nothing to do with me?
Yeah, I like that. I'll definitely include a link to it.
And the first part that you had said of like the value in disconnecting
and like not getting notifications and whatnot,
I imagine that there might be some CEOs,
educators like, Yeah, but I'm in CS education.
It's really hard to do that. We have to be connected, blah, blah blah.
I recommend they check out works by like Cal Newport.
So like deep work.
He also had a book called Digital Minimalism and then a more recent book
called World Without Email.
He is a professor, I believe, at Georgetown University,
and he's constantly preaching like, Hey, you don't need social media, Hey,
you don't need phone notifications,
you don't need to check your email like every 10 minutes, etc.
so people can go there to dive
a little bit deeper into that is like an awesome resource.
What do you feel is holding back educators and what can we do about it?
How do I answer that question
without going into like one of those like sixties style rants?
The system, Man,
I'm I mean, I think there is a certain amount of truth to that,
that there are certain structural barriers that make change very hard,
that education has, notwithstanding the fact that it's an incredibly difficult
time to be an educator. I mean, it really is.
I have a little bit of perspective on this,
as I'm sure you do as well,
because you probably talk
to a lot of people from all over the country
as I get to do as well,
which I feel very fortunate to be able to have a job
that lets me do that, because there are three things
that I hear from every teacher.
Number one, this is the most difficult year ever for me, and it doesn't matter
if it's their second year or their 22nd year.
I hear that from so many people that this is the most difficult year
that they've ever had.
Even more difficult when we had to pivot to online,
which blows my mind a little bit.
But the more and more I hear it, the more and more I believe it.
But the second thing I hear over and over again is that they are so,
so happy to be back in person, even if they've got all these weird
distancing kind of things that they're having to deal with or health concerns,
even if it's not like quote unquote normal school as they remember it,
they're just happy that they're back for the majority of them, not everybody,
but the ones that are back in person
are so grateful that they're back in-person
and they're willing to do so much to stay there. Yeah.
So you have this time where there it's so difficult,
but I so don't want to go backward.
Those are two things that I think about a lot when after like
what's holding educators back.
I think one of the things and I'll see if I can of develop this
a little bit more, but one of the things that I think a lot about is
we just went through a period of educational history where we were
pushed to reinvent, to rethink,
to really we did in a short amount of time so much to think outside of the box
and reinvent so many aspects of education that it kind of blows my mind.
Sometimes I can think about big, huge, like rethinking, Well,
do we really need our students to be in person all of the time,
or is it better for some of them to maybe not be in a classroom?
distract them, Big things like that all the way down to like
there was this teacher that I worked with at my old school
who swore up and down that I would never, ever, ever get an iPad in her hand.
It's like she was like, I love you, James. I think you're great.
You could not ever get me to pick up that iPad and use it in my classroom.
And as soon as we pivoted to online, she realized, Wow, this is actually going
to really help my students.
And she did. Like, that's a micro example.
But to me, that was like the most earth shattering thing I ever saw.
That's like this teacher who wasn't really a technophobe.
She just really felt that
this was not something that she needed and wasn't interested in learning about.
It was able to turn the corner on something like that.
To me, that blew my mind.
We had all of these experiences, all of these things
that we did, new stuff that we never tried before.
Systems were broken apart to make these accommodations,
but a lot of people,
once they got back
in the classroom, went back to exactly what they were doing before.
They were like, Well, I'm back in class.
I'm going to throw away all of these online resources,
all of these asynchronous lessons that I put together, all these ideas
I had around differentiation through technology or the power
of being able to like Skyping it or bringing in these outside
experts in my students.
That's all going to go out the window because thank God we're back to normal.
And I think that's what's holding us back because we had this moment
where we kind of like got a glimpse of what education could be
and I know some people are definitely doing
a great job of saying, we're holding on to this.
We're not going to let go of it.
But I think the vast majority of folks are just glad that they're back in person
and they're kind of like covering up with that comfy cozy blanket.
And I get it.
I don't shame anybody who wanted to just go back to
the things where, I mean, I would love to forget the last couple of years.
Like what?
But I think it's a disservice to not really ask yourself,
like everything that I did, everything I experience, what the value like,
what things have valued,
what things don't, that I can bring in and continue making a part of my.
Yeah.
And taking the time even now to just reflect on what worked, what didn't,
what would be an ideal that could continue to strive for and what
and I think that it's extremely valuable.
How do you practice or iterate on your own abilities in education?
That's a great one thing I definitely do,
and I feel like I have a leg up in this situation is that I get to go
and to learn alongside teachers from all different parts of the country
and all different places.
So like one day I might be working with New York City public school teachers
the next day on might be working with a little rural school in Iowa
that only has a dial up and K through eight are all in one classroom
like old style prairie schools.
And when I go in, I immediately start trying to dial in to what are they doing
that I can bring with me and share with the next group.
When I introduce myself at the beginning of these workshops,
I always say, I'm here to learn alongside you.
And you know, sometimes I get like, I get it, but it really is true
because it's kind of shocking the amount of things
that I've learned about or the amount of tools that I have,
strategies that I bring with me
that I can take and be like, Wow, that's really helpful.
That's really awesome.
Or it's something as simple as just like,
Hey, I've got this piece of work that I'm working on.
I've got this blog post that I wrote, I'd love you to read it.
Give me your perspective
because it's so different from other people, So always being open
to being willing to learn and never really saying that.
Like, you know,
I might have expertise in this room, but I'm not the only expert in this room.
You know, like there are some people that I go into
that are like, you know, they're 55, 55th 60th year as educators.
They know things that I don't even know, and I need to really be open to that.
So being kind of open to saying like, okay, I am an expert
in this room in some areas, but I am not the only expert in this room.
And I know that sometimes people
in professional development, they get kind of in that
like kind of assume that they know
everything about everything if they're not willing to learn from
the people who've had such a missed opportunity.
It's such a missed opportunity. Right.
So the next question that I'm asking, I imagine that there's somebody
who's listening to this interview who might be currently doing research
or be interested in doing research down the road.
And I'm hoping that the answers to this question when I ask it,
will help inspire future research so that being said,
what do you wish there's more research on that could inform your own practices.
One thing that I really wish there was more research about
was the educational value or the outcomes
that can be expected from focusing learning
around places that have resources, learning
resources that you just can't get in a classroom
There is some, but what I'm specifically looking at is
if I'm a classroom teacher and I haven't been a part
of a pre-service program that partnered me with an outside
educational agency, like a museum or like a park or like a
some sort of nature based learning environment,
what are the benefits to me and why should I make sure to do it?
And then, of course, the other part of that is this is the part that I'm focused
on, is either as the classroom teacher or as the outside educational resource.
How do I talk in a way that the other entity
understands, the other organization understands.
Because a lot of times what I've learned is that folks that work in informal
education have very little idea
what goes on in the classroom unless they came from there.
And folks in the classroom have absolutely no idea
what goes on or how the education works in those other states.
Right.
And I think that there is a lot both sides can learn from each other.
And so that's kind of the focus of my work right now.
And I can tell you, as I've done the
there's very, very little about the educational value
of these outside spaces or the kinds of outcomes
that we can expect that's been done recently.
Or in the US, there's good evidence from other countries
that have these kind of nature based
or experiential models that they go in like Scandinavia and places like that.
But there's not a lot here and I feel like it's a huge missed opportunity,
especially since,
like we said, we've kind of reevaluated everything that we thought of
when it came to education.
Why can't we reevaluate that learning benefits for
not just being inside four walls or the stoop?
Some students will benefit greatly.
Some students may not benefit as much.
I feel like that really needs to be considered
more by a wider group of people.
There's a small group that gets why that's important and they understand the value.
I wish that it was just the way things were done
and it was a part of everybody's pre-service program.
But I think that's a place that we could really move the needle forward.
Yeah, I appreciate that answer.
I'll include a link to this in the show notes,
but there's an interview that I did with Grant Smith where he talks about that.
So he's a former colleague.
When I was teaching in Avondale,
who's now working in more like afterschool and informal spaces and whatnot.
Do you have any questions for myself or for the field?
I'm always interested in
who else is interested in these same things
I feel
like a lot of the things that I enjoyed are kind of an island unto themselves.
So I always love getting connected to other people.
A lot of the writing I do on my website focuses around the idea of teaching
more like arranger, and this idea of informal education
practice is being brought into the classroom.
If any of that resonates with folks or there's people
that you think of specific for, that kind of stuff would resonate with,
I would love to be connected with it, mostly because,
number one, I want to see what they're doing.
But number two,
I love to hear
what they think about the work and just kind of get their perspectives as well.
So I like that there's over like 100 and some odd episodes released now.
So the show notes include links to like prior guests
and prior episodes to try and synthesize and like collate.
Here are some more people who are talking about similar ideas and whatnot.
So hopefully the show notes are helpful for people.
Yeah, awesome. Thank you.
Where might people go to connect with you and the organizations that you work with?
Awesome.
Well, as previously mentioned, definitely go to the record to find out
about all the great resources and stuff that I mentioned
are there and check them out and you can learn more about
how to work with them if you want to get some training
and how to open up your own cable practice, my own website.
FOSTER Edu.
And that's a great place to go and connect with me.
I always love to hear from people, even if it's just, Hey,
your interview was great. I love hearing that.
But if people want to hear a little bit more,
be connected to more of the work I do, that's great as well.
And then I'm going to, of course, shamelessly plug the book that my friend
George and I just wrote.
So it's environmental science for grades six through 12, which is published by ESI
and I believe starts shipping, probably already shipping
if not by the time people hear this, but it's out and you can get it on Amazon
or it is this website.
I would love for people to check that out
because I think that would be really helpful
to anybody, not just science teachers, but anybody who's interested
in environmental science and saving the planet. Definitely check it out.
And with that, that concludes this week's episode of the CSK podcast.
Make sure you check out the show notes at JR Telecom to access
all the links that we mentioned.
If you enjoyed this particular episode, consider sharing with somebody else
or leaving a review on whatever app you're listening to this on.
Thank you so much for listening.
I hope you stay tuned for next week's episode and until then,
I hope you're staying safe and are having a wonderful week.
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Check out some of the publications by James Paul Gee (the professor I mentioned)
Check out the framework from High Quality Project Based Learning that James mentioned
Connect with James
Check out James’ book, Environmental Science for Grades 6-12: A Project-Based Approach to Solving the Earth's Most Urgent Problems, that he coauthored with Jorge Valenzuela
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