Recently I was honored to tag along with some colleagues and friends to a seminar at a nearby school. This particular school is coming "on line" with project based learning, and our job was to facilitate conversations that would help them in their training. During one such conversation the question was posed (and I'm paraphrasing), "How do you keep a project together?" I want to address that question in this week's post...
What the questioner was inquiring was- How do you keep the students focused on the driving question? How do you keep yourself focused on the project outcomes? How do you form a unit? How do you form the unit so that the learning has a scope and a sequence... a direction? My answer was not intended to be snarky, although I think the questioner took it that way: How do you keep your class "together" in a traditional classroom? Just like college professor's, my co-teacher Mrs. Papin-Thomas and I use a unifying text.
Think back to your college days... You had the stuffy prof. with the bad clothes and worse hair. Maybe you had the le sheik prof. with the stylish mustachio and cool glasses? Regardless of their appearance, they all had a text. The formula was simple: You read the text. They (and sometimes you too) discussed the text in class. Then you wrote a paper on the text. Then, at the end of the "unit", you filled a blue book on the text. Everything was centered on a text. Sometimes a prof. used several texts.
I had the luxury, and I mean that sincerely, of participating in a class with Dr. James Watt at Butler University. Dr. Watt held a English/Humanities course entitled, "13 Ways to Look at a Blackboard." There were several books that we read and discussed all centered around the idea of a Christ figure; a savior. The class was quite interesting, and I often reflect back on my brief time with Dr. Watt - who looked an awful lot like Panama Jack. I still have those books. They sit on the bookshelf in my own classroom and I refer students to them from time to time when I'm looking for solid short stories or way to make analogy.
It was Dr. Watt's connection of all of the texts that made the class interesting. I couldn't see the way that they connected until the end of the course. I knew there was a connection. It was obvious that he had a designed outcome, but I couldn't see it. Then he revealed it and my classmates and I felt silly for not having seen it sooner. In a way, you want to build your projects like that. You want your students to have a firm direction and understanding of the standards they are learning, but not where the project is leading until it nears the end.
If you're not as brilliant as Dr. Watt and don't feel confident scoping a start to finish project that ties up in the end, there are two options. The first option is to withhold the rubric until 2/3's of the way through the project. The students will be working, but they won't be sure exactly what they will be graded on until you unveil it. A second option to do this is to throw a "twist" in the project - change it up midway through. For example, during our Myth project, students build a wiki space for a myth that they have studied. They understand that once they build the wiki they are to use it to create a live re-telling of the story. What they don't know is that once they build the wiki, we put them in a lottery and they end up with someone else's myth. The story they start with is not the story they end with. They have to rely only on the data that the other students put together for them. (We have safety nets in place for the students that get stuck with wikis that are incomplete, of course, so that their grades do not suffer due to other students failure.)
Whichever strategy that you use, you're still going to need a guide to help the kids find their way. A north star of sorts that sums up what you're wanting to do. This is where the unifying text comes into play. For our "Nosce te Ipsum" ("Know Thyself") project, our students read Anthem, by Ayn Rand. The "Death" project revolves around the texts for the Mozart Requiem, the Brahm's Requiem, and the work of Dr. Mark Roth which can be found on-line. For the "Film Festival" students get ideas from the This I Believe project which is linked here. We have several anthologies for our "Myth" project, as well as Homer's classics. For the "Love" project we look at articles in magazines, newspapers, and on-line publications. Also, we look into parts (not all) of Plato's Symposium. For both the "Poetry Slam" and the "Music Video" project we allow students to create their own poetry, but they look at several examples from myriad poets.
A unifying text gives direction to ideas, a focus point, a reflection point, and a place to create analogies. A text can keep everyone on the same page or you can hand out separate texts and get everyone going in different directions. Synthesis can be achieved when you ask students to amend a text, abridge a text, or create their own texts. In years past, Sarah and I have taught Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and asked students to modernize the text. Why would we do this? We check reading comprehension. You can't change it unless you understand it. My favorite rendition is when Brutus tells Cassius, "Soft. We'll have no words here." in the final act. The best modernization of that line: "Shut up. We'll talk about this later."
As a final point, every educator knows that the greatest way to help people learn is to get them to READ. It was a little old lady named Martha Gulde that introduced me to a book called "Jurassic Park" in the 8th grade. It had nothing to do with our English class, but Martha knew that if I would just read books I'd be okay. I've never really looked back after that.
Until next time.
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