Hacking Project Based Learning by Ross Cooper

Author:Ross Cooper
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Hack Learning, Education, School
Publisher: Times 10 Publications
Published: 2016-04-07T04:00:00+00:00

An Umbrella Question promotes curiosity, thought, and exploration, which ultimately should lead to understanding. The goal of any unit, PBL or not, isn’t to necessarily answer the Umbrella Question with a “right” answer, but rather to leverage the question as a starting point for inquiry, and a reference point to which all other content can be connected.

Hack 6

Shift The Ownership Of Assessment

Facilitate a Progress Assessment Tool

Students can hit any target that they know about and that stands still for them.

— Rick Stiggins, Educator and Author

THE PROBLEM: ASSESSING PROJECT BASED LEARNING

As students are engaged in the controlled chaos that often characterizes PBL, teachers and administrators often have two questions regarding assessment: How will my students and I know they are learning what they are supposed to learn? How will I assess this?

Just the thought of rubrics, checklists, and scoring guidelines can be completely overwhelming. We created the Progress Assessment Tool (PAT) to facilitate self-assessment and feedback (and grading, if necessary) in the most straightforward way possible.

THE HACK: SHIFT THE OWNERSHIP OF ASSESSMENT

While the importance of grading PBL (and grades in general) can be debated, the fact remains that individual students still need to develop skills and demonstrate understanding of content, both of which should correlate with curriculum documents and/or standards. A well-crafted assessment tool (no matter who makes it) should assist with assessing these skills and understandings by making student progress visible.

Students who shape how they are assessed own their learning because they can then make connections between their learning and the High Impact Takeaways for which they are aiming, and they know what they have to do to produce exemplary work, while maintaining enough flexibility to exercise their creativity.

If we want the emphasis to be on the learning and not the grading, we ultimately want to give our students a tool that helps them to self- and peer-assess throughout the PBL process.

The Progress Assessment Tool (PAT), shown in Table 6.1, is a three-column grid, which allows a class to collaboratively establish what exemplary work looks like for each one of the project’s learning targets. Students then use the tool, with the support of their teacher, to track their progress toward these learning targets. The driving force behind the PAT is students grappling with exemplars and uncovering their strengths, which they can then use to inform their own work. By the time students are done analyzing these exemplars they are so entrenched in what quality work looks like that making it their own is significantly easier.

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