So it’s 11:50 pm on a Tuesday night, so what? I can still think critically, right? It was the last day of classes and I had an amazing day, but then all of a sudden Twitter started gearing up and lots of discussions began and my mind started racing. I had planned on writing a blogpost about a student’s awesome inquiry project (which, it ends up, took me about 2 hours to figure out a way to make an iBook on my iPad into a video to try to post on my blog, so that will have to wait), but then I read a great post by Andrew Shauver (@hs_math_physics)
Great reflection and worth thinking about #pblmath – thoughts? https://t.co/hzpsk7kerY
— Carmel Schettino (@SchettinoPBL) May 27, 2015
Mr. Shauver writes about the pros and cons of direct instruction vs. inquiry learning but has a great balanced viewpoint towards both of them. In this post, he is discussing the how and when teachers should or can use either method of instruction. It is important, Shauver states to remember that “inquiry can work provided that students possess the appropriate background knowledge.”
I would totally agree, but I’m just wondering how we assess that – does it really work to lecture for a day and then say they now possess the appropriate background knowledge? Do we lecture for two days and then give them a quiz and now we know they possess it? I wonder how we know? At some point, don’t we have to look at each student as an individual and think about what they are capable of bringing to a mathematical task? We should set up the problems so that there is some sort of triggering of prior knowledge, communication between peers, resources available for them to recall the information?
@SchettinoPBL@hs_math_phys can we provide the task and adapt to what students do with it? I am usually surprised at what they have / lack
— Joseph Mellor (@JosephMellor1) May 27, 2015
Joseph Mellor makes a great point that in PBL most of the time you might plan a certain outcome from a problem, or set of problems, but the triggering didn’t work, or the kids didn’t have the prior knowledge that you thought. He says that he is often either pleasantly surprised by their ability to move forward or surprised at how much they lack. In PBL, we depend on the students’ ability to communicate with each other, ask deep questions and take risks – often admitting when they don’t remember prior knowledge – hopefully to no suffering on their part. This can be a big hurdle to overcome and can often lead to further scaffolding, a deeper look at the writing of the problem sequence, fine tuning the awareness of their true prior knowledge (not just what the previous teacher said they “learned”) or yes, maybe a little direct instruction in some creative ways. However, I do believe that given the opportunity a lot of students can be pleasantly surprising. What do you think?
I’ve wondered when lecture would be more meaningful and necessary and when inquiry/exploration would be more meaningful. Read an NYT article on pre-testing and it actually focused more on the benefits to the student than the teacher. Reflected about it on this entry: http://wp.me/p3LdGY-8w
Hey Thom,
thanks for the comment! Your post is very interesting and I totally agree that giving “tests” that might teach kids what they don’t know is as useful as ones that assess what they have learned. My question would be – what would you do with the “grade” – would there be one? What would be invested for the students?
My blogpost, however, was really more about the idea of assessing prior knowledge when attempting PBL, in the sense that if you are trying to get students to learn through doing a problem, how do you know that the students have the prior knowledge/conceptual understanding to be ready to learn from that problem? In other words, how do you know that the problem will serve the purpose you intended or that it is going to be useful in the way you hoped? It’s kind of a different type of assessment I think – one which you need to be doing in the moment or before you begin (similar to what you are talking about) but not necessary assessing the concept you are about to teach, but assessing the knowledge needed to teach that topic. Does that make sense?