Flaws of Averages

Welcome to the world of being a facilitator! While you once wore a "teacher's hat," you will now wear a "facilitator's hat." This means you no longer give direct "yes" and "no" answers, but will instead provide "How will this get you to…" and "What impact will this have on…" in response to questions from project team members. You are a leader for your students' education and a guide to enrich their thinking.

If your students have not done much teamwork, it is so important to go back to the BLOSSOMS PBL Resource Tools and take a few days if needed on role-playing team roles. You are guiding them to become active team members, rather than passive individual students. Note that in PBL, we use the word team vs group. The idea of a team means a collection of people that are focused on accomplishing a goal, while a group usually refers to people joining together to form a unit.

1. I'm worried that my team will not work well together.

It's all about preventative maintenance. Effective team behavior starts from class norms. Then teams build comfort through ice breakers, like the famously googled Marshmallow Challenge. Finally, teams build their team agreements in unison.

Members proactively discuss what their collaboration and communication will look like before the actual work begins, instead of reactively when the problem arises. The team doesn't just start a project without an agreement as to how everyone works together. Read more at BLOSSOMS PBL Resource Tools.

Keep it going:

• Before teams start work each day, take 30 seconds for teams to state their current agreements to one another.
• Remind teams to positively state when each person is doing a team norm well. It's equally important, maybe more important, to discuss the positive behavior as well as the negative behavior.

For more information, read Jamie Back's article on Getting Smart, "Teaching Students How to Work Together."

2. How do I respond to students who are paralyzed by being assigned a problem that doesn't have a right or wrong answer?

This is an opportunity to guide the student through a mental challenge where they get to use problem-solving skills. Don't tell them the answer! If you're really ready to try PBL, embrace guiding them with big idea questions.

Suggested strategies:

• Questions to ask: "I understand you're feeling stuck on this problem. How can you find answers to this issue? Looking around, what resources are available immediately to you? Stepping back from this, have you experienced a situation where you were stuck before or didn't know the answer? What did you do to get through it?"
• "Ask 3, then me" phrase. Means ask 3 other students in class before asking the teacher. Often students are more open to hearing an explanation from a peer than from an adult, and a peer would be available immediately, while the teacher may be helping someone else.
• If they still need help, you'll have to give guiding questions that are specific to the problem, but use this as a last resort, as it really removes the project-based learning skills as soon as we provide the guiding path for the student.

Read more about students here: unlocking their "yes/no" thinking
Read: "When Teaching the Right Answers is the Wrong Direction."
Getting It Wrong from Scientific American

3. How do I respond to students who have gone down a dead-end and don't know how to proceed?

If you're reading this, you're already invested in a better way to educate. You're a guide here, asking them the big questions that ultimately will assist them in dealing with the big problems they will face in their future lives and careers. The key is to ask them questions that help them think of solutions, without giving hints or ideas on solutions:

• Acknowledge it; "I notice you are feeling like this is a dead-end at the moment and you're not sure how to go forward."
• Continue with the student, "What do you need to get out of this situation?" and "What tools do you have to get out of the situation? Are these tools nearby, with others here, with others through contact?"
• "Is there another way to look at this problem?" "How can we look at this another way?" "What out of the box ideas are we not yet seeing that we need to see?"
• "What are you trying to accomplish? How can you look at this as though you're standing on a mountain instead of sitting in this chair?"

The Brookings Institute's article "Teaching problem solving: Let students get ‘stuck' and ‘unstuck'" provides additional support.

4. A parent/guardian reached out to me because they heard about this Project-Based Learning method, and is concerned about…(ineffective, won't get them into the right college, doesn't do well working with others…)

PBL has become more widespread and popular since about 2009. If a parent/guardian is worried about PBL, restate their concerns and share some of the evidence pointing to its success. Here is one of several articles about PBL and its success: This article discusses research that proves PBL and its effectiveness on student learning.

5. How do I help my students overcome their deep reluctance to communicate with professionals related to their projects?

Some projects require students to communicate on various levels with professionals in a particular field. While for many students it is exciting to connect with professionals, for most students this can be a daunting task. In order to develop students' confidence in this area, we recommend building specific guides for all types of communication that students might have with professionals. This instruction could be included in a small lesson given as part of the project.

Be sure to teach them how (and when) to write a formal email, a formal follow-up email, how to prepare for phone conversations, how to prepare for Google Hangout video sessions, or Skype and of course if writing a formal letter, how to write a formal letter. Include these instructions on a support poster that is kept up in the classroom for the entire unit so they can reference it when needed. Finally be sure that students get your feedback before submitting an email or letter to a professional.

Read further information on "My Students Don't Know How to Have a Conversation."

6. As a student, I am much more comfortable with learning with notes, practice and homework. I will likely pick a career where I don't need to collaborate in anyway. Why do I need this PBL stuff?

While it's understandable that doing something you're used to doing is comforting, it doesn't necessarily provide the right tools for your future. If the goal of education is to make you prepared for the future, you need skills from PBL, not a multiple choice test. Every job requires collaboration, communication, problem solving, critical thinking, which are all skills developed through PBL.