Project Based Learning allowing Every Student to Shine

good morning good afternoon and good evening to all participants my name is david malik and i'm the special advisor at the commonwealth of learning vancouver and welcome you to the fourth webinar in the future of learning thought leadership series organized by the commonwealth of learning under its open door initiative it is our privilege to have as our speaker today professor richard larson from the massachusetts institute of technology dr larson is mitsui professor both tenure in the institute for data systems and society of the massachusetts institute of technology or mit as we know it he's member of the us national academy of engineering he served as founding director of mit linc and is principal investigator of mit blossoms his career has focused on finding ways to improve services industries including education urban service systems disaster response disease dynamics dynamic pricing of critical infrastructures and workforce planning at mit for 25 years he has served as leader for initiatives in technology-enabled education especially secondary and tertiary stem education in the u.s and in other countries his research on the doctoral workforce has been extensively cited including stem crisis or stem surplus yes and yes which was given the best paper of the year award from the lawrence klein fund professor larson the stage is yours good afternoon good morning good evening everybody it's an honor to be here and honored to be invited by the commonwealth of learning should tell you i'm reporting from my home in lexington massachusetts which is less than one mile from lexington green on april 19 1775 was the source of our revolutionary war now hope i'm still in good hands here in the commonwealth of learning and you won't turn me off when you hear this anyway we have the finest relationships now between the us and great britain and the commonwealth basically we're going to talk about project based learning today allowing every student to shine and this has been passion of ours i'd say for the past half dozen years or so so let's get going so project-based learning what is it well we take real world project topic to investigate and we're dealing with teenagers in high school and we're going to assign these projects to to high school stem classes and students and teams in high school stem classes so we want an authentic topic something that's happening in the students community it's going to have issues that the students think they can have positive impact on and it's question for now not historical or not in the future it's something that has meaning in the students lives and here's an example of student project out in the field doing some ecology or some biology research this sort of thing okay so the idea is in the 21st century students need to know lot more than just facts that have that are derived from lecture board blackboard lecturing the industrial kind of the model ford mass production process we've been using for education for 100 years or so so we need to develop critical thinking skills problem solving skills we need to support creativity and imagination thinking out of the box collaboration and self-directed discovery learning so so stem education is much more than just memorizing the pythagorean theorem and having to prove it or knowing in physics newton's three laws of motion although they have to know those things but it's much more now so and also students have so many diversions these days so we have to capture their interest get them excited and get them engaged put engagement in red and bold because without student engagement it's not going to work so standard lecturing unfortunately often falls short in this mode and know there's some teachers watching here today thank you very much for for participating and know that none of you ever taught class that that that responded like this so this is just separate class nobody here is involved time magazine said you know had to cover how to build student for the 21st century and some of these things are called soft skills but think for most people they're harder to match to master than the pythagorean theorem or the quadratic equation or all these other things so these soft skills are problem solving creativity critical thinking so it aims to promote student-centered thinking experiential approaches and so it's going to add education through interactive collaboration and exploring real world challenges and it's going to be open-ended so lot of students maybe feel little uncomfortable with that and they're gonna have to design project plan so in in our view of project-based learning we treat these teenagers as adults and as adults they have to do both the hard sciences and and then technology and math and and and the soft skills as well so they're going to have to come up with project plan they're going to have complex task they have schedule they have to put all this together and at the end they'll have product which probably will be combination of written report concrete recommendations and an oral report and their old report will be not only to the class of the students but also to parents and hopefully to people in the community who have responsibility for the topic that they just investigated here are some students outside engage in project-based learning so the students need now two kinds of skills the fundamental skills of reading writing arithmetic or stem stem for those of you who don't know is science technology engineering and math and these digital age 21st century skills okay so let's think of the traditional way of teaching stem so here we have teacher maybe he's professor in front of class and the blackboard is green board is loaded with lots of math equations and the students are dutifully recording this either on notepad or onto their laptops in front of them so that's one way of thinking about teaching stem which is more or less the traditional way for for many many decades and in my view like to think of images when when think of situation going on like to think of images my image of that is mother bird shoving partially digested food down the throats of her chicks where the the teacher's responsibility is to deliver content to the students the students dutifully type it under the computer or or write it in the notepads they memorize it they regurgitate it back an exam or quiz week or so later and then sometimes they dutifully forget it now think of teaching stem this way here we have students who are working outside taking pictures collecting data doing something in nature and this is maybe biology or an ecology class doing project and in my view the image of this is mother bird teaching her chicks how to fly and so the project-based learning is more in that mode and rather than in the regurgitation mode so here we have bunch of people students sitting listening to lecture and we might say if everyone loves pbl project-based learning why isn't it used more widely well we've talked to you know thousands of teachers during our 12 years working with the mit blossoms project which i'll describe little bit more in bit and we have found that high school stem teachers have been reluctant to employ it in their classrooms some do the majority do not and we hear words like this too much time taken away from state mandated curricula or in the us we have the s.a.t and the act tests which are standardized tests and sometimes the college or university you get admitted to is closely related to the score you get on that we need to teach these national standardized tests or too much teacher preparation time or you know doing that requires more content knowledge than have and there's bullet here have put and and basically lot of teachers we've talked to when you say project-based learning they think of the the next three to five weeks which are going to be the project and the students are going to work on it both in class and and outside of school in interacting by internet or in teams maybe on weekends they say have no idea how to manage this this is something totally foreign to me have not been skilled in my education classes in college how to do this and this seems to be if you don't know how to manage this this could result in total chaos so think i'm going to avoid it okay so that's the case and the majority of teachers have not done this or they've done it once maybe and it was not successful thing so how do we deal with this well what we've done at mit with our mit blossoms pbl project which just was completed two months ago in september and we're happy to say that today is our first public dissemination of our results first public dissemination of the pbl products that we've created which are all open source freely available worldwide we've created for the novice teacher or the teacher who avoids this complete scaffolding of the pbl process so again images love images especially you know on powerpoints you need to see eye candy as well as as well as textual bullets okay so mit blossoms so blossoms is has completed just its 12th year blossom stands for blended learning open source science or math studies we have about 200 blossoms lessons in stem and each one takes one class time 50 minutes to 60 minutes to go through and the blossoms lessons are in two to four minute video segments so there's two to four minute video segment in which challenge is given to the class and then the teacher turns the video off and then guides the class through answering addressing that challenge over the next four to five minutes in an active in-class discussion as soon as the challenge is solved then the teacher goes back and presses the video button again and the next video segment comes up and there's more stuff that goes on and more concepts and another challenge and the video goes off and it oscillates this way back and forth maybe there are four to six different video segments with one-hour class and four to six different active learning in the class so with blended learning it's the in-class teacher who's still in charge of her class or his class and then there's the blossoms of video teacher and our project-based learning products our units are anchored around blossom's lessons so each blossoms pbo unit is developed to provide the teacher everything he or she needs to navigate through the potentially rough waters of three to five week blossoms project-based learning unit with class and so where does blossoms appear here on day one of the of this three to five week exercise the teacher shows and then interacts with the class with the selected blossoms video unit so it starts on day one with class experience in blossoms lesson and then the project follows with that so that gives the anchor content for the three to five week pbo exercise so we have completed now and it's been lot of work with us for us but we're very happy with it six blossoms pbl units and don't have the time today to go through in detail all six of them thought i'd just indicate what the six are and then we might drill down and do little bit more detail on one of them okay so with blossoms day one as said the ppl exercise has the teacher present the lead-off blossoms lesson to the class and the one i'll be talking about is called flaw the project-based learning i'll be talking about is flaws of averages and this laws of averages was originally done seven or eight years ago by dan livengood and rhonda jordan here they are at the time they were doctoral students at mit at the institute for data systems and society and now dan is working high tech in seattle washington and rhonda has distinguished position at the world bank in washington dc and but they did they did wonderful they did wonderful job with this lesson okay so after they experience it on day one the students with appropriate directions and guidance by their teacher they're charged with multi-week pbl exercise and the teacher provides continual support throughout and also our website provides continuous support for throughout so whether the students have any questions about you know my god what do do one of our one of our team members is not working up to speed here there's lot of advice for this for the students as well so let's just talk about the six just that we have one slide each on each of the six pbl units we have one of my favorites is tragedy of the commons you might have heard of this originally the idea of boston commons way back when in history you can graze cow on it and so first the fur the first farmer puts cow on eats some grass and gives milk and gets fat and happy and then nine more farmers follow suit and soon there are 10 cows and lost in common and all the cows are happy and the grass is growing milk is coming and eventually there's 20 cows and eventually 30 cows to 40 cows eventually there are more cows desiring grass then the grass can replenish the grass is not growing the cows shrink and become unable to give milk and the whole system crashes so that's metaphor for free resources that are around us in all kinds of ways and that are being abused and overused and perhaps collapsing so the question in this pbl lesson is how do we restore these resources to better state green chemistry the driving question there is how can we become sustainable community through the 12 principles of green chemistry this is an excellent lesson we don't have time to here to list the 12 principles but it's an excellent lesson special properties of water the special properties of water was created by william andrake who is at swampscott middle school soon retiring from there he's such superb teacher his blossom this starts with his blossoms lesson which and he's standing on the on the shore of swampscott by the ocean and carrying two glasses of water equal glasses of water and he then says well suppose put an ice cube in each of these two glasses of water this one is salt water and this one is fresh water in which glass will the ice cube melt faster and from that thing of being able just to hold two glasses of water with ice cubes he's able in one-hour blossoms lesson to expand from that small little universe to ocean currents flowing around the world it's it's unbelievable and then he expands in this in this pbl unit he expands that even further and has wonderful exercises for the students user-centered design how can we resolve problems in our community by employing user-centered design complex systems this one starts out with motivated by lesson we did in 2009 on the h1n1 pandemic influenza and it says if we view cobit 19 which is our current problem or flu as complex systems how can we analyze them and and and make them less stressful for us all and then one we're going to go into in depth here in depth pun slightly intended here here we have non-swimmer who's going to cross body of water where there's sign at the water's edge says average depth three feet in the guise of five foot nine inches tall and clearly three feet would be maybe up to his waist he says well if it's average depth is three feet could certainly get across even though i'm not swimmer but it says average depth and it doesn't say there's deep deep part here where it goes down for 10 feet and there you see our gentleman who's in suit and tie underwater so the question here is how do we better understand averages what information have they given us and in what ways may they be misleading us and so that's the thing thought would drill down little bit on so if you drill down on our blossoms lesson again all this is open source freely available down to level two the driving question is at the at the top and we have big idea of the lesson students will learn students will be able to in the upper right hand corner is the video that they could they can play again if they want so let's look at what students will learn here so how many situations that focus on average can will the averages distort the reality of the data or give misinterpretation what about histograms showing the distributions and how do we construct histograms how do we collect data and construct histograms and from the from the histograms we can look at the extremes of minima maxima we can look at the median which is the halfway point and we look at the mode which is the most likely point and we can understand the definitions of these and the students all of sudden get more sophisticated idea of data and that averages are just one measure of distribution and to really have comprehensive understanding of the situation you need the distribution and then you can talk about all those other measures so what will the students be able to do well the students will be able to distinguish between situations where averages are fine and others where we need more things like the distributions like the median mode etc and more than that the students are going to learn how to collect the data themselves got data collection strategy and in the project they're going to be assigned that that that project has to do with safety some aspect of safety in their community they're actually going to collect data which is going to be distributed and then shown on histograms and they're going to be integrate the data and and compute the mean median and mode and all those things and interpret them and hopefully then write up report on of their safety project which could benefit relevant community officials and in some sense make the community safer for everybody and they're going to present that report to the class to the teacher to invited parents and to hopefully invited community members whose responsibility that safety issue is so that's what they'll be able to do okay so that's level two and we have level three down there says getting started so let's let's pretend we're clicking on level three we're getting started and it looks like this now ninety percent of the content that helps the teachers helps the students do project-based learning has at this level so getting started so how do we do this in finite time well let's look at project-based learning tools down here let's click pretend we're clicking on that and we end up with project-based learning tools so we see that this is resource page that we think the student teams are going to find useful and let's let's focus on this they have the driving question there so they want to know about what the driving question is for their particular project we have project tracker which they're gonna have to you know we're gonna treat them as adults and as an adult team working on project they're gonna assign different responsibilities to people on the team and they're gonna have schedule of milestones and they're going to have dates with these milestones that to be achieved so this is the project tracker and they have the other tools too task log and team agreement as to who's going to do what and when and even team contract that they might sign now we don't expect that every team will do all of these things but these are project-based learning tools to help them develop at an adult level really so the soft skills they need for the 21st century else can we do there getting started let's look at the teacher questions because the teachers are you know my god how do control this how do manage this don't know what's going to happen so let's look at the teacher questions do have extra time to undertake pbo lesson with everything else have to do you have to grade homework and prepare classes don't have ta blah blah blah well we we offer answers to these questions and you can you can read it here faster then i'm not going to read it to you number two want to get behind covering the curriculum material and the common core and ngss standards have so many things i've got to cover state mandated curricula et cetera the parents are on top of me to do this and that well the idea is well why don't you just start out with one pbl unit in the next academic year see how that goes learn from it kind of fine-tune your approach and then the next academic year you could try one in the fall and one in the spring and then hopefully that will grow over time and your skill will be good and he will be less anxious about it well let's go down here to common concerns during pbl and how to handle them student comes up to the teacher i'm worried that my team won't work well together again do they have role-playing games that they could play with each other to to figure out how to work more more closely together how do respond so the teacher says how do respond to students who are paralyzed by being assigned problem that doesn't have right or wrong answer if you think about it it's the and plus students who dutifully circle the correct answer on let's say particularly math homework problems but also physics and chemistry biology is little bit the less of this certainly the correct answer and they're very proud that they get their or plus because they've been assigned problem that they can do kind of formulaic approach turn the crank and get the answer put box around it and smile and get their or plus well these students perhaps are the most anxious about getting involved with something that does not have correct answer it's kind of vague and they've got to have to specify process that gets them to not the answer but bunch of conclusions and recommendations and these sorts of things or parent or guardian may come to the teacher and say want my little johnny or janie to get into harvard and or oxford and for that they need an s.a.t score such and such and such and i'm worried that if they spend time on pbl their sat score will be less what you know and how do you how do you respond to something like this and we have we have answers that how to address that or this this is one of my favorites this is one of my favorites how do respond to students of going down dead end and don't know how to proceed so they've they've gone down they've spent maybe three or four days working in this particular way and all of sudden they're stuck they're stuck they don't know what to do and my favorite answer here is thomas edison you might recall that thomas edison failed you know 999 times to create the incandescent light bulb and in the thousandth time he invented it and so reporter asked him once how did it feel to fail one thousand times this is edison and thomas edison replied didn't fail one thousand times the light bulb was an invention with one thousand steps great success is built on failure frustration even catastrophe unquote that's what thomas edison said and think the students should understand that that if you don't fail on occasion you're not thinking out of the box enough you're not taking intellectual risks that will come up with new things that others haven't known before okay so what else do we have well we have something called the project calendar and you will not believe the detail of help materials we have both for the teacher and the student in the project calendar basically it's project calendar for anywhere from three week to five week project and for each of our six lessons we assume it's you know one we might assume it's three week one five week but the teacher has great great bill great deal of flexibility on how he or she organizes this but for each day with day one day two we have we have homework that can be downloaded as pdf or word format we have instructions of the teacher all sorts of things like this and so on day one of flaws of averages they the the students see the the video and they interact with the video and and then they're asking questions they're asking questions for the first homework and the first homework is things like what did you find most interesting in this video listen what did you find confusing about it one of my favorites is come up with one or two examples that relate to rhonda's question about cookies not cookies and her your question about cookies to dan she says dan here under these two plates under these two plates in each of them have two circular cookies one set of circular cookies has an average diet has an average diameter of eight centimeters the other set of two cookies has an average diameter of seven centimeters which would you prefer dan and dan says well that's clearly obvious rhonda i'm going to go for the the plate that has the cookies with an average diameter that's larger which is the eight and then rhonda shows the two cookies the two cookie plates and the cookie plate with the average diameter of seven has one cookie whose diameter is half centimeter and the other one whose diameter is like 10 centimeters so the area of the two with the lower average which is seven has is actually more cookie in that way so and that was kind of flabbergasting thing and there's technical reason for that which we don't have time to go through but that's just one example about where you have none non-linearities in the system and here are the nominal areas that goes with square because the area is pi square of the circular cookie you can't think linearly in terms of its its radius in diameter okay so like that lot and so let's go on so day two so basically the next several days now on the next assignment is that they're supposed to look at the news and and talk to their friends and parents about how averages are appearing in the news and whether they think that some of these averages are good or bad or neat distributions and so if you think about this right now with clovid19 there's something called r0 which is the basic reproductive number that's the mean number of new infections that newly infected person will create and zero for covalent 19 has been talked about somewhere between 2.5 and 3.2 or something like this well if the students think about this and look at the definition of r0 and they read about covet 19 they read about 80 of the people who are infected with covet 19 in fact nobody else so their reinfection rate is zero and then about 80 percent of the infections are covered 19 come from super spreaders and the super spreaders might in fact 20 30 50 100 more people but the average over the entire population is let's say three so there's an example about where the average is you're really misleading in terms of the physics of the situation and that's the something that the students could could find on one of these early assignments we give them two or three early assignments about averages another one is collect data on yourself how many hours do you sleep at night how many ounces of fluid you take every day things like this just so they can calculate data and they can calculate the averages and maybe get other measures besides just the averages these are all warm-up exercises to well day four five six or seven we'll skip and we'll go to day eight so day eight is the big assignment so on day eight all the teams are together and they've made contracts with themselves about how they're going to operate and then they're assigned their each team is assigned project and the way we've done it in this class is these projects are all dealing with safety issues in their community these are real safety issues in the community not something made up out of out of textbook and so we have fire safety and distance to the nearest fire hydrant driver's intersection safety smart traffic lights sidewalk safety playground safety or none of the above project where the teachers in the student team the teacher and student team can negotiate some other safety project and so the teacher provides an overview of each project and then we have some collaborative safe way of of figuring out which team gets which which project okay so let's look at the drivers intersection safety that's the one we're gonna drill down on little bit my own interest in this is here's here here's an intersection where you see there's lot of shrubs and bushes at that particular corner there so if car comes down from the northeast to the southwest on that on the right-hand street and it cannot really see whether there's fast-moving car coming from north to south on the vertical street my own interest in this is quite personal was almost killed once and then lexington intersection that had this problem and my son eric we've got to take it into the middle school was also in the car and i'll never forget what he said dad and didn't know what he was talking about but jammed on the brakes and by jamming on the brakes stopped we stopped from being sideswiped by speeding car it must have been going at least 50 miles an hour in 25 mile an hour zone so and but the idea is here particularly in suburban communities because of lack of attention to this there are lot of intersections which are unsafe in terms of visibility so this is driver's intersection safety and you can see the visibility triangle right there so there's little bit of geometry involved but there's lot of geometry involved in this study and so these street intersections some with stop signs and some without stop signs might have fences i'd have trees bushes shrubs that are in the way that have maybe gotten in the way over the past several years maybe the intersection hasn't been attended to by officials for 20 30 40 years so the idea of this project is to have it's assigned the students to ask their parents who are drivers and to ask their parents of of their friends you know which intersections in our community do you think are unsafe did you have any near accidents or real accidents at any of them let us know and the team will then go out and given the time that they have maybe they'll model and inspect 10 to 20 different intersections take photographs take measurements create the visibility triangle and come back with recommendations as to maybe maybe they'll order the intersections from what they view as most dangerous the least dangerous of the ones they've looked at and prepare report and this report should be scientifically valid and then then then present it orally to the class to the teacher to the students to their parents and hopefully to the individuals in the department of transportation in their community who whose responsibility it is to have safe intersections so that's basically the idea of what this project is now we do not give them recipe for the science and technology and geometry of how to proceed so the actual creation of the work in the in the geometry and the collection of data and knowing about means versus distributions for instance is the distribution of where the car that's stopping will stop there's distribution of the speed of oncoming cars here in places where averages are not sufficient in order to to model the physics of the situation so that's what's going on there so we do not spoon feed them at the end they have to create their own methodology for doing this report but we give them lots of references and websites and so they can learn that way as well so that's our story we're about halfway through and promised dr navid that i'd be through it about half time about half an hour and so those are blossoms pbl units designed for teachers and the kind of detail that we had on the schedule and all those helpful things the pdf files on each day to help the students and the teacher we had that level of detail if you can believe it or not for each of the other five pbr lessons as well so we're very proud of this is probably the one of the most ambitious projects we ever undertook under the mit blossoms flag and so each is complete instructional scaffolding for the teacher and there may be other open source sites with comparable content but if there are we're not aware of them and please email me if you are aware of them rc larson mit.edu we'd like to learn about them and collaborate with them so the scaffolding is what we created before turn it over to questions and answers want to thank sincerely elizabeth murray who for 12 years has served dutifully and fantastically as blossom's project manager with great passion and she must have put in 88 hour weeks after being the director of the blossoms project-based learning project which that just finished at the end of august so thank you elizabeth for everything you've done we also had tara conley as our key staff member on project-based learning thank you tara and the financial resources came from two foundations the open education resources foundation link miller chairman and from the lansbury foundation glenn straley was keen responsible for that he was the treasurer of the lansbury foundation thank you very much professor larsen that was very interesting and having been associated with blossoms in its early years can see beautiful and very logical progression into pbl for the the initial blossoms work that you did so i'll i'll hand over now to my colleague dr sanjaya mishra leading to the conclusion over to you sanjaya thank you professor larson your your emphasis on the use of video in and looking at the future resonates with lot of things that we at the commonwealth of learning has been trying to do to promote open distance online learning to reach large number of people to scale education to reach the person in the in the the last person in the queue particularly to also promote science technology engineering mathematics education through open distance on online learning and particularly the way mit blossom courses has been designed to use multiple video resources chunking of the resources are all those things that talks about new pedagogical approaches of open and distance learning so thank you very much for these reassuring awards for the world of open and distance learning the way things are going currently it looks like the future of learning is open blended online learning video based learning and so on and so forth on behalf of the commonwealth of learning and the international partnership for distance and online learning open door at commonwealth of learning and my colleagues and my own behalf would like to thank you for the time you have spent and the excellent work that you have done at mit blossom for the world to see all these resources are available with an open license so other people can make use of so thank you very much we have several people today on the audience watching this session the session will also be available as short video clipping of the particularly of your lecture and demonstration part for wider audience to watch thank you very much for everyone from around the world who have joined today and have asked so many interesting questions that we could ask and get clarification profess from professor larson thank you very much thanks to my colleagues at commander learning dr balaji for joining dr marriott and of course professor malik who actually from the very beginning wanted professor larson to be here and to speak and mit blossom is one of the earliest agency that joined our open door platform and it all happened because of professor malik thank you professor malik would be failing in my duty if don't thank my colleague who has been diligently working behind the screen to make all these things happen at open door at call thank you everyone for joining us today we will make our best efforts to make the video recording available to all of you for sharing with your colleagues as soon as possible thank you all have great day wherever you are stay safe thank you very much