Featured blogger and High School History teacher Aaron Eyler took some time out of his teaching, blogging, and saving the Trenton Barracks for an interview with Learning Today on problem-based learning, grading methods, and more.
How do we infuse more Problem-Based Learning into classrooms?
Educators need to be constantly scouring the newspaper for problems that students can attempt to solve. We continue to perpetuate an educational environment that is disconnected from the world that students will eventually lead. This shouldn't be something that is "21st Century Learning." This is how education should have been all along. Allowing for schools to be a "sandbox" of innovation and development by simulating the problems that are plaguing the world at that time.
My hope is that we all start to alter our thinking when it comes to curriculum and what kids "need to know" and start thinking about how we can best educate our youth. No one should have to go through 13 (or more) years of boring curriculum as though it is indoctrination to the problems they will really be confronted with.
How do standards and objectives fit in with Problem-Based Learning?
We can't continue to be bogged down by standards and learning objectives as though they contribute to some hierarchy of knowledge that students must have in order to be educated. It's simply a joke that we spend a year engaging kids in unique projects and assignments to simply boil down their success to whether they make their marks "heavy and dark" or that we continually want them to think "outside the box" but then want to make sure they constrict their thinking to options A-E.
Understanding the danger of capitulating on this topic, I would argue that we need to start basing our standards and learning objectives on a scale that speaks more to critical thinking and the ability to reason and evaluate instead of arbitrary content objectives.
Last I checked, advocates of 21st Century Skills never put "will be able to fill in bubbles" as one of the critical skills for future success. We need to start redesigning everything we do in school...from scratch....with no regard for what we have "always done."
What role do rubrics and assignment sheets play in education today?
Rubrics and assignment sheets take away a lot of the individualized learning that we have pushed to create. By providing every student with the same parameters for accomplishing a task we have eliminated their ability to think critically and problem solve without a step-by-step guide.
Fun experiment: don't give the kids an assignment sheet or a rubric and ask them how they would solve the problem. You'll be amazed at how many students have panic attacks because they don't have that crutch to rely on.
In addition, providing them with rubrics and assignment sheets lessens their ability to successfully problem-solve once they have left the boring confines of K-12 education. The problems that we want our kids to solve (like that of BP's) don't come with rubrics and the assignment sheet is simply "we have a problem". There was no rubric for the men to follow to save Apollo 13. That took human ingenuity and the ability to think critically about the situation while attempting multiple solutions.
We're robbing that ability of our kids every day.
Three Words to Describe Education Today?
- Rigid- We don't allow for any deviation that doesn't fit our predetermined beliefs of education.
- Traditional- Why is every student that is 16 years old in 10th grade? (on average). So much for individualizing learning.
- Exciting- No matter what, we need to remind ourselves that we have the best job in the world.
I encourage you to engage in discussions over these, and other topics, on my blog:
Synthesizing Education.com.
-Aaron Eyler
Photo from Twitter.com/aaron_eylerFree Educational Resources | Interactive Whiteboard Lessons by Learning Today