The Innovations class is deliberately open-ended, which means students have to propose their own project ideas and the standards they plan to meet.
"The mentor can't be their dad or their dad's buddy," Wettrick says. "It has to be an expert in an arena, and it has to be somebody who makes a commitment to help them."
Students benefit from honest critique along with positive attention for their projects, Wettrick says. "They don't need to hear, 'Good job!' They're better off when an expert tells them, 'That's not bad, but have you considered this, or you might want to look at that.'
Wettrick encourages teachers to make their good ideas public so that others in education can learn from their examples. "It's not bragging," he says. "It's sharing best practices."
The Buck Institute for Education has produced a feedback form (6) to help audience members think through their role.
What do you want students to gain from the audience interaction?
Who's the audience for the "real-world" version?
How can technology connect students with larger audiences?
So according to our "big tent" model of PBL, some of the newer "X-BLs" -- problem-, challenge- and design-based -- are basically modern versions of the same concept.
At BIE, we see project-based learning as a broad category which, as long as there is an extended "project" at the heart of it, could take several forms or be a combination of:
Designing and/or creating a tangible product, performance or event
Solving a real-world problem (may be simulated or fully authentic)
Investigating a topic or issue to develop an answer to an open-ended question
We decided to call problem-based learning a subset of project-based learning -- that is, one of the ways a teacher could frame a project is "to solve a problem."
problem-BL is still more often seen in the post-secondary world than in K-12, where project-BL is more common.
Problem-based learning typically follow prescribed steps:
Presentation of an "ill-structured" (open-ended, "messy") problem
Problem definition or formulation (the problem statement)
Generation of a "knowledge inventory" (a list of "what we know about the problem" and "what we need to know")
Generation of possible solutions
Formulation of learning issues for self-directed and coached learning
Sharing of findings and solutions
By using problem-BL, these teachers feel they can design single-subject math projects -- aka "problems" -- that effectively teach more math content by being more limited in scope than many typical project-BL units.
The most effective creative process alternates between time in groups, collaboration, interaction, and conversation... [and] times of solitude, where something different happens cognitively in your brain,
Unequal participation is perhaps the most common complaint about group work.
a handful of practices that educators use to promote equal participation. These involve setting out clear expectations for group work, increasing accountability among participants, and nurturing a productive group work dynamic.
Rich tasks: Making sure that a project is challenging and compelling is critical. A rich task is a problem that has multiple pathways to the solution and that one person would have difficulty solving on their own.
be mindful that introverted students often simply need time to recharge.
if you want to grade group work, he recommends making all academic assessments within group work individual assessments.