An Arctic adventure... from the comfort of your classroom!

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Last month, over 3000 students between the ages of 7 and 16 travelled thousands of miles to one of the remotest regions on the planet... And they did it all without leaving the comfort of their classroom!

How? Well, they were all taking part in Digital Explorer’s Arctic Live Education Event, which saw students from across the world accompany an expedition of scientists and explorers to the Arctic using Skype in the classroom.

Thousands more students were able to follow the expedition via the Digital Explorer blog, social media and accompanying educational resources.

Jamie chats with one class at St. Bartholomew's Primary in Sydenham

The aim of the expedition was to investigate the latest impacts of climate change on the Arctic Ocean, specifically looking at ocean acidification. Schools were able to connect and interact with the expedition live via satellite at the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) base on Svalbard, the northernmost public settlement in the world.

Digital Explorer director, Jamie Buchanan-Dunlop, said: “It has been an amazing opportunity to share life and science in the frozen north with so many students around the world. We hope that through this experience, they will reflect on how they can play a role in preserving this fragile and beautiful ecosystem for future generations.”

But what did the students think of this grand adventure?

Pupils at Scoil Fhursa in Ireland strike a pose!

“The experience was incredible. I learned so much it took me almost 10 minutes to explain everything to my Mum!” – Matt

“It was fantastic to have a once in a lifetime chance to be informed directly by one of the scientists the causes of global warming. I was determined to find out more after it was over.” – Lily

“It was nice to know about all the interesting things you guys are doing. We learned about the krill and how far down in the ocean you put the nets to catch them. We also learned how many layers of clothes you have to wear sometimes. I thought the Skype was awesome. It was an amazing experience to talk with Jamie.” – Logan

And their teachers?

“To me, this is a fresh teaching experience and has shown that learning need not be confined to the textbooks. This will definitely make students’ learning more relevant and authentic.” – Chye Thiam Chng, St Nicholas Girls' School, Singapore

“Thank you so much for that opportunity to speak to you [Jamie – via Skype] today and for taking the time to chat to the students. Although you couldn't see it, the children all gasped when they saw you up on the screen and ooed and awed, something very special for them indeed, so thank you. They were hanging on your every word!” – Christopher Muller, Eastwood School, Essex

And you can still get involved!

Ocean Literacy is becoming a larger part of the UK national curriculum, and it's more important than ever to engage students from a young age in the protection and preservation of our environment – especially the Arctic, one of the most vulnerable and fragile environments on the planet.

The Arctic Education Event, its blog, social media feeds and classroom resources – including a range of booklets and videos, as well as free science lesson plans on, among other subjects, ocean acidification – provide an innovative and engaging approach to educating young people.

Digital Explorer hope to run the Arctic Live Education Event again next year. But this isn’t their only event! Students and teachers can accompany a wide range of live expeditions, download exciting resources about various environmental issues, and organise visits from real-life adventurers and scientists! See this page for more information.

Jamie teaches in the snow!

Jamie Buchanan-Dunlop’s trip to the Arctic and the wider Frozen Oceans education program are sponsored by Catlin Group Limited.

Interested in exploring the Arctic even further in your classroom?

Capture your students' imaginations with our mixed media resource pack, Arctic Stories, available to purchase from the TeachingTimes Bookshop.

Designed to promote the skills-based curriculum, this resource pack is full of thoughtful activities to help children learn about the ecosystem of the Arctic and understand how indigenous peoples relate to it.

How to plan for project-based learning

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Setting up your first project-based learning unit can be an intimidating task – especially for first-timers. There’s just so much to consider!

The first blog post in this series provided an overview of the 8 elements that must be incorporated into your project for it to be successful. Each of these elements require planning for – but how?

There are 2 broad areas you’ll need to take into consideration. The first is the exciting part – the project itself. This is all about planning the learning experience and making the project interesting but educational.

The second is the not-so-exciting practical stuff – time scale, funding, resources needed etc. It’s what you’ll need to think about to make sure the learning experience runs smoothly and students get the most out of it that they can.

This blog post will consider both of these areas.

Planning the learning experience

First off, you’ll need to identify the curriculum content you want to cover, as well as the 21^st century skills you want your students to develop.

Then you need to decide how you’re going to go about covering the content and developing your students' skills. You will need to consider:

1. The driving question

This is the stimulus that leads the entire project. For advice on creating your DQ, see the previous post in this series.

2. The final, publicly-presented product

What your students are working towards will shape the entire project, so you need to settle on this early on. There are endless possibilities for their final product depending on the skills you want them to develop – a film, a museum exhibition, a sales pitch, a blueprint, a sculpture, possibly even a garden.

The public presentation aspect of this is also very important. You’ll need to decide who your audience is. It could comprise of:

• Other students in the school
• Other adults in the school
• Other adults who visit the school (parents, experts, teachers from local schools etc. who come into the school to view the final product)
• People in the community or online (requires displaying students’ final products off site).

Or a combination of all four!

3. Structured activities

You should now consider what activities your students need to undertake in order to complete their product. Obviously, the whole point of PBL is to let students take the lead in directing their own learning, so some fluidity is necessary. However, it's also important to expose students to new experiences and give them the knowledge and skills they need to fulfil their brief. 

Structured activities can include presentations by guest speakers, educational visits, critiquing sessions (see 'Assessment and reflection' below), mini-research tasks, skills workshops and more.

4. Assessment and reflection

The next thing to decide is how you will assess your students’ work and development. You will need to consider both formative assessment (during the project) and summative assessment (after the project).

Formative assessment will involve assessing and providing feedback on the students’ work-in-progress. Students will need to complete multiple drafts of their work (or rehearsals in the case of an orally presented product) and learn how to produce formal critiques of each other’s work. Regular formal critiquing sessions throughout the project are vital, as critiquing involves a range of skills and concepts that students will need to be taught and practise.

Summative assessment will involve the assessment of the students’ product and how well they've answered the question/fulfilled the brief and how fully they understand the curriculum content covered. However, you’ll also need to assess the extent to which they’ve improved their product since the first draft and how well they’ve taken feedback on board.

You’ll also need to find a way to assess the 21^st century skills you identified at the outset. Self and peer evaluation, as well as whole-class discussion and focus groups, will be useful for this. Students will need to demonstrate they’ve understood the enquiry process – getting them to complete a learning log during the project, culminating in a final write-up of knowledge gained/skills developed, will make this easier to assess.

5. Entry event

Now you know where the project is headed and how you’re hoping the students will get there, you can consider how to introduce them to the project. According to the Buck Institute of Education (BIE), an entry event has two basic purposes:

• To spark students’ interest and curiosity
• to begin the inquiry process by leading students to ask questions

You’ve got to make this a day to remember – so bigger is better! The more dramatic your entry event, the more excited and intrigued your students are going to be to get on with the project and answer that juicy driving question.

Examples of entry events include:

• a film clip
• a dramatic performance (adult-in-role, though you could use older students)
• guest speaker
• presentation of a puzzling problem
• an activity or simulation

The possibilities are endless!

And if you need anywhere to store all this information, the BIE provides this brilliant interactive project planner tool. Definitely worth a look - even if only for inspiration.

Making sure it all runs smoothly

This is all about ensuring the project is sustainable and minimising the risk of things going hugely wrong i.e. nowhere to hold your final exhibition.

You will need to think about:

1. Resources

This area can be split into 3 sub-sections:

• Facilities – Where will students work during the project? Where will the final product be presented? Are there any other events which might clash? Will we need off-site facilities? How much will these cost? Can we make a deal with these off-site resources to reduce costs? How will students get there?
• Materials and equipment – What will students need to make the products? What technology will we need? Do we have enough or will we need to buy more in? Are any specialist resources needed? What safety measures do we need to consider?
• Human resources – Who will be involved in school? Do we need the help/input of anyone outside of the school? The BIE provides a list of potential human resources to consider:
• Older students
• Parents with special expertise, interests, hobbies, or skills that connect to your project
• Other teachers, administrators or staff members with special expertise
• School or local specialists in art, music, drama, technology, physical education
• Experts from local (or distant, reached online) non-profit organisations
• People from local businesses and industry
• Local government officials and agency representatives, police and fire departments
• Technical school, college and university faculties

Running a project doesn’t have to require a huge amount of resources, but it can do. Planning beforehand will minimise the costs.

Source: disneytheatricallicensing.com

2. Time scale

Make sure to plan and allocate time for your project. Projects can be run across consecutive weeks with a suspended timetable; however, an alternative is to run the same project throughout the school year in dedicated curriculum slots. Both options have benefits and drawbacks – decide what’s right for you. You can always try a different approach next time!

You will also need to schedule time to train staff to become more prepared to deal with the type of learning taking place and the philosophy behind PBL - especially if this is your school's first PBL project!

To help with your time management, you might like to download this brilliant project calendar from the BIE. This can be used to plan your project events, but may also come in handy during the project, as a record of activities and events for later scrutiny.

3. Funding

Ensure the project is supported by some allocated funding. The budget doesn’t have to be big but some money helps – especially for buying resources for the exhibition and facilitating trips for students whose families can’t afford it.

Make contact with people and organisations outside the school to sponsor the project or get involved in some way. The more high profile your project is, the more likely they are to invest in you! Use your connections in the community and promote the benefits to the students and local businesses/organisations should they get involved.

And if you can’t get it for free, see if you can negotiate a deal. The Innovation Unit’s guide to PBL reveals that one teacher held a premier of student-produced films in a local cinema by guaranteeing that the audience would spend at least £250 on food and drink.

Of course, convincing people to get involved, planning time off timetables and sourcing adequate funding is going to require the cooperation and consent of other teachers, the headteacher and students’ parents.

Getting people on board will be the theme of our next post in this series. Stick around – it’s due out next week!

Keep up with this blog by following us on Twitter @TeachingTimes or liking us on Facebook.

Even more advice on planning for PBL from our archives...

Busting the myths of project-based learning - Bob Lenz
A longer version of the blog post cited in this post, in which Bob tackles three major myths about PBL, proving them wrong with his own school's successful PBL unit.

PBL for beginners - Alyson Boustead
Plenty of advice in here, as Alyson explains everything she needed to think about when preparing and implementing her first project-based learning unit.

Project inspire - Geraldine Norman
Lots in this one about planning PBL - Geraldine explains the process she and other members of staff went through before coming to the conclusion that PBL was the best way forward!

A crash course in writing good driving questions

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One of the most difficult things about planning a project-based learning unit is writing the driving question (DQ).

And no wonder! According to the Innovation Unit’s guide to project-based learning, a good driving question is a question that:

• people ask in the ‘real world’
• has no single, easy answer, and stretches students’ intellectual muscles
• ignites students’ imaginations.

The question should also address content from the curriculum and allow for the development of 21st century skills. Students also have to be able to answer it thoroughly with the time and resources available.

Add all that to the fact that the whole project hinges on a good driving question, and you can understand why DQs are not only very important, but very challenging to create. There’s a lot of pressure to get it right!

But let’s start with the basics. First, a reminder of what a driving question is:

A driving question is the ‘big’ question that provides the stimulus for a project. 

According to the Buck Institute of Education (BIE), there are 2 basic types of driving question:

     1) A DQ that specifies a product to be created, a task to be done, or a                     problem to be solved.

     2) A DQ that focuses on a philosophical or debatable issue, or an intriguing           topic.

Where can we find inspiration?

Creating a question that fulfils the criteria listed at the outset and has enough power to drive the project as far as you want it to go is not easy. It’ll take time, trial and error, and lots of discussion with your colleagues.

Some of the best DQs come from the students themselves. Do this by introducing your class to the topic you’d like to be the focus of your project – it should be presented in a relevant, thought-provoking manner, perhaps through a current news article.

For example, in recent news, we’re heard that doctors are rapidly running out of medicines to treat infections, as certain strains of bacteria are growing increasingly resistant to antibiotics. This could mean that in the very near future, a minor scratch or infection after a routine operation could kill. Think of the implications of this! By discussing the issue and doing some relevant research, students can come up a question that will guide a project along this theme. For instance, ‘How might running out of antibiotics affect our daily lives here in the UK?’ or ‘How did past civilisations cope without medicines for infections and other common ailments?’

Driving questions that are specific to your local area can also be very effective. Recently, one science teacher at a school in the San Francisco Bay Area teamed up with art and government teachers to implement a project on the devastating Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010. They chose the driving question: ‘Who is to blame for the oil spill?’ Because the students lived in the area of the spill, and could remember it happening, there was an immediacy and a connection to the people most affected by the disaster that helped engage them in the topic.

And there can be more than one driving question! As the project develops, you may find that other questions need to be asked and answered before the final, overarching question can be explored to its fullest extent, or for the desired curriculum content to be fully covered.

For example, in the oil spill project cited above, the teachers realised their students needed a greater understanding of the impact of the disaster and also the clean up efforts afterwards before they could take part in the final exhibition - a simulated town meeting in which students played the various roles of residents and other stakeholders deciding how to deal with the oil spill. Thus, students also investigated the best strategies for cleaning up oil through scientific experiments, and explored the impact of the spill on the Bay’s wildlife through art and sculpture.

Creating your driving question

You can find a raft of driving questions on the internet to be adapted according to your needs. Some of the best example questions we found include:

• Is war ever justified?
• Should present governments apologise for the wrongs of past governments?
• How do communities evolve over time?
• Should we allow for genetic engineering to prevent diseases and illnesses?
• What is the impact of climate on civilisation?
• How do maths and science influence artistic expression?
• How can an idea be transformed into a product that could make us millions?
• Are we and our technologies a product of our ancestors?
• Why do humans need to protect the earth, and how can we as 12-year-olds play a role in this?

You can use the table below to practice writing driving questions by framing initial words, people or entities, actions or challenges, and audience/purpose. It’s also available to download as a tubric template from BIE.

Framing words	Person or entity	Action or challenge	Audience or purpose
How can…	I, We	Build… Create… Make…	Real-world problem
How should…	We as (roles/occupations)	Design… Plan…	For a public audience
Should…	Town, City, County	Solve…	For a school
Could…	State, Nation	Write…	For a classroom
What…	Community, Organisation	Propose… Decide…	For an online audience

So there you have it! A basic guide to writing a good, solid driving question. For more information, follow the links embedded in this post – there are some really brilliant resources out there to make use of.

What driving questions have you come up with? Share your examples by commenting below.

Don't forget to come back for the next post in this series! Due out next week, it will focus on the main things you need to consider when planning your project.

Keep up with this blog by following us on Twitter @TeachingTimes or liking us on Facebook.

Image source: xpotentialselling.com

Top 4 project-based learning websites

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Join the PBL revolution with this selection of websites and online resources to support all aspects of project planning, management and more.

Successful project-based learning takes a lot of planning beforehand and management throughout for it to have the greatest impact they can – and that’s not an easy feat.

Luckily, though, thanks to the recent PBL revolution across the pond, which we’re now seeing beginning to seep into British education practice, there’s an abundance of help and guidance available online. 

An overabundance it may seem, which is why we've selected what we think are the 4 best online sources of information on project-based learning for you to peruse at leisure. 

Buck Institute for Education

All key stages

Definitely your first port of call for all things project-based learning, there’s an astonishing amount of resources available on this site – and it’s all free!

More unique resources include:

• archived Twitterchats using the hashtag #PBLChat
• archived webinars on a diverse range of topics, including managing the day-to-day running of your project and authentically integrating STEM subjects
• recorded Google Hangouts - interviews and group chats between staff at BIE and teachers from different schools on various aspects of PBL, all recorded using the instant messaging and video chat platform, Google Hangouts.

Another great tool on this website is the Project Planner, which provides an interactive online framework to use during the first stages of your project planning.

High Tech High - Seven successful projects

All key stages

According to the site itself, its aim is ‘to offer practitioners useful, easily adaptable models of real projects’. These seven projects are outlined in great detail and include downloadable rubrics, resources and worksheets. 

Projects include examining how an idea can be transformed into a moneymaking product, using theatre to explore the controversies of the Vietnam War, and building a scale model of a tree for a citywide urban art project, exploring how maths and science influence artistic expression.

West Virginia Department of Education 

Key Stages 2-5

Under ‘PBL tools’, you’ll find one of the best and most comprehensive PBL planning resources I’ve come across – the WVDE template for project-based learning design. You download this as a word document so it’s completely adaptable to any project you may be considering.

Also worth checking out is this implementation plan to help make PBL sustainable in the long run, and second, these observation forms, which are self-assessment rubrics for teachers to refine their own PBL practice, or to use during observations of their colleagues. (Great if you’re interested in Lesson Study)

Real World Math
Key stages 3-5

A collection of free activities using Google Earth to support the teaching of maths.There’s a section explicitly labelled project-based learning, but the majority of the activities and resources featured on this site lend themselves very well to PBL and inquiry-based learning.

Highlights from the PBL section include simulating a search-and-rescue operation at sea, using Google SketchUp software to create 3D models of buildings, and a U-Boat hunt in which students take on the role of World War II code-breakers, solving cipher messages in order to locate German submarines in the Atlantic Ocean. Each project comes with the necessary information and resources to complete, and a list of helpful links.

You’ll also find a few interesting videos on this site – my personal favourite is below. It’s all about how the Surui tribe of the Amazon worked with Google Earth to map ancestral sites and places of interest, like sightings of jaguars or toucans, as part of a project to protect their rainforest from deforestation. It’s a brilliant video with plenty of potential for use in educational and project-based contexts.

The 8 essential elements of project-based learning

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We kickstart our new series on the practicalities of PBL with the 8 essential ingredients for perfect project-based learning.

Project-based learning seems to be the next big thing in the education world. And it’s really not hard to see why when you read of the amazing projects going on in schools all over the world. You can almost taste the excitement of both students and teachers in these accounts.

But what makes for good project-based learning? After all, we’re all familiar with the dreary ‘design a poster’ or ‘create a powerpoint’ type projects so common in our own youth.

Well, first off, a good project has to be meaningful to the students. It also has to fulfil an educational purpose. But that’s not all. Overall, there are 8 elements which are absolutely essential for any project to be a success:

1. Curriculum content

The project has to be aligned with the curriculum. It can cover curricular content in a range of subject areas, but there has to be a focus on teaching students important knowledge outlined in the curriculum.

2. 21st Century skills

Along with curricular knowledge, the project also needs to target the development of so -called ‘21st century skills’ and competencies. But what can we class as 21st century skills?

The University of Melbourne’s ATC21S project puts them into four categories:

• ways of thinking – creativity, critical thinking, problem-solving, decision-making and learning
• ways of working – communication and collaboration
• tools for working – information and communications technology (ICT) and information literacy
• skills for living in the world – citizenship, life and career, and personal and social responsibility

So it’s quite broad then! Clearly, targeting them all would be impossible, so your PBL unit should target the development of a just a few. You’ll also need to plan ways to assess this. Creating a rubric is a good idea. This website offers loads of ready made ones!

3. Need to know

The project has to motivate students to want to learn the new content knowledge or gain new skills. They have to find it meaningful, and they have to find the topic, driving question (see next essential element below) and tasks genuinely interesting and relevant.

You need an exciting and motivational entry event to introduce pupils to the project. If this isn’t dramatic or memorable enough, day one of the project will feel like any other day – in fact, it’ll feel worse, because it'll seem like more work than usual!

4. Driving question (DQ)

The driving question is exactly what it sounds like – the question or stimulus that drives your project. 

Your DQ needs to capture the project’s main focus, but be understandable (not too ‘text-booky’ or academic) and inspiring. It also needs to be open-ended – it can’t lead students towards one particular answer, and students must be able to answer it thoroughly with the resources and time available.

Not a simple task, we’ll admit, but never fear! In the next article in this series of blog posts, we’ll be considering good driving questions and how to go about creating your own.

5. Student voice and choice

The idea behind this element is allowing students to make decisions affecting the content of their project or how it's conducted. Student voice is already quite a common feature of many classrooms, but in PBL, it’s got to be more than deciding how to divide tasks within a team or which website to use for research. Students need the opportunity to express ‘voice and choice’ on more important matters such as which topics to study, the questions they investigate, the resources they use, the product they create, their use of time and organisation of tasks.

Students need to work independently from the teacher, but don’t make them work too much on their own! They’ll need ample guidance from you, especially if they’re new to PBL and its procedures. You’ll also need to provide sufficient feedback and in-depth critiques as the project and their product progress (see ‘Reflection and revision’ below).

6. In-depth enquiry

This element is all about rigour. The project has to be academically rigorous. It can’t just be an extended activity – it has to be an enquiry.

It also needs to be scaffolded, growing deeper as students gather and interpret data to answer the driving question, ask further questions of their own, develop and evaluate their solutions and build evidence for their final answer.

Getting the balance right here can be tricky. The inquiry can’t be too narrow, but it also can’t try and include too many side topics or task.

7. Reflection and revision

There have got to be plenty of structured opportunities throughout the project for students to give and receive feedback about the quality of their work-in-progress. Constructive critiques play a large part in this. You, as a teacher, need to provide them, but students will also need to be taught how to give them themselves to their peers. They also need to be able to reflect on and critique their own work.

Part of the assessment of the students’ final product (see below) should be how well they've used the feedback you and their peers have given to improve and refine it.

8. A final product presented to an audience

PBL is not PBL without a final product and an audience. Students should present or exhibit their work to an audience – and it’s got to be more than just you and their classmates. Get other people involved, both from within and outside the school. You could also have students target an online audience.

Another important part of the final product/exhibition is the students’ explanation of how and why they did what they did. This could be presented orally or in written form – whichever’s more appropriate. This has got to have depth – students need to be able to defend and explain their reasoning behind their choices in detail, as well as make it clear that they understood the inquiry process, and prove that they took the feedback they received throughout the project on board to improve their work.

An intimidating task?

So that’s what makes a good PBL project! Worried?

Admittedly, setting up a PBL unit is no small feat – it’s like conducting a massive orchestra, getting all the instruments to come together at the right time and in the right way – but the rewards can be immense.

In order to help you along the way to those immense rewards, we're launching a brand new series on the practicalities of project-based learning. We’ll be covering driving questions, planning your project, creating the perfect entry event, the art of critiquing and much more.

All the information will be from real teachers who’ve tried this stuff in their classroom – tried it and had the most mindblowingly awesome time with their students they want to share it with the rest of the world.

Our next post (everything you need to know about good PBL driving questions) will be out next week. Keep an eye out!

Keep up with this blog by following us on Twitter @TeachingTimes or liking us on Facebook.

Also, sign up to our free e-newsletter, TeachingTimesReport, for news, updates and free articles and resources. It comes out every 2 weeks and is mega popular with teachers of all subjects, from both primary and secondary level (and did we mention it’s completely free?!) Don’t miss out! Sign up today.

The 8 essential elements of PBL featured in this article were inspired by this rubric from the Buck Institute of Education, available to download for free.