Project-Based Learning Workshop
Preface - Introduction - Background
This effort is a collaboration of Jack Stanfill and RJ Dake, in the Master of Arts in Educational Technology program at California State University, Sacramento. March 18, 2001. Updated July 29,2001.
Jack Stanfill musicview@hotmail.com RJ Dake rdake@edcenter.egusd.k12.ca.us
Preface
In
Brainstorms and Lightning Bolts, David Thornburg writes, "Today's
pace of change is incredible. We are drowning in information that seems to
double every two years...and educators are struggling to help students acquire
skills for survival in a world moving at light-speed. In the face of these
incredible changes, we all need to master new thinking skills, strategies and
tools to help us become flexible, creative thinkers who are able to find order
among the chaos - to find the signal in the noise."
An Instructional Organizer is a guide for developing project-based learning units of study ( PBL). We have found PBL to be the instructional strategy of choice that recognizes and responds to the milieu that Thornburg describes. Our goal is to provide a scaffold for PBL that suggests stability and organization with the flexibility to accommodate diversity. Our Instructional Organizer benefits PBL to address the challenges in education today through democracy, inquiry, and relevancy. This guide is comprehensive, suggesting many and varied examples and models that reflect best practice and yet is by no means exhaustive. We hope this effort will be an important contribution to your understanding and is worthy of the cause we celebrate.
This effort is an attempt to help the teacher organize project-based learning units. It is hoped this organizer will:
Serve as a guide for teacher planning.
Formalize student expectations.
Broaden the scope of student investigations.
Contain these efforts in a visualized and conceptualized format.
These are not hard and fast rules - only suggestions. You may find it necessary to exclude elements presented here and your experience may suggest elements we may not have considered. We invite all suggestions for improvement. You are free to adjust, expand, minimize, or ignore according to your needs and circumstance. This adventure can be fraught with risks, but the rewards can be magnificent. We share the common goal of developing higher-order thinking skills in our students and in ourselves.
Many models for instructional systems design exist; however, they all serve three functions:
1. Identifying the outcomes of the instruction.2. Development of the instruction
3. Evaluating the effectiveness of the instruction
The instructional designer must consider and use existing knowledge of how individuals learn. Organizers, as described by Ausubel, were introductory material presented “in advance of the learning material itself” and “at a higher level of abstraction, generality, and inclusiveness” than the learning material. The organizers provided the link between the new material to be learned and the learner’s cognitive structure and helped the learner to see where new information fit in relation to the general knowledge associated with the material or to what he or she already knew.
R. F. Barron (1969) suggested a change in the format of the advance organizer to a tree diagram utilizing the vocabulary of the concepts to be learned; he called these diagrams structured overviews. Other educators described two forms of graphic organizers – participatory, on which space is left for the student to fill in definitions of key terms and detail, and final form, which have all the information already filled in. Kenny (1993) referred to organizers – both advance and graphic – as instructional organizers.