Creating Arete PBL Academy Year 1 Part 1

During the first year of PBL at Neenah High School, we each had two sections of PBL and 3 other classes. We quickly found that the PBL classes were how we had always thought school should be taught, which made teaching our standard classes less satisfying than they had been in previous years.

Maybe it was good we didn't spend too much time with "experts" who told us what we were trying to do was impossible.  It was clear early on that the most important part was to put a team of people passionate about changing education. We all found the content from other subject areas interesting and it afforded us a new way of looking at our own class to make it fit together with the other subject areas.  It was our idea that most adults functioned very well in their own lives without currently knowing who the 8th Emperor of China was, or what are the parts of the ear.  We decided to make our standards the skeleton of our program, on which we layered the truly important part of education, the 4 C's or 21st Century Skills.

From the very beginning we emphasized collaboration, communication, creative and critical thinking to a group of students only signed up for the program because they thought it would be easier because they weren't going to have tests.

It turns out they were wrong about how hard it was. After being used to being told which problems to do, how long the essay had to be, how many slides the presentation should be, we changed all the rules on them.  They became frustrated at the responses when they asked how long, how much or how many  questions because they were usually answered with something like, "How long will it need to be for you to clearly communicate your ideas?"

The difficulty came in having to self organize and be self directed. Depending on the project, group roles, project tasks, and final products were all varied based on what the group was trying to accomplish.

The first project was rough for both the students and the teachers.  As teachers, we expected to have students who were curious, excited to learn and hardworking.  That was not always the case.  We also found that the amount of choice we gave students who were used to choosing from a list of 3 or 5 topics, was paralyzing at first.

While students were unsure of what to do, the teachers were emboldened by our new found panoply of options for the school year.