Creating Arete PBL Academy Year 1 The First Project

Our first project in year one was an individual water project.  For Global Studies, students researched a water crisis somewhere in the world. For physical science, students looked at molecular bonding and did water testing. For algebra they had to find statistics about water issues in the country they were researching and make a visual display of their learning.  For English they wrote an argumentative research paper on the water crisis in their country.

We expected that kids would choose a country with water issues that interested them or made them angry. For our entry event we showed the documentary, Tapped, which garnered their interest.  As we began to work on the various parts of the project, we did some traditional skills based teaching so that students could begin to put their project ideas together.  We wanted students to choose a topic they were passionate about, but, for some reason, most kids chose the drought in California as their topic. The drought is a great topic, but when students had the opportunity to choose any water issue in the world that we had talked about and what seemed like 1/3 of them chose the same topic, we knew that we had to set up future projects in a better way.

One of the most painful aspects of the first project was that to many the "no tests" message students heard in the spring was meeting up with the reality that they actually had to produce something. The first few weeks were really rough. We had to overcome the misconception of what "no tests" actually meant. To students, projects were what happened after the test took place, like dessert after a meal.  Our idea was that in creating the presentations for high school juniors and seniors, they were doing the learning and their final project was a series of pieces on the water crisis of their choice.

We emphasized that failure was expected, meaning that not everything one tries works out.  We were no exception to that rule.  We had spent the first two weeks of the school year trying to get kids to unlearn their 9 years of school. In retrospect, we should have taken more time to work through more collaboration, teamwork and leadership activities so when we started the project, they would have the tools to shut down disruptive activity before it interfered with their project work. In overestimating how prepared our kids were to be self directed, we also made a major miscalculation.

After they created their visual data piece for math, did the chemistry of water for science, researched a country and its water issues for Global studies and wrote their research paper for English, students presented their projects to juniors and seniors who were not that impressed with the initial offering.

We thought we had all parts of the Gold Standard project, entry event, driving question, learning in class contributes to final project, final products presented in front of an audience other than their class or their teacher, but we missed the mark. Part of the miss was us expecting too much of the students off the bat.  Even if they were really excited to do the project, we could have given them smaller more frequent checkpoints.  I think the project was so big that they didn't know where to start or where to go next if they had already started.

Creating the Arete PBL Academy at Neenah High School: The Beginnings

Two years ago, there had been no PBL program at Neenah High School. The plan was to start with a 9th grade cohort, and they would have the opportunity to progress through high school being the first group of PBL students at that grade level.  Our initial team of teachers for the 9th grade included Lynn Heyn in physical science, Tara Meinke in Algebra, Suzy Weisgerber in Global Studies and me in English.

At our original meeting in the spring of 2014, we tried to put together our ideas and standards into groups we thought would make sense for each unit.  In our initial meeting, we planned projects for the entire year based each unit on a big idea from the 9th grade Global studies curriculum.  We decided that using Global Studies would be easiest as the center point because the rest of us could incorporate our standards into some aspect of Global Studies.

From the onset, we made tons of mistakes. Possibly the biggest was our phrasing of what the program was about.  We emphasized that the program was for people who were smart, curious and despite possessing knowledge, did not do well on tests, thinking we would have students who were as excited about the opportunity to learn in a more meaningful way as we were to teach it.  The middle school teachers and counselors looked at our description of the type of students who we thought would be successful in the program and selected about 80.  We met with the students and we excitedly talked about projects which combined all the subjects and that the learning would be shown through projects.  Somehow the only message many of them heard was there were "no tests" and they listened no further.

Our next step was choosing a name for the program. We chose the name Arete  Academy because we felt the Greek definition of the word (striving for excellence) fit our overall goals for our us and for the students.

Shortly thereafter,  we went to the Innovative Schools Network PBL conference in June, hoping to learn about effective implementation of a PBL  program, creating and assessing projects and any other tips or tricks we could pick up.  We did learn some of that and did make some connections with other PBL schools throughout Wisconsin, but we were discouraged when we heard from many people that constructing a PBL program that included all core content areas in a public high school was impossible. We were determined to prove the experts wrong.