"When Will I Use This in the Real World?"

In regards to school, if every kid has not asked this question out loud, then they have thought it. How can schools answer the question before students ask it?  By making education something students do because it has meaning to them. The best way is to allow them to take their learning beyond the four walls of the classroom to help real people in a real way. 

Authentic learning involves giving students a way to see what their learning has to do with real life and how their learning can have a direct impact on other people.  They are learning for a reason and will share their learning with others to make their lives better.  Adam Grant, Management professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business, discusses how, through prosocial motivation, people benefit both themselves and others with powerful results. 

Prosocial motivation, as described by Grant has shown that people who know their work has a meaningful impact on others are happier and more productive than those who don't see or specifically think about the influence their work can have on others. Grant may not approve of my leap from his prosocial motivational studies in the workplace to authentic learning in schools, but here it goes:  

According to Grant's chapter in the ProSocial Handbook, Prosocial Motivation at Work: When, Why, and How Making a Difference Makes a Difference, "when jobs are designed to connect employees to the impact they have on the beneficiaries of their work (such as clients, customers, and patients), they experience higher levels of prosocial motivation, which encourages them to invest more time and energy in their assigned tasks and in helping these beneficiaries."  In the case of students, I take "jobs" to mean "learning," because they both involve daily tasks.  and "employees" to be "students" because of the human element. 

When students learn about how their learning will affect others, they will stop at nothing to make sure they do the best job possible.  One example  was in the 2016 spring semester when students in the Arete Academy at Neenah High School held a Heroes of Neenah Celebration.  Students interviewed, researched, wrote articles which were published on various websites in the Fox Valley, and created permanent artwork installed on a prominent wall of the school where heroes will be enshrined each year.  The amount of time that students spent at night and on weekends working on the project far exceeded what they ever would have done if they were assigned those tasks without any connection to real life, or to actual people they knew.  Because of the prosocial motivation to do something great for others, while also doing something great for themselves, students pushed beyond the requirements of the assignment  and contacted people from the historical society, other family members of the heroes, television stations, along with current and former local and state political figures who lent their knowledge of the heroes and also attended the ceremony. Students also felt there should be a reception following the event for everyone to interact on a personal level, so they took it upon themselves to decorate, provide food and drinks, made a booth for nominations for the 2017 heroes and host the event.  

Had we just told them that they had to write an informative essay about a hero, they would have written it, and we could have checked off the box that indicates, yes, this student can proficiently write an informative essay.  There is no way they would have worked as hard as they did.  Authentic learning gives students prosocial motivation to follow their passions and take their learning and final product to a level that would likely never be equalled in a teacher led, artificial learning environment. 

Romeo and Juliet PBL style

Seth Godin says when assessing an audience or creating a culture, the main question is, "Who are we and what do people like us do?" All 9th grade classes at my school read Romeo and Juliet. Our 9th grade PBL students decided that as Problem Based Learners, they needed to go about their Shakespeare experience in a different way.  Students decided they wanted to perform the play but in a different setting than what Shakespeare ever would have chosen.  After much discussion, the groups decided they would do the play in pantomime format.

While it sounds like it may be easier, every student had to know not only what their lines were, but also how to interact with others based on facial expressions and body language. The miming of the play led to greater knowledge of the intracacies of the play than my standard English 9 classes normally do.

Creating Arete PBL Academy Project 2

Our learning from the beginning of the first project to the second project was exponential.  Our entry event for the second project was to show the film Night at the Museum, where the historical figures come alive. Each student in the program was to "become" an influential historical person from one of ten countries or areas, England, France, Germany, Italy, Scandinavia, Australia, China, Japan, Egypt,  and Greece. Students were to know everything about their influential person and be able to answer any question about them. The public exhibition for the second project was to present to 6th graders at the middle school.

To prepare for the presentations, in math they made scale models of a famous structure in that country, in physical science they studied the materials used to build the structures, in English they wrote a story which took place in their country. In social studies they learned the history and stories of their person and country, including why their person was so influential.

The event that truly captured their interest was the Thursday 30 Second Throwdown based on Brad Gustafson's 30 Second Take. We set up a March Madness style bracket featuring all influential people and each week we had them face off for 30 seconds on a topic.  Some topics included, who was more historically significant, who would make a better principal of our school, who is more like Santa Claus, with whom you rather be stuck with for a day in the airport.  For the finals we did a rap battle. As the weeks progressed, and characters were defeated, the vanquished joined the team of their conqueror.  The job of the vanquished was to research both their conqueror and their opponent for the next week.  That requirement worked on multiple levels.  1. It kept everyone involved with a stake in the result, 2.  As the tournament progressed, everyone got to know all the historical figures 3. It established a team atmosphere in the class.

After each match up we did a poll everywhere vote for the round.  Kids loved to see the vote totals as they came in. I'm sure the teachers in the classrooms around ours hated those Thursdays because I don't think it could have been louder as students stated their claims and then threw some dirt on their opponent. I highly recommend doing the 30 Second Throwdown. It was a blast and the kids learned more during that time than they may have in some entire years.

In addition to actually building their famous structures, they had to create a backdrop which served as a billboard showing a map of the country, the flag and something famous about the country. Most backdrops were 4 feet by 6 feet or so. They also had to find or create a costume which represented what the character would have worn or how they had been depicted and have an interactive component for 6th graders to do when they came to learn about the country.

Two weeks before our final exhibition,  the we held a "cocktail" type party to practice being characters around other people and answer questions students didn't know were coming. We invited parents and adults from the school to come and talk with the famous people. The highlight was a spontaneous debate between Marie Antoinette and her husband, King Louis XVI of France. The kids had fun showing off how much they knew and having snacks and soda.

When we got to presentation day, we had to transport 50 structures, ten backdrops, our artifacts and interactive components and transform the lunch room at the 6th grade middle school into a museum.  The day was amazing!! Our students informed, entertained and delighted the 6th grade students and loved having former teachers there to show off how much they knew and how they had grown. It was a huge success! Some teachers even told us the kids got more out of our Living Museum than they had from the culture fair in Milwaukee. They said our kids were more engaging, entertaining and there was more of an interactive element to our "museum."  To that point it was one of the greatest days of my teaching career.  We left there excited, and exhausted.

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 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.

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.

PBL and The Matrix

"Let me tell you why you are here. You have come because you know something. What you know you can't explain but you feel it. You've felt it your whole life, felt that something is wrong with the world. You don't know what, but it's there like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. It is this feeling that brought you to me. Do you know what I'm talking about?" While speaking to Neo, Morpheus obliquely describes the feeling Neo has had through the first quarter of the 1999 film, The Matrix, and the one I had for years as a teacher.  

For the longest time I was unsatisfied with the way school was being run.  Something wasn't right, but I wasn't exactly sure what it was or how to fix it. It would wake up at night only to catch a fleeting glimpse of the idea disappearing the more awake I became.  In 2010 or so, I read Daniel Pink's (@DanielPink) book Drive (which I highly recommend) and followed its ideas to see where they went. As I combined Drive with Seth Godin's (@thisissethsblog)  Stop Stealing Dreams, suddenly it all became so clear. It was as if Daniel Pink and Seth Godin had spoken collectively to me with the sentiment expressed by Morpheus. It was too late for me to turn back, I had taken the red pill.

And I began my journey down the rabbit hole of Project Based Learning. I then knew it is the true path for education. Everything else in education I had seen is a fake world created by an oppressive force which has been in place for over a century. The whole time the solution was so close, but I was not able to see it.  I am far from being "The One," but it sure felt like I was when I first recognized the truth of what education and learning should be.

Education was so contrived.  "Mary has a red dress. If she is walking 2 miles per hour and Agent Smith starts .5 miles behind her and walks 3 miles per hour, when will he catch her?" It is obvious that the teacher has come up with the problem of the lady in the red dress and can easily find the answer, which doesn't matter anyway. 

Whether it was math, science, social studies or any other subject, concepts did not transfer between them. Even though a student may have learned about reading a line graph in Math class and then immediately walked 40 feet down the hall to the next class classroom and used line graphs in Social Studies, students either replied, "This isn't math class," or "How am I supposed to do this?" Obviously students weren't learning.  To me, once one "learns" something, it means they know it and can call upon it when necessary. That wasn't happening. 

Fortunately, the rabbit hole has led Lynn Heyn, Tara Meinke, Suzy Weisgerber, Emily Bennett and I to found the Arete PBL Academy at Neenah High School (@nhsarete).   Our  two years of experiences have shown that real learning is happening now.  By combining English, Math, Science and Social Studies in a regular public high school, Arete PBL  allows students to participate in a meaningful, authentic experience which drives their learning everyday and not solely in our four classes. One of the most surprising revelations from our students is that they take the interconnected way of thinking we teach everyday in our classes and even connect their learning to their non-PBL classes.  Our students are now so passionate about their learning, they are looking to rescue as many students as possible from the Matrix of regular education. They figuratively hold the two pills, and say, "This is your last chance (at our school). After this, there is no going back. Youtake the blue pill and the storyends. You wake in your bed andyou believe whatever you want tobelieve. You take the red pill and you stay in Wonderland and I show you howdeep the rabbit-hole goes."