With the national unemployment rate hovering between eight and 10 percent, colleges and universities are under greater pressure to deliver an education that will lead to jobs. At Alfred State, that's exactly what we're doing.
Changing the Way Students Learn
One way Alfred State helps students prepare for employment is a teaching style called "project-based learning." Project-based learning is a dynamic, engaging method that helps students learn by doing. Typically they're challenged by a project that demands inquiry and hypothesizing as to how they will solve the problem. It teaches critical and original thinking. They learn to cooperate and solve problems in teams.
Part of project-based learning is asking students to achieve skills and competencies they've never accomplished before. When they rise to that challenge, they learn to synthesize all the factors around them, actively apply previous knowledge, and ultimately 'think on their feet' and come to a conclusion.
Better Training Makes Education More Relevant
Bill Goodrich, president of LeChase Construction, is a firm believer in project-based learning. He graduated from Alfred State in the '80s and has hired more than 40 employees from the college. "Alfred State consistently brings into the classroom what's happening in the marketplace. This produces grads who clearly know the field they're going into and what's expected. That's why I think project-based learning helps make excellent employees."
Students here often engage in internships or civic work that put them directly in their subject area, applying their skills and knowledge. Surveying engineering students travel to New Mexico to intern with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. Nursing students do clinical hours in the area and regional hospitals. Electrical trades students install solar lighting at the U.S. National Arboretum and teach homeowners, contractors, and engineers on how to use it.
Set Expectations High, but Within Reach
With project-based learning, the challenge is to set the expectations high, provide support and belief in your student, and get out of the way. The payoffs are huge. Students discover they're capable of far more than they realized. It permanently changes them. They learn how to relax and think when confronted with something they don't know. This type of learning has led Alfred State students to do amazing things like build a zero energy green home, modify alternative fuel vehicles, design and present a port facility in Italy, and apply their knowledge to help those in need in Missouri and Louisiana.
As Matthew Lawrence, professor in the mechanical and electrical engineering technology department, observes about one of his projects, "The growth of the students, the pride, the confidence they gained by a project this challenging would never happen in a lecture/theory class. They've been tested in labs that are far more like the real world."
Over the years, we have found that this approach to education yields a high percentage of our graduates being employed or having been accepted into a program to continue their education. Of those employed, most are working in their field of study. Those are results that we can be proud of.
http://mindfulstew.wordpress.com/2012/06/09/summer-media-workshop-a-huge-win/
PBL works well for English instruction (which, when you think about it has an open-ended curriculum), and our school showed great gains in ELA achievement levels. But, PBL it is a dismal failure when used as the primary means of instructing secondary students in math and science. A math or science teacher will devote a good 30-50% of his/her total time providing what amounts to language arts instruction.
Now, if I had a student who had gone through AP Physics and AP Chemistry (essentially a college-level kid), then PBL would be reasonable. On the other hand, if the community wants us to really trivialize math/science content and just simply teach "conceptual math" and "conceptual science" (which is what I was urged to do as a New Tech teacher...you know...hush, hush, wink, wink), then we have a winner!
PBL use in the collegiate environment does not translate well into math/science implementation at the K-12 level, so until this issue is researched and clarified the author needs to qualify his argument.
But, although PBL is a useful tool that should be implemented in both math and science classrooms ( a few projects per semester), it should not be the sole method of instruction. As I said, a math/science teacher will be lucky to get through 50% of their curriculum if PBL is used that way.
You may assert that 50% is great, that the kids will be picking up other skills in lieu of math/science content (the position that MANY New Tech teachers will take). But then I would ask, are we then actually moving forward?
I would say that, overall, the country does a fairly good job at teaching math and science to high achieving students but a poor job at ensuring that our average and marginal students are proficient at either.
If we are comfortable with a two-tiered system, then by all means teach math/science in a traditional fashion to the higher achieving students and use PBL to address the lower groups. PBL does generate interest on the part of the students, and makes the learning process more enjoyable. But it is slow and palliative, not necessarily addressing the underlying problems. Personally, I don't want a two-tiered system, but it is occurring by default anyway.
A good percentage of New Tech kids eventually go to work in the business world and even with tech firms, but not as scientists and engineers. And good luck in getting raw data from the New Tech Foundation regarding its schools' results, it's as opaque as the DoD.
I'm a bit confused by your claim that PBL is both good for AP level content AND for trivializing content.
I also taught at a New Tech school, and will next year too. I've taught AP physics project-based, and saw the same average on my students' scores (> 3 on average) taught with both traditional and project-based approaches. The difference? Students from the PBL version emerged with better presentation, collaboration skills, and with summer internships to boot. But it would be foolhardy for me to extrapolate from my experience that "Math and Science taught with PBL is an unbridled success!", just as it seems a bit, well, *ambitious* of you to claim that PBL is a dismal failure in math/science based upon your experience at one school.
But I've also observed many geometry, algebra, biology, chemistry, and physics 1 courses taught project based, with excellent results. Let me know if you want a list of schools.
Despite your rather broad generalizations, you point out something that I've seen too: full-blown PBL can be a challenge for teaching math. Because of that, many New Tech schools are using a more "problem-based" approach for math, where the problem is still front-loaded, and instruction still occurs as a result of student need...but they are shorter in scope, and get to math content immediately. The results are promising , and they point to an adaptation of PBL to meet the needs of all learners.
Utilizing PBL as the sole means of instruction in a math/science classroom is an excellent way of trivializing the course content, as you will be spending nearly half of your time going through the mechanics of a project and teaching ELA skills. This is what I saw being done in each and every New Tech school that I came across.
I did not make the claim that using PBL as the sole means of instruction would be good for an AP level course. Indeed, I think that would be a disaster, and I am skeptical of your AP Physics results. I said that once a student had ALREADY gone through a couple AP classes, THEN a PBL-based course would be great. It would essentially be an independent study lab course. I would certainly like it if you were to produce a list of schools (and their results) to demonstrate the method's utility.
Your kids' internships are independent of PBL, and could be arranged by any active teacher/school. I appreciate that your students developed greater presentation and collaboration skills in your AP class, but I would assert that they had done this by their sophomore level courses anyway, and that they (11th/12th graders) could probably have spent their time more effectively learning some new concept.
Your description of the modifications need to teach math only support my argument. Those schools are not using New Tech's "full-blown" PBL model. As I said, it doesn't work.
New Tech (Napa)- Alg1: 5/34/27/27/7 Geom: 5/11/45/30/10 Alg2: 0/7/18/39/35 Bio: 37/38/20/4/1 Chem: no chem class for 11th graders
Sacramento New Tech- Alg1: 1/3/18/49/29 Geom: 1/8/27/49/14 Alg2: 0/2/20/45/33 Bio: 3/10/46/19/22 Chem: 4/8/59/14/14
Da Vinci Magnet (Davis)- Alg1: 1/28/36/27/7 Geom: 9/31/27/26/7 Alg2: 5/16/34/23/21 Bio: 40/32/16/5/6 Chem: 10/29/37/11/14
None of these schools are problematic from a racial/SES perspective, and Da Vinci is a charter magnet school. Yet, Napa's and Sacramento's scores have been dismal for a decade and Da Vinci's are nothing special (in fact, pretty dismal for its student body composition). In addition, you can see that the subject that is the most conceptual (biology) has much higher scores than the other subjects. I'm sure that the other New Tech schools around the country have similar patterns.
When I was a New Tech teacher I used to bring this up all the time, and the result was always a "go away" stare. Well, I went away...as any student should if he/she wants to pursue math, science or engineering.