Why PBL, and Not Inquiry?

Why PBL, and not Inquiry?
As the week of learning our new curriculum came to an end. I kept asking myself, why are we focused on Project Based Learning (PBL), when Next Generation of Science Standards (NGSS) seemed to encourage scientific discourse and literacy. Needless to say I was very confused how an Invasive species project would lead students toward a greater understanding of the core idea of Interdependence. I was skeptical. I told myself, this is a Pilot year, I don’t have to perfect it; however, I just have to try it. My hypothesis at the beginning didn’t support PBL over inquiry.
Trial and error is learning. Trial and error is a process in science especially when we take the time to reflect and evaluate how the experiment worked/didn’t work and then determine how to improve it for the next time. As I generated my lessons from the lesson plans designed by other teachers in my district, I began to see evidence of lessons crafted to meet a specific purpose (Wiggins and McTighe, 2005). Lessons with purpose provide students with the “Why are we doing this?” a question that seems to be answered as the lesson progresses. With project based learning the key is to actively engage students throughout the lesson and to define “the why”.
For example, the lesson: How Human Disturbances affects ecosystems, engaged students to think about what they know about this topic using chain notes. Chain notes is a learning activity that can be done in small groups or in pairs. Chain notes challenge students to be thinking about the lesson from the moment they walk into the room. As students pull their background knowledge forward, they are getting the why of the lesson. The next portion of this lesson, had students actively reading about the 4 major impacts of human disturbances in an ecosystem. In the past, I would get push back, “ugh, yo, Mrs. Gable, do we really have to read? “ This didn’t happen in any of my 5 classes. Students were asked to read in small groups and to discuss each of the topics. As this lesson, continued, I had students form larger groups, 4-5 groups of 6 students. Increasing group size generally results in more students off-task, but with this lesson, I observed more student discourse than ever before, why? I believe the reason for more students on-task was because they defined the purpose of the lesson and because the appropriate “learning activities” were applied (Wiggins and Grant, 2005). In this lesson, cooperative learning provided students the opportunity to exchange ideas and to learn content from students within the group.
PBL is an effective way of allowing students to explore authentic learning experiences especially when students are building their understanding through experience and student-student discourse. PBL defines the purpose and engages the learner to explore uncertainties. The ingenuity of the Invasive species project and the lessons that build up to the management plan include the criteria outlined by Wiggins and McTighe (2005) in Understanding by Design. At this moment, my students are two weeks from completing this unit and with each lesson I teach I see more student-student discourse and more student engagement than ever before. This is evidence that leads me to revising my hypothesis. My revised hypothesis is PBL leads students towards inquiry especially when it is “thought provoking, engaging, relevant and is centered on big ideas” (Wiggins and Grant 2005).

Reference:
Wiggins, Grant; McTighe, Jay (2005-03-22). Understanding by Design, Expanded 2nd Edition. Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development. Kindle Edition.

Read more about Chain notes: http://blog.mrwaddell.net/archives/114 and http://www.celt.iastate.edu/teaching-resources/classroom-practice/teaching-techniques-strategies/check-student-learning/

Stay tuned – I will attempt to provide additional evidence to support my claim that PBL does lead to inquiry.

Jennifer L. Gable has been teaching Science to diverse learners for 12 years. She currently teaches at Gaithersburg High School, a Signature Academy School. Jennifer has a MAT with specialization in NBCT from National University and has a Masters of Science from University of Arkansas.