Papamoa College (TLIF 4-013) - Personal projects as a primary mode of learning in the senior school Publications
Publication Details
Project Reference: Papamoa College (TLIF 4-013) - Project-based learning is an exciting way of engaging students in learning around challenges that feel real to them. It enables students to make connection to the ‘real world’. Done well, it promotes the development of the ‘soft’ skills and capabilities that are necessary for an adaptive and lifelong learner.
Author(s): (Inquiry Team) led by Dave Ballard
Date Published: July 2020
Overview
Inquiry learning was already a significant part of the curriculum in the middle school at Papamoa College but in the senior school, the curriculum became more traditional, assessment driven, and teacher led. Staff had long believed that it should be more personalised and do a better job of promoting student agency. Connecting project-based learning to the design thinking framework developed at Stanford University and the pedagogical framework presented by the OECD suggested a way forward.
We get to colour outside the lines of NCEA. We teach ourselves how to improve at things we already love and care about deeply. Not many people in mainstream can say that about the classes that they are in.
Future Focus student
Teachers in the senior secondary school face a very real tension between managing the demands of external assessment and the imperative to prepare students for a world in which success requires a broad range of capabilities that are often not captured in NCEA assessments. The Future Focus Team at Papamoa College was successful in raising student engagement but had more mixed success in terms of NCEA achievement. Students in Year 11 tended to achieve fewer credits, but of a higher standard. At Year 12, both quantity and quality seemed to improve. While the growth in students’ capabilities was apparent, it proved difficult to monitor. Unfortunately, it also proved more difficult to ‘sell’ the concept to a new cohort of parents and students in 2020.
Overall, the project was a success, but it needed stronger structures, a different approach to monitoring capability development, and better marketing. With these issues remedied, the school plans to relaunch the programme in 2021.
The inquiry story
This inquiry grew out of a ‘Future Focus’ pilot programme involving a group of year 11 students in 2018. The following year, it was extended to include a new cohort of year 11 students, as well as a group of year 12 students who had chosen to continue. Many members of the inquiry team are school leaders, reflecting the commitment and interest of all staff.
What was the focus?
Teachers and school leaders at Papamoa College were interested in what it takes to develop and implement a deeply personalised, student-led curriculum and how such a curriculum might impact on students. Inquiry learning was already integrated into the middle school curriculum, where the school had also explored cross-curricular learning within a range of learning contexts. However, the transition to year 11 marked a shift to a curriculum that was driven, not by students, but by the assessment demands of NCEA. Pedagogy tended to be teacher-led and outmoded, so a significant group of senior students were not engaged in learning and not achieving to their potential. Staff, students, and parents at Papamoa College lobbied for the focus on inquiry learning to continue into the senior school.
Project-based learning appealed as a way of offering students the opportunity to explore individualised learning contexts, connected to the wider community, that would foster meaningful learning outcomes, including the key competencies and the essential employability skills[1] identified by the Ministry of Education’s Pathways Group. Instead of being driven by assessment, opportunities for assessment would arise naturally out of the student-led learning.
As a new school, Papamoa College has the flexible learning spaces that help make problem-based learning possible. However, if the school was going to broaden its curriculum to include a greater focus on such skills, then part of the challenge was also going to be to investigate how to monitor their improvement, as well as the impact on NCEA achievement.
Building on the success of the pilot programme run in 2018, the Future Focus team investigated the following questions as they expanded the programme in 2019:
- If a diverse range of Year 11 students use personal projects as their primary mode of learning, will it have an impact on improving student engagement and achievement?
- What is the evidence that project-based learning improves teaching and leadership practices, and the perceptions of those within and connected to the school?
- How can the effect of changing the learning environment in the senior school from traditional, to project based, be effectively measured?
What did the teachers try?
Students were expected to select a context for learning that was meaningful to them and to produce an outcome that was authentic in terms of originality and its usefulness to the community. Projects were expected to test students’ resilience and resourcefulness and be structured to demand sufficient academic rigor to withstand peer review. While undertaking a study of contexts that matter to them, students would be intentionally taught and naturally practise a wide range of skills and competencies that are less available in traditional learning structures. For example, students might learn how to negotiate, resolve conflict, find novel solutions, run meetings, and manage other people.
A design thinking process (Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford, 2020) provided the framework for the project-based learning process:
- empathise: develop a deep understanding of the challenge
- define: clearly articulate the problem you want to solve
- ideate: brainstorm potential solutions; select and develop your solution
- prototype: design a prototype (or series of prototypes) to test all or part of your solution
- test: engage in a continuous short-cycle innovation process to continually improve your design.
Year 11 students participating in the Future Focus programme stayed in one classroom throughout the year. They had a mentor who was permanently with them, while six subject teachers supported their work on their projects. Five blocks of learning per two-week cycle were assigned to mentoring, resolving knowledge gaps, and supporting students towards achieving NCEA credits. Year 11 students could also opt for one additional subject outside of the Future Focus class.
Due to University Entrance requirements, Year 12 students took three additional subjects outside the Future Focus programme. This significantly reduced their time in the Future Focus room and their ability to work together.
Teachers were expected to transition from teaching ‘to the Standard’ using teacher-directed contexts, to innovating around the four elements of the pedagogical core described in the Handbook for Innovative learning Environments (OECD, 2017, p. 42):
- Learners: who?
- Educators: with whom?
- Content: what?
- Resources: with what?
It was anticipated that teachers would rethink elements of their pedagogy and take on a role based not on classroom management and control but instead on co-construction and support for students to engage in their own personal learning journeys.
What happened as a result of this innovation?
The first inquiry question was: If a diverse range of Year 11 students use personal projects as their primary mode of learning, will it have an impact on improving student engagement and achievement?
Surveys and interviews showed a significant improvement in student engagement. The impact in terms of achievement was more mixed. Year 11 students in the Future Focus Programme did not achieve as many Level 1 NCEA credits as their peers. However, they were more likely to gain a Merit or Excellence endorsement and to achieve Level 2 standards during Year 11. This is consistent with the rationale that students were able to be immersed in their project and to gain a deeper understanding of their chosen area of interest. Year 12 students did even better. While only studying three traditional subjects, they still, on average, outperformed the mainstream students in terms of Level 2 pass rates and Excellence endorsements.
Achievement could also be measured by the ongoing spontaneous learning demonstrated by a number of these students. Examples include a group of students instigating, planning, and producing a full theatrical production without any prompting by staff. Another student picked up her project from the previous year and continued with implementation of new aspects, even in the absence of the Future Focus class. Another, having achieved Level 3 NCEA in Year 12, chose to enrol at university at the end of Year 12 and study in the same realm as his Future Focus project. This is an exciting instance of a student developing as a “lifelong learner”.
Finding NCEA standards that aligned with the students’ goals for their projects proved more difficult than anticipated. Some students resisted the idea of doing the work needed to fit their project to the demands of the assessment.
The second inquiry question was: What is the evidence that project-based learning improves teaching and leadership practices, and the perceptions of those within and connected to the school?
Many staff reported significant shifts in their teaching practice and philosophy. While it was initially quite difficult, staff learned to let go of control and place greater faith in students’ ability to make learning decisions. They felt they had become more competent at supporting personalised and purposeful learning and had come to a deeper realisation of the value of different types of achievement for diverse students. Parents observed that their children were more confident, independent, and seemed engaged in lifelong learning.
The third inquiry question was: How can the effect of changing the learning environment in the senior school from traditional, to project based, be effectively measured?
A survey of student self-perceptions of their employability skills proved not to be valid, with students rating their skills somewhat higher than their teachers did. In addition, too few parents responded to enable triangulation. This is an area of ongoing focus.
Some parents, students, and staff reported that the structures and processes used in the programme lacked sufficient robustness to create a sense of accountability and urgency in students. This lack of structure also resulted in lost opportunities for assessing student performance by capturing and credentialing evidence as it was generated. As a result of this, the Future Focus Team has developed a Project Template to guide students through the phases of their inquiry, based on the design thinking process. Each phase requires sign-off before students can progress to the next.
The Future Focus team’s inquiries into the small number of applications for 2020 identified ways to increase its appeal to students and parents. A review of resourcing and professional development in the middle school aims to ensure students’ experience of inquiry learning is truly authentic and engaging.
What did they learn?
Through professional development in design thinking, teachers realised that collaboration is key to success in developing projects and testing innovative ideas. For the next iteration of project-based learning, teachers are investigating incorporating more groupwork into the design thinking process, mirroring the team-based approach to problem-solving and research that is common in business and academic research. Students will be explicitly taught the skills this requires.
The Future Focus team offers the following five recommendations for other schools who considering the introduction of project-based learning:
- Overall, project-based learning can work and, if it does work as intended, it is the “ultimate” in giving students real choice in their learning.
- The selection of students is important – a full project-based learning programme is not appropriate for all students. Students who are likely to succeed are those with the ability to self-manage. Additionally, if a student is unable to articulate (with support) an outline for a project at the outset or cannot suggest a question that interests or motivates them, it seems likely that they will struggle further down the track. Experience suggests that if staff suggest ideas or projects for students, engagement and effort may not be sustained.
- If students struggle with sustaining the high level of self-management, engagement, and motivation necessary to undertake and complete a long-term, independent investigation, teachers should investigate structured project-based learning with a shorter timeframe and/or small-group or collaborative investigations. However, there are issues to be thought through with a collaborative approach, such as how to ensure all group members have an identified and useful role and how to select a project that all members feel invested in.
- Students who conduct investigations on their own might not gain groupwork or collaborative experience. A possible solution is to incorporate group input collaboration at certain stages of the project (for example, seeking ideas from others at the project design phase and seeking feedback at key points).
- Strong programme structures and dedicated teacher support are vital for programme success. Students need support to frame their project questions and refine the project to arrive at a workable design. They need targeted support during each step towards project completion. Tools such as the new Project Template could help teachers and students to achieve this.
Inquiry team
Dave Ballard was the project lead. The rest of the team comprised Andrew Tilby, Sarah Cowie, Pip Leslie, Nick Leask, Phil Hewes, Mat Benes, Claire Mulcahy, Annie McCreary, Helen McDuff, Ken Kilkenny, Mike Wright and Kathrene Webb.
The project had expert support from Professor Bronwen Cowie and Suzanne Trask from the Wilf Malcolm Institute of Educational Research at the University of Waikato.
Visits to Albany Senior School and Rototuna High School were also invaluable.
For further information
If you would like to learn more about this project, please contact the project leader Dave Ballard at 272829333 at dballard@papamoacollege.school.nz
Reference list
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Leadbeater, C. (2006). The future of public services: Personalising learning. In Personalising Education (pp. 101-114). Paris: OECD. Retrieved from https://www.oecd.org/site/schoolingfortomorrowknowledgebase/themes/demand/41176645.pdf
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OECD (2017). The OECD handbook for innovative learning environments. OECD Publishing, Paris, France.
Pintrich, P. R., Smith, D. A. F., García, T., & McKeachie, W. J. (1991). A manual for the use of the motivated strategies questionnaire (MSLQ). Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan.
Rototuna High School Curriculum: https://www.rhs.school.nz/curriculum-1
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Footnote
- These are teamwork, communication skills, resilience, positive attitude, self-management and willingness to learn.
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