Everyday Problem-Based Learning

Quick Projects to Build Problem-Solving Fluency

Brian Pete, Robin Fogarty

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781416624721
• eBook ISBN: 9781416624752
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Teaching Methods

Educators know that problem-based learning answers that perennial student question: "When will I ever use this in real life?" Faced with a meaty problem to solve, students finally "get" why they need to learn the content and are energized to do so.

But here's the exciting part: problem-based learning doesn't require weeks of study or an end-of-year project. In this book, Brian Pete and Robin Fogarty show how you can use problem-based learning as a daily approach to helping students learn authentic and relevant content and skills. They explain how to engage students in each of the seven steps in the problem-based learning model, so students learn how to develop good questions, launch their inquiry, gather information, organize their information, create evidence, present their findings, and assess their learning. Using practical examples, they also describe how to help students master these seven important thinking skills: develop, analyze, reason, understand, solve, apply, and evaluate.

To put all this in context, the authors offer seven "PBL in a Nutshell" lessons that can easily be incorporated in a single classroom period. Depth of thinking and ease of implementation--this is problem-based learning at its best.

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Chapter 1

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Develop Questions

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Questions get us up in the morning, answers allow us to sleep.

The human brain is inherently curious and always in search of answers to the questions swimming around in the mind. As humans experience life, from birth until death, they process incredible amounts of information, trying to find a pattern, find relevance, find the right place to store this new information. The challenge for humans is deciding whether this new information answers a simple question (What does this taste like? Have I been here before? Who does this person remind me of?) that makes it easier to slot the answer into existing schema. Or, if the question may be more complex, generating further questions and inciting more curiosity (Why does this place remind me of home? What makes me truly happy? How can I measure the value of a life?).

In school, students are most likely to face that first breed of questions—those that are simple, with definitive, measurable answers that are easy to assess and anchor to existing or prior knowledge and to formed patterns in their brains. In inquiry-based learning, therefore, the first and biggest hurdle is challenging students to ask lots of questions until they find one question that can serve as the umbrella question for the lesson. These are questions that tease them into wanting an answer, rather than simply completing the assignment by plugging in some ready-made response. There's something inherent in creative, puzzling questions that satisfies an innate need to make meaning of the world.

Understandably, teachers may not always choose to engage students in a creative brainstorming session every time they need an essential question to spark their inquiry-based instruction. Sometimes teachers will simply develop the questions themselves, reuse one they've used before, or select an essential question included in the curriculum resources they have on hand. However the question is derived, it becomes the question to reference throughout the inquiry lesson.

However, it remains a constant truth that the ability to generate essential questions is an urgently needed skill for 21st century citizens. Developing these universal, enduring questions is seminal to the inquiry process. Ultimately, it's about instilling question asking, question raising, and question posing as a habit of mind (Costa & Kallick, 2009). Thus, students are best served by making the teaching and learning process one of authentic inquiry at each and every opportunity. And that begins by fostering student questions whenever possible so that they become more familiar with the process called inquiring.

Developing an essential question that students will try to answer hooks students and keeps them engaged throughout the process. After all, the brain is naturally engaged by challenge. Why not take advantage of this inherent curiosity and eagerness to delve into the situation to find the answers?

This chapter goes deeper into the idea of essential questions. It defines essential questions as compared with academic questions and promotes the creative process. Moving both teachers and students toward compelling, universal questions, with the breadth to reach into many sectors of the disciplines and the depth to dig into the intricacies implied, is more likely to move students into conceptual learning rather than topical and superficial learning. Here are a few quick examples of moving toward essential or enduring questions as we move from the topic to the concept: Primary School: How Do We Use Apples? vs. How Does Nature Nurture Us; Elementary School: How Can We Improve the Environment? vs. Does the Environment Change or Do We Change the Environment?; Middle School: What Is Peer Pressure? vs. How Do We Influence Others?; High School: What Can We Learn from Wars? vs. Does History Repeat Itself? Notice how academic topics are limited, while essential questions are universal in scope and schema.

With the Whole Game in Mind

Students may wonder why their teachers are expending so much energy trying to teach them how to create essential questions, especially if they don't understand how those questions fit into the context of Perkins's "whole game" concept. Because inquiry-based instruction is designed to prepare students for "the test of life, not just for the test," developing the creative and cognitive skills to generate a rich, relevant essential question is the cornerstone of the whole game. In fact, it often becomes the primary objective because it guides every "decision point" throughout the inquiry process.

This one component of the inquiry-based lesson—developing a memorable, essential question—becomes more relevant because it connects the skills of question generation to the idea of problem solving. Students soon realize that the questions serve as guiding principles, as beacons of light that they need to search out and follow as they research pertinent facts on the way to developing the final findings and the final product or presentation.

With Deliberate Practice in Mind

In his book, Coyle (2009) noted how important deliberate practice is to master a skill. It's also the perfect platform for students to continually use their creative skills to generate, modify, and perfect essential questions as they invest themselves in inquiry learning experiences. This is just the kind of skill that can be practiced over and over until it becomes second nature for students to question boldly. The more times students ask high-quality questions, the more fluent they become in generating these rich, robust questions that can drive an entire lesson or unit.

What Makes a Question Essential?

One way to define an essential question is by comparing it with an academic or closed question. Academic questions have a definitive, measurable answer that is correct or most reasonable. Interestingly, and perhaps, unfortunately, they're also the most common kind of question that students are asked to answer in many classrooms (Figure 1.1).

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Figure 1.1. Essential—or Not?

As we search for deeper understanding of what essential means in terms of a question, let's look at the three questions below. Only one is an essential question:

• What makes a question essential?
• Why is it integral to the inquiry-based instruction?
• Do all questions have answers?

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Although this dichotomy of questions is referenced in numerous ways—as open or closed, messy or clean, divergent or convergent, even fat or skinny—the terms essential questions and academic questions prevail in this text (Figure 1.2).

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Figure 1.2. Essential vs. Academic Questions

Essential — Academic

Does war create peace? — Why did the United States go to war in Vietnam?

What makes art, art? — How is surrealism different from impressionism?

Does hard work always pay off? — What are some good homework habits?

Is scientific theory fact or fiction? — Who completed the experiment first?

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In Essential Questions: Opening Doors to Student Understanding, McTighe and Wiggins (2013) describe essential questions in this way:

Essential questions are questions that are not answerable with finality in a single lesson or a brief sentence—and that's the point. Their aim is to stimulate thought, to provoke inquiry, and to spark more questions, including thoughtful student questions, not just pat answers. They are provocative and generative. By tackling such questions, learners are engaged in uncovering the depth and richness of a topic that might otherwise be obscured by simply covering it. (p. 3)

According to McTighe and Wiggins, a good essential question

1. Is open-ended; that is, it typically will not have a single, final, and correct answer.
2. Is thought-provoking and intellectually engaging, often sparking discussion and debate.
3. Calls for higher-order thinking, such as analysis, inference, evaluation, and prediction. It cannot be effectively answered by recall alone.
4. Points toward important, transferable ideas within (and sometimes across) disciplines.
5. Raises additional questions and sparks further inquiry.
6. Requires support and justification, not just an answer.
7. Recurs over time; that is, the question can and should be revisited again and again. (p. 3)

Every day, each one of us is faced with questions. Some are essential (open-ended, thought-provoking, unanswerable), whereas others are academic (knowledge-based, easily measurable). Because the goal of inquiry-based instruction is teaching life skills that go beyond the subject area, let's consider some of the questions we run into every day. Take something as unassuming as popular song titles: Which ones below pose essential questions? Which ones do not?

• "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?" (The Shirelles)
• "How Do I Stop Myself from Being Just a Number?" (John Mayer)
• "Should I Stay or Should I Go?" (The Clash)
• "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" (Pete Seeger)
• "How Do I Live Without You?" (LeAnn Rimes)
• "Why Can't We Be Friends?" (War)

Why Are Essential Questions Integral to Inquiry-Based Instruction?

Inquiry-based instruction works best when the essential question driving the search for knowledge is the kind of compelling, multifaceted question that keeps you up at night. As Coyle (2009) pointed out in his discussion of the importance of ignition, a great essential question ignites in students a burning desire to do more than learn what's required to complete the test. It ignites their desire to know, to investigate, and to validate their thinking. Perkins (2009) extends the thought. He writes, "If much of what we taught highlighted understandings of a wide scope, with enlightenment, empowerment, and responsibility in the foreground, there is every reason to think that youngsters would retain more, understand more, and use more of what they learned" (p. 61).

Essential questions provide the foundation for the whole search for knowledge because they cause students to ask more questions. They naturally fit into an integrated model of instruction because they're larger than the subject being taught and, consequently, reach easily into other content areas and, ultimately, into real life. They're questions worth revisiting, ones that seek deeper answers again and again. They spark discussions that require us to listen closely, to think more deeply; they're the kind of questions we end up carrying around in our heads for days, like a song that keeps running through your mind.

Inquiry-based instruction, when applied with fidelity and anchored with a compelling essential question, will bring more students into the learning process. For example, when challenged with academic questions, high-achieving students usually know the "right" answers. But what about students who struggle? What about those who don't know the right answers? Essential questions offer far more opportunity to think and reason. Because they don't have a right or wrong answer, such questions can foster a sense of confidence as students—whether they're struggling, disengaged, or just shy—increasingly participate in the learning. This shift in students' perception of their ability and in their willingness to take part in the interactions will, over time, increase both motivation and engagement.

The Role of Creativity in Inquiry Learning

Creating a climate that fosters creativity supports student learning in the inquiry-based instruction process. When students formulate an essential question, think flexibly to address a problem from unique points of view, and then disseminate their research and repurpose it into an innovative final product that they present in striking ways, this calls for creativity on steroids. Fortunately, creative thinking is a primary by-product of inquiry-based instruction—or is it the engine that drives the process? Either way, it requires time and effort to genuinely nurture creative student work with inquiry learning. They begin thinking out of the box, and we're not always sure how to respond.

Creativity, now in high demand by employers throughout the world, is rooted in the skill of divergent thinking. Its opposite—convergent thinking—is what is typically required in traditional classrooms. Students are usually given a question, a problem, or pieces of information with the expectation that they will arrive at a single, measurable...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Develop Questions
• Chapter 2. Launch Scenario
• Chapter 3. Gather Information
• Chapter 4. Organize Information
• Chapter 5. Create Evidence
• Chapter 6. Present Findings
• Chapter 7. Assess Learning
• Afterword
• References
• Study Guide
• Related ASCD Resources
• About the Authors
• Copyright