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What Does Appropriate Voice & Choice Look Like?
Originally published on the BIE PBL Blog: http://www.bie.org/blog/what_does_appropriate_voice_choice_look_like
We all know that excellent projects position students to drive the learning. Through the deliberate accounting of student passions and interests, the teacher is able to modify aspects of a project that allows individual students to satisfy expectations in different ways. Teachers are also stakeholders in this process. Through PBL design, teachers weave an interdisciplinary tapestry of standards. By way of this process, teachers often select an overarching theme, public issue, or inquiry path. In addition to student input, the charisma, interest, or expertise of the teacher is often an important factor in the success of a project. Between the tension of standards alignment and student voice and choice lies the question, “What does appropriate voice and choice look like?”
A 7th Grade ELA Project
When our school’s 7th-grade English language arts and social studies teacher Karen Haddas embarked on her project TED Talks: #socialstructures, she had taken careful inventory through formative assessment, and was excited to walk the line between standards-driven instruction, and student voice and choice. In the preceding project, Wonder Woman, students explored the themes embedded in the driving question: “Why do the wonder women, in our biography study, challenge societal structures and break out of expected gender norms when other women didn’t? Are they rebels or heroes?” Based on this foundational understanding, students are compelled to apply this discernment to a choice of subgroups within a society. This is one way that student voice and choice is a key feature of the project.
Throughout most of the project, Ms. Haddas was feeling excited, but that changed towards the end. When she introduced the rubric for the summative performance assessment, something changed in the students’ outlook. It wasn’t the narrative content of the writing piece that caused feelings of unrest. It wasn’t the abstract application of the synthesis of complex literary themes. Oddly enough, it was the expectations outlined in how the work would be produced.
Major Product: Secret Compartment Assignment
The idea of a secret compartment is simple enough, and rather brilliant. Ms. Haddas drew her inspiration from the work of educator Elaine Wang from the article, Art as Meaning-Making in a Secondary School English Classroom: A “Secret Compartment” Book Project on Toni Morrison’s Beloved. The concept being that in its construction there would be a hidden message, or reveal that would encapsulate the deeper, abstract thoughts of the student in response to their biography study. Within this constructive framework, students are given an avenue for their expression. The expectations were as outlined:
| Each page contains one of the types of Information listed below with cited pages from text. Illustrated and narrated example of… …how women break out of gender norms and why they did. …how a certain action could be considered the act of a rebel. …how a certain action could be considered the act of a hero. …how a certain action could be considered the act of a rebel and a hero. | Four Panel Secret Compartment: – Illustrate on two panels if the woman has the heart of a rebel or a hero or both. – Two panels have written claim with explanation of thinking. | Back Cover: – Illustration or design connected to the book Final Draft Requirements: – Colored neatly – Written neatly – No spelling errors – Book correctly and neatly constructed |
Through discussion and careful solicitation of student feedback, Ms. Haddas realized that this structure was intimidating for some students. They either did not have confidence in their own artistic skills, or felt strongly about expressing their understanding in different ways. Ms. Haddas revised her product requirements thusly…
| Each page contains one of the types of Information listed below with cited pages from text. Show and explain… …how women break out of gender norms and why they did. …how a certain action could be considered the act of a rebel. …how a certain action could be considered the act of a hero. …how a certain action could be considered the act of a rebel and a hero. | Shows and explains why you think the character has the heart of a rebel or a hero or both. – Two panels have written claim with explanation of thinking. | Final Draft Requirements: – Colored neatly – Written neatly – No spelling errors – Neatly constructed |
More Options Help Engage Students
While many students elected to embark on the original secret compartment concept, they were given the opportunity to propose their own idea as long as it met the revised requirements. Some examples include computer programs, iMovie projects, and other media expressions that break out of the common Google Slide medium.
Renewed enthusiasm returned to the classroom dynamic, and students were refreshed to be able to express themselves using complex fluencies they have acquired as students at a STEAM school. As developers of project-based curriculum, we ask students to engage in inquiry and self-reflection as a matter of course. If we hope to instill these values in our student body, it is important that we practice and model these skills as well. It can be tricky to espouse this discipline while maintaining a fair expectation of academic excellence. Through careful curation and appropriate formative assessment of all aspects of a project, student voice and choice can help all stakeholders to embark on a bolder vision of project design. Inevitably, we can all feel excited about our work.
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Project Based Learning & Culturally Responsive Teaching
There is much discussion lately among teaching communities about the concept of Culturally Responsive Teaching. There have been many equity and diversity models in education over the years, so it is important to distinguish the differences between them to better understand CRT. According to the work of Zaretta Hammond, self proclaimed “former writing teacher turned equity freedom fighter,” CRT can be distinguished from other models in the following ways:
| Multicultural Education | Social Justice Education | Culturally Responsive Teaching |
| Focuses on celebrating diversity. | Focuses on exposing the social political context that students experience. | Focuses on improving the learning capacity of diverse students who have been marginalized educationally. |
| Centers around creating positive social interactions across difference. | Centers around raising students’ consciousness about inequity in everyday social, environmental, economic, and political aspects of life. | Centers around the affective & cognitive aspects of teaching and learning. |
| Concerns itself with exposing privileged students to diverse literature, multiple perspectives, and inclusion in the curriculum as well as help students of color see themselves reflected. | Concerns itself with creating lenses to recognize and interrupt inequitable patterns and practices in society. | Concerns itself with building resilience and academic mindset by pushing back on dominant narratives about people of color. |
While there is no singular approach to inclusive teaching, it is worth noting that different approaches favor different outcomes. The goal with Multicultural Education could be stated as striving toward social harmony. The goal with Social Justice Education could be stated as engendering and cultivating critical consciousness. The goal with Culturally Responsive Teaching, however, places a premium on all students actuated as independent learners.
The value that this approach brings to the conversation of equity and inclusion should not be understated. Harmony and consciousness are important, but achievement is also a favorable outcome. It is favorable because it equips the learner with the skills needed to create the life that they choose. But CRT is not a checklist. Teachers do this work responsively. They are practitioners and practitioners are positioned to evaluate the impact of their practice as it pertains to achievement outcomes. After all, the case can be made for most instructional practices that they have a positive impact on achievement. Only when approaches are evaluated in comparison with each other can they be understood. This idea has been developed through the research of John Hattie over decades. The text Visible Learning helps practioners evaluate strategies in their own practice, given that Visible Learning “occurs when teachers see learning through the eyes of students and help them become their own teachers.” As PBL teachers, we ask ourselves the question, “How does PBL help students to become their own teachers?”
For a long time, project based learning has been ill-defined and inconsistently administered. The research from Hattie reflects this. PBL in and of itself is not a high-leverage practice. PBL is valuable because it is an excellent vehicle for high-leverage instruction. Unfortunately, there is not enough data yet to evaluate the effect of Gold Standard PBL as dictated by Buck Institute, but we can look at the effect of high-leverage practices if we unpack them within the PBL model. Through these high-leverage practices, practitioners move the locus of learning to the student-centered learning environment. This is a departure from what is often seen as the traditional approach – learning coming from the teacher or text books. Through this reorganization, and in concert with Multicultural and Social Justice Education, the learner is positioned to construct their own narrative.
Hattie describes strategies that are worth the investment of finite instructional time as being greater than or equal to an effect size of .4. He calls this the hinge point. One strategy identified through this work is classified as “strategy to integrate with prior knowledge.” It has an effect size of .94. You can see this programmatically applied in high quality PBL as the “need to know” protocol. Not only does this process account for the diverse perspectives of learners, positioning them to begin the learning path by activating prior knowledge, it sets the stage for authentic classroom discussions. This has an effect size of .82. By returning to the questions laid out by students, and ideally generating new ones along the way, the need to know protocol eschews some of the common pitfalls of traditional discussion structures such as question taxonomies – essentially questions generated by teachers. It also has a tendency to distribute the power dynamics of the discussion because the locus has been moved from the teacher to the students.
Evaluation and reflection is yet another effective strategy that is well-articulated within the BIE’s Gold Standard PBL framework. It carries an effect size of .72. Evaluation and reflection is characterized in many different ways in PBL. The need to know process itself creates a framework for students to self-evaluate their path along a challenging question. We also use protocols embedded in the design thinking framework to ensure that this feedback comes early and often.
Strategies are tools, and educators employ these tools in sophisticated ways to achieve optimal outcomes. John Dewey writes in School and Society, “What the best and wisest parent wants for [their] child, that must we want for all the children of the community. Anything less is unlovely, and left unchecked, destroys our democracy.” As culturally responsive teachers, we endure in this mission, and respond to our students through project-based learning.