Week 5 - Project-based Learning (PBL), assessment, rubrics

This week we were supposed to read an interesting article by Susan Gaer "Less Teaching, More Learning"  and best practises about how to implement PBL into our teaching. The projects described are not exactly useful in non-English speaking countries, but might be used as an idea what to do and how to do it.

A project is a "swear" word  among many teachers and parents in Slovakia. From my personal observation, teachers in our country have been forced to implement PBL into their teaching without proper knowledge, training or support. In many cases it has ended up as follows:

Case #1  primary school, age group 8-12, the topic and the outcome (usually poster with photos or pictures) is set without any guidelines what to follow, pupils "run wild" with the topic, parents are involved  - usually parents do the project, pupils read it

Case #2 primary school, age group 12-15, the topic and the outcome ( usually IT-based, MS PowerPoint most favourable), no guidelines, just the topic. Pupils go to wikipedia and copy and paste anything concerning the topic, then they read it in front of the class. MS PP is done as a "book" - everything is written there, pupils read it from the screen or directly from the display of OHP. No sources are provided - pupils are taught to plagiarise without any consequencies, they are even praised for the "copy and paste" job.

Case #3 secondary school, only enthusiastic teachers dare to ask students to do any projects :-)

On the other hand, there are many international and intercultural projects running in Europe that are founded by the European Union to unite member countries, to overcome predjudices, to become tolerant towards differences and odds and to keep nation's cultural diversity.

The one EU project, I was involved in in my previous school, was Electronic Curriculum - New Ways of Teaching and Speaking Foreign Languages. We enjoyed working on this project, even though the tool eJournal we used seemed too difficult for teachers to learn that it caused some delays and not exactly the appropriate use of the tool. It was much easier to make an MS PowerPoint presentation and upload it there than to "write an article" so most materials and projects must be downloaded if you want to see them. 

http://ejournal.eduprojects.net/linz2/index.php?output=FrontPage() 

I am amazed that the link functions :-) I have just checked if we used any kind of rubrics but realised that the article is not published. I even remember the password so I have logged in and found out that some websites that have been recommended to us in this course, we used 8 years ago and there are also some more. 

What we struggled with was a clear assessment of the project work. If we had had some knowledge of rubrics then, it would have been much easier. Using the rubric tool at http://rubistar.4teachers.org/ enables us to start and improve our assessment and implement an alternative assessment involving students as well. 

I have tried to create a general rubric for an oral examination of presenting certain topic (talk about....) and I am not sure if I succeeded. I need some training and perhaps a tutor. It is much simplier when I do it in my head, announce it to students and evaluate their performance. I always highlight a variety of grammar structures, the use of new recently acquired grammar structures and vocabulary, also the wide use of vocabulary and linking devices at an appropriate level (CEFR) in advance. Even though some students talk a lot, they tend to stick to their "safe" structures and vocabulary since they can express everything they want. This is a common problem that after reaching the certain level of understanding in L2 and basic communication, students are not willing to improve more because they are satisfied with what they know and do not understand our persistence to force them. Although we try to introduce something new to motivate them, they are usually so indifferent or they see "so much" effort behind it.

As the other tool we have been exposed to is WebQuest. I need a little time to explore what it offers, however, I am contemplating now what I may prepare for my conversation lessons next school year to integrate it and make students do their assignments. To be honest, even though I have been using LMS Moodle with all possible sources for  them to be prepared for our lessons, I failed this year. The students are not mature enough to become autonomous learners and I did not find the right tool to encourage them to understand, to observe, to think critically,  to analyse, to create their own opinions and views and express them. So they came to lessons unprepared, with no knowledge of the world around them, no opinions, no vocabulary, awful grammar. They expected me to "explain" the topic to them, perhaps provide them with some handouts to memorise and parrot the next lesson. They are not used to thinking!