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By: Kendra McPheeters, English teacher
Crown Point High School
Crown Point, IN
@kmcpheets
When I left my job of 11 years in May of 2023 for a position at a new school, I knew my world was changing. The school year that followed pleasantly affirmed my choice to switch districts over and over again, with one exception: I was not teaching PBL. After a decade of PBL facilitation–three quarters of my teaching career–switching gears back to a traditional teaching model felt scary and strange. I was a student of PBL; I knew I wanted to teach PBL from the time I decided to become a teacher! Looking at shared calendars with fast pacing for English 10 Honors and American Literature felt daunting. As I embarked on The Year Without a PBL–complete with “I’m Mr. Heatmiser” stuck in my head as I realized that phrase sounded an awful lot like The Year Without a Santa Claus–I realized that PBL has so much within it that I could still use, even if my curriculum maps did not allow for full-blown PBL units. The takeaway for us all is that we can implement PBL concepts to improve class culture even when we are in the parts of the school year when we are not working within a PBL unit; for myself, my takeaway was that I do not want to teach completely outside of PBL.
In August 2023, with my curriculum maps and pacing guides in hand, I set forth with the goal of implementing as much of a PBL culture in my classroom as possible. We began by taking time to get to know each other and developing agreements together. To do this, we used the Forming Ground Rules protocol from the Center for Leadership and Educational Equity (CLEE). Protocols became a way for me to integrate a PBL mindset and culture with my students, even without participating in PBL units themselves. This past year, my new school implemented an expectation that all classes would build agreements with their students, which was exciting! I shared protocol ideas and pedagogy regarding agreements with my colleagues, many of whom appreciated that I had done this work before and could offer ideas and feedback.
Despite having a more traditional curricular framework, I intentionally built in tasks requiring collaboration to empower my students to develop that skill. Before embarking on any collaborative work, we participated in the Compass Points protocol to help give us a common language to express why we work the way we do. We also built group agreements prior to major collaborative tasks that added on to our class agreements. Additionally, before our first peer review, we used the Feedback Nightmares protocol to ensure that we had an understanding as a class of what our dos and don’ts were for giving and receiving feedback. We implemented warm and cool feedback when giving comments on work with our dos and don’ts in mind. We also used various protocols to help us in giving feedback. The Feedback Carousel protocol and Gallery Walks helped us glean feedback from numerous peers in a structured way. In Feedback Carousels, students gave categories of feedback to peers, while in Gallery Walks, students asked for specific feedback in writing and set up a space for peers to give that feedback using sticky notes. Almost all of these protocols were new for my students. Like with any students new to a concept, protocol, or structure, there were bumps in the road, but as we continued using the protocols together, we were able to fine tune our understanding of their purpose and their possibilities for our work together.
The other area in which I deviated from our shared calendar was in presentation opportunities. Without PBL, oftentimes presentations are nonexistent or are tacked on to the end of a unit without any structure or scaffolding. I wanted to make sure my students still benefited from oral communication education and received opportunities to practice their public speaking skills. After our first presentation, I realized just how much PBL does for students when it comes to oral communication skills; my former students at my previous school were already well-versed in presentations more often than not by the time they came to me as sophomores. Our goal at that point was fine-tuning presentation skills rather than delivering instruction on them for the first time. In my new school, I realized that much more instruction was necessary for students to be able to deliver polished, professional presentations. Often, their visuals were cluttered and animation-filled, and their physical and oral deliveries lacked confidence. I made it a goal of mine to scaffold speaking skills and provide time for students to speak formally in front of the class in a presentation with a visual at least once per unit. By the end of the school year we saw a vast improvement in students’ oral communication skills. My students also commented how they liked when we did more collaborative work and went through instructional workshops in different forms because it was a change of pace from how their classes usually functioned.
Perhaps our best moment was in preparation for our first semester final exams. While my students decided in May that they just didn’t have the bandwidth to undertake this exercise in the spring semester, they also readily admitted that how we prepared for our first semester final was meaningful and useful. I offered students a list of skills that we covered in class over the first semester. In groups, students selected a topic they felt confident they could teach to others and built a review of their choosing. Students built review slides with checks for understanding at the end, Blookets and Kahoot!s, and recorded mini-lessons with exit tickets. On our review day, students set up their stations with their review materials and a sign labeling which skill was covered, and we spent the period with students having the autonomy to go to whichever station(s) they needed, for as long as they needed to stay there. They told me that they loved being given total freedom in what to review and how much time to spend in a given review, and they appreciated that I trusted them enough to be able to decide which skills they had already mastered and which could use a little refresher. This exercise and my students’ feedback showed me that they would do well in and enjoy a PBL environment.
Now, as I have the opportunity to reflect on my craft before embarking on a new school year, I am excited to take the feedback from my students who got a taste of a PBL classroom through protocols, intentional collaboration, and student voice and choice and apply it to my teaching of AP Research next year, which will be run as a wall-to-wall PBL course. AP Research is a class in which students’ College Board submissions include a 5,000 word academic research paper based on primary research that they conduct as well as a twenty minute academic presentation with oral defense. Because these performance tasks are based on identifying and conducting research to close a real-world gap in a research field, this class lends itself readily to PBL. I am excited to begin this class with an Entry Event, help students find their own Community Partners to help them based on their individual research topics, build Benchmarks with them to guide them in their process, engage in Scaffolding opportunities to help them understand the research process and how it works differently in different disciplines, and empower students to develop rapport and offer substantive feedback in Critical Friends Groups to improve the work of the entire class. Our end products will be our papers and presentation visuals, and our publicly presented product will take place with our oral defense panel, which will include the community partners that students utilize as expert advisors.
I learned a good deal about myself pedagogically as I taught The Year Without a PBL. I learned that I can teach without full-blown PBL units, but that I felt like an important part of me was missing. By incorporating PBL ideology into my lessons; building culture in the same ways I would in a PBL classroom; and offering students opportunities to develop their own autonomy, creativity, and communication skills, I was able to bridge part of the gap between traditional teaching and PBL. As a facilitator who taught in a wall-to-wall PBL environment, this also helped me to see how facilitators who engage in a couple of meaningful PBL units each semester can still utilize PBL concepts year-round in order to maintain engagement and class culture. Finally, I learned just how much I love PBL, because when I found out I would be teaching AP Research as a singleton course, my first thought was how easily I could make it a wall-to-wall PBL class. After all, my own adolescence was shaped by PBL opportunities, and one of my goals from the moment I decided to be a teacher was to share that PBL love.
Kendra McPheeters is an English teacher at Crown Point High School in Crown Point, Indiana. She has facilitated using Project Based Learning since 2013 to sophomores through seniors ranging in levels from remediation to Advanced Placement courses. Before becoming a PBL facilitator, Kendra was a student of PBL in middle and high school, and the unforgettable experiences from this time are some of the reasons why she wanted to become a teacher in the first place. Kendra is also a facilitator and certification reviewer for Magnify Learning and loves seeing the amazing work being done across the country in PBL by teachers learning the process. Outside of education, Kendra is mom to an amazing little boy, bonus mom to four fantastic kids, wife to her best friend and former co-teacher, and coach to a very cool group of teenage fencers who let her share her love of the sport she’s participated in since 2006. You can follow Kendra on Twitter (X) @kmcpheets.
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