Week 5 - Project Based Learning and Webquests

This week we read about using projects as a teaching/learning method rather than the traditional discrete, skill-based lessons. This is how we learned to teach in my master's program, so this idea is not new to me. Unfortunately, this method is not used enough in my opinion, especially in the realm of adult education. Perhaps this will change as more children use PBL at school. I went on at some length about this in a nicenet post, so I'll try to say something new here on my blog.

Susan Gaer's article "Less Teaching and More Learning" was particularly interesting to me because she was working with adult immigrants, just like I do. She mentioned that working on a project helped learners build a sense of community and I appreciated that because people who enter a new country or new culture often feel isolated. I also noticed that when her students were preparing to share their stories with the 8th graders, they modified their storytelling style. They added visuals to engage the audience. This is an example of the meaningful communication that PBL helps to create. The ESL students really wanted to communicate with their audience, so they used their cultural stories and told them in the cultural style of their audience. This kind of adaptation is HOT skills in practice.

Two other points from her article were relevant to my situation. She states that the project helped her students be in control, as they had been in their native countries. It's important when teaching adults to remember that they are in fact, adults. We need to access the skills they have and help them use them in an English-speaking environment. PBL is well-suited to this and the added technology element can make it easier for the teacher to find and build materials and more interesting for students to engage with those materials. Also, she states that projects that are 4 to 6 weeks long are best. This can be achieved with some of my classes, although not all.

I really like the idea of webquests, which I hadn't heard about before. I'm trying to develop one and I find the hints in A Road Map for Designing Webquests and Internet Expeditions to be very helpful. It is a bit daunting though because the material has to fit in with the existing curriculum, engage the learners, be understandable and be manageable. I think I'll get better at it with more practice.

The sites with links to good examples of webquests I found at Webquest Design Patterns and
the interview with Bernie Dodge. (Beware of pop-ups if you click on this site.)

It's too late in the summer semester for me to introduce PBL into the class and I'm not yet confident about my ability to build a reasonable webquest to use this learning method in class. My plan is to put webquests in the fall and winter semesters as supplemental options for the students to try. This way I can get some student feedback and then decide if I should introduce it into the syllabus in the spring.

Now I have to get back to the traditional world of teaching this weekend and mark essays!

Janet