Numeracy and Mathematics Guest Blogs
This week, Gillian Mathewson from Alford Academy discusses Project Based Learning and what it could offer to learning and teaching in numeracy and mathematics.
Project Based Learning
Gillian Mathewson
Alford Academy, Aberdeenshire
Twitter: @gmathewson1
February 2021
As an adult there are generally 3 circumstances under which you learn something new:
1. You need to. Think about the massive learning curve many of us went on to be able to move teaching online. We had no choice, it had to be done. It was difficult, we made mistakes, we maybe went on online training, we helped and supported each other, and we got there.
2. You want to. You’ve maybe heard about something through a friend or colleague, on twitter, or at a conference. It was piqued your interest and you want to find out more.
3. You’re told to. Think about the training courses you are told to go on. In service days. In school CPD. Sometimes it is something you find interesting and useful. Sometimes it is not. Your enjoyment of the day, and how much you take away from it usually depends upon your interest in the topic, the personality of the presenter, and whether or not the people you are sitting with engage in the presentation.
For many pupils, their experience of school is like the third example. Project Based Learning (PBL) aims to make it more like the first.
In general, project work in maths involves something that is ‘tagged on’ to the end of a learning episode. Pupils are taught the content, then given an opportunity to use it. The only person that sees the end result is the teacher, and possibly the rest of the class, when pupils are given feedback on their work. In essence the project is the ‘dessert’ – it should be the ‘main course’.
In PBL, the project is introduced at the start of the learning episode. Pupils are then given the opportunity to think about what they will need to learn to be able to complete the project. They are then guided through this learning in the context of the project, reviewing their work as they go. The projects should also allow independent design and differentiation – so pupils can add challenge through how they approach the project, but the project work maintains the rigour of ‘traditional’ teaching.
Where possible projects should include a link to the local community or industry – which also gives the opportunity to bring in external experts who can offer guidance to pupils through their projects. There are multiple benefits to this, firstly it brings the learning into a realistic context, it allows interaction with local industry with a purpose, and it can give a more public audience to the project – as pupils’ work will be seen by more than just their class and their teacher. Working in this way helps pupils to develop skills for life learning and work, while learning not only the required content, but also with the opportunity to investigate other aspects linked to the project, which may or may not be linked to the curriculum. Not all curriculum content should be taught through PBL – different topics across the curriculum lend themselves better to PBL than others. When you start working in this way, you take it one project at a time.
I got involved with PBL though example 3 of the options above. Our school is involved in a project through the Wood Foundation called Excelerate, looking at how schools can work in partnership with local industry to create authentic, meaningful, and impactful learning opportunities. I was given the opportunity to go on a course as someone else was unable to – knowing nothing about what was involved. It was a PBL training course (PBL101) where we were taught about PBL, while developing our own PBL project using PBL! (Yes it was that confusing…. but it was awesome!) The potential of this way of working to have a transformational impact on schooling and opportunities for our young people really hit me, and I was hooked.
So far I have run two projects and I have learnt a lot from both of them. The first was with a small class, where the class were learning about nets of shapes, volume and surface area. The driving question for our project was:
How can we use Christmas Maths Activities to help people in financial hardship have a better Christmas?
In this project we made boxes, decorated in Christmas paper and filled them with sweets to hang on a Christmas tree. The aim was to sell them, then buy food to donate to the food bank. The pupils asked to run a community café to sell the boxes at, so they could make more money (and this gave an even more public product!) The pupils designed their own boxes, calculated the volume and surface area, as well as building the boxes. I saw a different side to many of the pupils that I had not seen before both through the project work, and in the final event, but the biggest impact for me was when I recently gave the pupils a piece of cardboard, and asked them to make a box with given dimensions (so we could do a task on container packing using link cubes) and the pupils were able to do it with no fuss and no questions.
The second project was run during lockdown with all of our s1 and s2 pupils, looking at area and perimeter of shapes, as well as ratio and scale. Our driving question was:
How can we, as Architects design our dream house?
The original plan for this project was to design a house to fit within local building design, within a given budget, but as we were in lockdown, the opportunity for bringing in external experts was reduced, and we felt the pupils would benefit of being able to implement any design they wished (remembering that the more elaborate the design the more complex the maths) The project was delivered through a series of online videos interspersed with learning tasks and the opportunity to give each other feedback. The final deliverable was a scale model of their final design – we found a wide variety of models ranging through cardboard, lego, cake, timber, minecraft and videos of walkthroughs of their houses created in a CAD package. The feedback we received from pupils regarding this project was positive, with many enjoying the opportunity to be creative with their maths.
I am in the process of designing my third project, which will be delivered in the spring with a group of S3 pupils. It is centred on the learning of circle properties.
How can we develop sustainable outdoor learning spaces which fit within the design themes of the campus?
Being a fairly new rural campus, we have some large spaces within the school grounds, which are underused as outdoor learning spaces. After discussing with the Head Teacher, we have the go-ahead for the pupils to design an outdoor learning space, the public aspect of the project will be for pupils to build a model of their design, and details of their budget, alongside a presentation of their learning. This will be reviewed by a panel, (possibly at some kind of presentation event if restrictions allow) and (once the weather is better) we hope that we can bring the winning design to reality.
With one of the design themes of the campus being circles, this will be a necessary element of the pupil designs. The main learning that will take place to bring the project to reality is circumference and area of circles, however it can also be extended into arc length, sector area, trigonometry, Pythagoras, as well as budgeting. I hope that we can get some external support to work with the pupils on their designs, and give them feedback as they go - either in person or remotely – but that will largely depend upon the restrictions imposed by the pandemic.
I also hope that this project will be able to be used again in future years – developing additional outdoor learning spaces for the pupils…. (Update - the project is now on hold due to the new lockdown)
I am still scratching the surface on my learning of PBL – and there is so much more I could share – one thing I haven’t gone into here is the planning and detail that go into the development of the projects. The aim is for the teacher to facilitate the learning, offering different opportunities for the pupils to learn and discover what they need to complete the project. This involves a fair bit of thinking and planning up front, but the teaching and learning aspect shouldn’t change significantly from what you do now. My learning in PBL has changed the way I teach on a day to day basis. While much of what I am doing is part of an overall school level plan, there are many aspects of project based learning which can be implemented without that whole school involvement. If you are interested in giving it a go, find a project that someone has shared online, and tweak it to your own circumstances; find a context for what you are teaching, and teach through that context; tweak small things in your daily practice – make learning more collaborative; get pupils to review and feedback on each others work BEFORE it is complete, so they have the opportunity to make it better; find ways to give pupil work a more public audience.
If you are interested in finding out more, please feel free to get in touch by email at gillian.mathewson@aberdeenshire.gov.uk or @gmathewson1 on twitter.
For more information, I recommend the following as a starting point:
https://www.thewoodfoundation.org.uk/developing-young-people-in-scotland/excelerate/