Once finished our project it’s time to reflect about it.
One of our first learning outcomes is that PBL methodology is a great challenge for all of us:
Teachers, to properly create and implement a project that must be attractive for students, must achieve content and language goals and, at the same time, should flexible enough to gather pupils approval. All this while teacher him/herself learns by doing.
Students. as it requires come into play skills such as collaboration, finding and understanding information, critical thinking, problem solving, peer teaching, drawing conclusions from data, and reflecting on the learning process, so we must make an effort and introduce our educative system in it.
School, as far as PBL initiatives require the acceptance and cohesion of the whole educational community. A determined bet and an important effort in terms of organisation are required for its implementation. Otherwise, it won’t be possible to put down roots.
Some of the problems that we have perceived in our interaction with students are:
The difficulties of a great number of pupils to develope logical and/or critical thinking.
Their lack of autonomy to self-regulation and the little ability of collaboration with each other.
A self-assessment not according with real effort and outputs.
On the other hand, advanced students were eager to learn and they asked us to do groups of the same level. In the last part of the project we agreed to do so and they made groups freely. It turned to be a good idea and everybody worked at ease.
Of course we have a lot of issues to improve in the future:
Try to be more realistic with the amount of activities to do in a session.
Take in account students opinion even more, when possible.
Look for different and surprising activities that engage students in the project.
Improve data collection and assessment method.
As a conclusion, this learning methodology has enrolled students and teachers in an important new way of learning, encouraging the acquisition of new meaningful knowledges in a proactive and participative learning process.
We are ready for new challenges to come!