I'm Brian Myers. I'm Mike Ritalik. I'm Becky Hiread. And this is Al pellets, a podcast featuring tips for ad teachers.
We are your agricultural education resource across the web, sharing research based tips and tackling the tough questions facing agriculture teachers every day. Hey Al pellets, this is Brian here with Mike and Becky and we are here once again by the Al pellet. And Mike, today we are going to talk about a special type of learning that is special for Becky. Problems, problems.
Because Becky is the problem. Is that right? Is has whatever, a lot of hard you want to use there. Problem based learning.
I like that now. That's what we're going to call this is a Becky based learning. Finally, a model I can actually like it by. No, we are excited to have with us some great folks.
We've got Taylor, American, Amber Rice with Taylor, Amber. Thank you for being with us here today. Thank you. Did you sense again the hesitation in her voice?
I think our reputation precedes us. He's like, I have made some poor choices. Amber, do you warn them? I really don't.
I'm just going to figure it out when you adhere here. It's more authentic that way. No, I feel like it really impresses the learning we're going to talk about today. As we get going, Taylor, why don't you introduce yourself, tell us a little bit about who you are.
Okay. So as mentioned, my name is Taylor, I just finished up my fourth year teaching, kind of a rural moving suburban high school in central Arizona. We're here, I guess, to talk about, I shouldn't say, I guess we are here. Why am I here again?
Yeah. Talking about a study that I wrote when I did my master's thesis at the University of Arizona. And I'm the person who convinced Taylor to come on this podcast today. My name is Amber Rice and I am a teacher educator.
I was at the University of Arizona where I got the pleasure to work with Taylor and very recently, starting in August, I'll be moving to Iowa State University. I was going to say, I feel like I should be cheering right now. Where's the buttons? Where's the clapping?
Oh, no! That's only because Brian's disappointed. I'm each other. He doesn't have Amber in his shop.
That's right. That's right. This is awesome. That's very cool.
So Taylor, give us a quick overview of the topic of our conversation for the day. Basically, the entire basis of the study was looking at problems-based learning. Problems-based learning is really just facilitating students through a problem-solving process. A couple of key things that go into that is just making sure students have some background information to go off of.
Like I said, guided through possible solutions, that problem-solving process. And then at the end, making sure we revisit and reflect on what that process was, the solutions we visited and how we got to our end result, that reflection piece at the end. I'm really glad that we get a chance to spend a little bit of time talking about the problem-solving process and method and those kind of things. I think, at least I was guilty of this as a high school teacher, I heard problem-solving and it sounded logical, it sounded like a good thing to do.
But I don't know that we spend enough time being intentional about developing that process and working through the various steps of the problem-based learning process. So can you tell us a little bit about the steps and the process that we ought to be going through, Taylor? Yeah, just to go into a little bit more detail. In that problem-solving process, they kind of go hand-in-hand.
As a teacher, your job is really to make sure that students have the resources available to help them solve a problem. So that might look like asking a question, identifying resources around the topic, helping brainstorm possible solutions to set questions, answers to that question in a way, testing out those solutions, figuring out why they work, why they don't work. And again, that reflection piece coming back, bringing back and connecting those outcomes and those solutions to the original question. So did your solutions actually solve the problem and the question that we started off asking?
The work that you were doing was in a fabrication lab. So tell us a little bit about the context that you were using. So it was a charter school. Just a little bit smaller of a captive audience is ultimately what that helped me get during a charter school.
But a fab lab is a dean education lab. So it's fitted with things like 3D printers, laser cutters, CAD equipment, a lot of automation, things like that. It's also really just intended to be a free space for creative thinking. And so that really went itself really well to this idea of problem solving because of that creative thinking piece where the world is your oyster in a way.
You know, you had all these resources available to you. In my case, we were actually looking at teachers who, their students were trying to solve problems by designing things to solve those problems and to capture that critical thinking and cognitive space. And I have to imagine in that process that things don't just progress smoothly. I mean, they don't for me.
One of those things where student personality really got a big play in it, you know, some personalities really fit in that space. And Becky, I'm kind of the same where it didn't happen naturally, but it got there. Can you talk more about that back getting there? Because I have to, like, yeah, obviously the post-secondary, they don't want to have to work through the thing.
Well, they're still used to trying to figure out what the answer is. Like, you have a problem to solve. They're wanting to get the right answer because we trained them that way to answer the test rather than solve the problems. How do you help students through all that?
So, and that's where that environment came in really important is that environment where failure is okay. You know, a couple of things that I saw where it worked and where it didn't, the cases where this was a super effective model is where teachers were expecting kids to fail. They weren't able to be okay with their first submission type of thing. You know, they had to do multiple versions and multiple shots at getting to that answer in a way.
The ones where teachers and students both kind of struggle with it a little bit more is where teachers kind of saw students struggling and wanted to step in and take over and do it for them and tell them what the right answer was. So that conflict between teacher and student, that internal conflict of a teacher saying, hang on, I can't help you. That conflict that a student had just to want to get the right answer and not want to get it wrong. It really came down to how the teacher guided that and facilitated that process, which can be hard as a teacher.
I know that it really can be hard to put your own desires aside sometimes. And I think that is a shift in thinking for teachers that we probably ought to be more explicit about. And it's the fact that we're so used to delivering content and we're worried about the students getting the content that we're going to deliver. And rather now we're more of a facilitator, we're a coach, we're guiding the students through those experiences and helping them learn and certainly evaluating and assessing to make sure that they have content or the learning occurred at the end of the experience.
But we're not there just opening up heads and dumping content into their heads. Right, absolutely. I don't think we can understate that because that's like, I think there's a lot of validation. We don't expect having to go into that because students will say, well, I'm doing all the work here.
You're not teaching. Who's supposed to be working harder? You know? So with that Taylor, what did you see or what sort of best practice or tips would you all give for teachers who are wanting to do some of this from what you learned?
I'm going to be a teacher, put me in the right headspace to be successful in this. So definitely something that's going to help is we talk about student centered versus teacher centered instruction practice. This is definitely a student centered practice where it's going to take some time out of your day to really think this through. And when I say think it through the things that you should be thinking about are, one, what question are we asking?
Have I given my students enough resources to answer this question? What other resources and questions could they potentially be asking me? And then the final piece is just making sure that you're responsive. And when I say responsive, I mean, come back to that reflective piece a little bit.
So you when a student is asking you a question, so saying, I don't know, what do you think? And those types of questions, they're a lot more guided and structured to help them through the process rather than again, pushing them, they're not pushing them to the side, but again, just saying like, no, what do you think you have to figure this out? I already taught you this in those kinds of questions, really guiding questions that are going to help them get to different answers, different possible solutions. But it's going to take some time on you and you need to be intentional and thoughtful.
I think the other piece to Taylor is this concept of anxiety. And as a teacher, knowing this is a normal student reaction that they may get frustrated and you have to be okay with, and help them to be okay with being comfortable with the uncomfortable and being high energy being positive as the teacher, even when they're struggling. And being that cheerleader along with a facilitator that we do in a student centered method, but knowing that it is their first time ever doing problem space learning, there's a bit of a learning curve on the method, I think for students too. Yes, I think that's a good point too.
And I'm just going to kind of add to that a little bit and say, you know, this is something that you need to establish some report and some relationship with your students first, so that there is that comfortable environment, there is that cheerleader mentality, so that they're receptive to you being a cheerleader. You know, don't go in first quarter and start trying to do something like this. Great, that's great. What, you've mentioned reflection several times in this conversation talking about, let's talk specifically about that.
What does that mean? How does a teacher use reflection in this case? There's a couple of different ways that that can happen, and one is just teacher reflection on your own accord. You know, one thing that I remember Dr.
Eisen, Mr. Elena, teaching us through our teacher program, you know, they often was at the end of a lesson, make notes, what went well, what didn't go well. So that same kind of concept applies here. What would you change about the way you presented information?
And the other piece of reflection that comes into play here is that student reflection. So giving students time to reflect, but you providing feedback for them to reflect on. That was one of the big things that I saw is that's where that light bulb was really coming on for students. That's where their learning was really happening was at the end when you were going over things with them, providing either written feedback, verbal feedback, feedback periodically throughout the process, giving students time to reflect on what you were providing to them.
So you talk a little bit about frustration that the students may end up having here, and you talk about being the cheerleader, and I get all that. What else do you have? Because again, I think it's good to talk about a little bit more because it's hard for a teacher. You don't want to see your student struggle to do that.
So what advice do you have for a teacher when your students are in that thing? And you talk a lot about providing some good questions, guiding questions. I really appreciate that. But help coach me up a little bit better on handling that.
It's tough. You see your student struggling, your RRE access so many times is just to give them the answer because you're like, I don't want to see that anymore. Right. And you know, that is kind of a hard thing to coach another teacher through because at least in my experience in the classroom, it has been practice.
And I hate to think of my students as my guinea pigs for my instruction, but in a way they kind of are. And I remind them all the time that we're learning together. I want to help you. But let's try and figure this out on our own first or in things like that.
And so it takes a lot of intention and practice on the teacher's part too, I think. You know, it's really hard to say do it this way or do it that way. It's inside you that you have to figure out kind of how to manage that. I wish I had a better answer for you.
Well, I think the other piece is the collaboration between peers. They first want to ask the teacher. Okay. So what do I do next?
Am I doing this quote unquote right? But instead forcing them to collaborate with each other because in a method like problems face learning, well, that's a beautiful opportunity for them to work with one another to get some diverse perspectives. One student has an idea and the other one never thought of that. And then let's go try it out.
So I think getting them to rely on one another, which is going to mimic skills they need once they leave your programs and go into the workforce and have to collaborate and solve problems all the time. Well, and I think too, when we're talking about student learning and we'd rewind probably a season or so, but when we're talking about how people learn and how students learn, just that cognitive dissonance that students are struggling with and they're coming in with preconceived notions, they're coming in and they're challenged around new information. This kind of gives them the opportunity to kind of wrestle with that and try to make sense of it. So they have a better understanding of the content and that we're trying to teach.
I think there's a piece of that we talked a lot. We've talked a lot about our own planning and intention. We've talked about the implementation and the environment that takes. There are also some pieces in terms of just the logistics of classrooms and the structures of schools that I feel like teachers need to think about when it comes to kind of expecting failure and setting failure up as an expectation.
So when you think about things like grading assessment, how did those things come in with these teachers in terms of problem based learning? Right. And that's a really good question too. And at least in this case, some of the teachers that I talked to during the study, their assessment and reflect or assessment and grading and everything was based on scaffolding and like completion point and not seem to work really well where they're setting up a multi-week project and each week there's checkpoints that we're revisiting to try and keep track of that progress.
For me personally, the other thing that I really have to remind myself about when I'm thinking about grading an assessment is that as teachers, we get really bogged down with jargon a lot I think. And we're talking about this teaching method here and it doesn't have to look one way. Right. Problem based learning can be this multi-week project that we're talking about.
But I'm a bit kind of a case curriculum. So if you're familiar with the case curriculum, I think that problem solving piece is something that the case curriculum does really well where we might not be solving this and answering this huge question, but we still have to problem solve our way through a process at times. And so that problem based learning can fit into a smaller box that can fit into this really big huge box. So it can look like a lot of different things.
We don't have to plan out this multi-week project. We can do it in a day. It's just the idea of that process. And so grading and back to the grading and assessment, it can look like checkpoints.
It can look like evaluating the total and piece. There's a couple of different things you can do with that. I think you hit it right on the head, Taylor. We're so used to grading a product.
This is the finished test. This is the presentation. This is the physical thing they created or demonstrated that sometimes we forget there's just as much validity in grading the process or both. I mean, sometimes problem space learning doesn't end with a product or project.
And sometimes it does. It just depends on what it is that you're asking the students to do. Right. And I'm not sure how it is for other states, but at least in the state of Arizona, career and technical education does have a set of professional based skills, skill standards, professional standards that we are supposed to be teaching.
And so this is a great opportunity to integrate those as well. Well, Taylor, you snuck a point in your response on assessment that I want to think about. I'm not sure it doesn't go unnoticed, but we don't have to solve world hunger. Right.
And I think emphasizing I don't want this, I don't want this to get missed in terms of it's helping students understand this process of problem solving and understanding, even identifying what a problem is. We've been talking about that in a couple of different places over the course of the season, that it's we're not always going to solve this huge, ginormous problem. Right. But if we can identify our piece of it, we have some things we can do.
And if we've got a whole bunch of, I mean, in a class of 20 people, if each person has their little piece, we have a change in the world. Right. Well, and I think that's a really good conversation to go back and look at is we talked about this. It's going to be hard to start doing this and not to give up.
The first time you use this teaching technique, it's probably not going to go real well. I mean, there's going to be some struggles, most of you as the teacher doing it, but also the students having them figured that out. The other thing that I've seen this is I've seen sometimes because I'm going to use this problem solving technique, I'm going to use problem based learning. And they don't have a problem to solve.
They said, I try to use this without having. But their problem is already solved. Right. Right.
So there's so many techniques but work through this is a very important tool in the teachers toolbox when they're doing this. You've given a great example to us to use this. Taylor, Amber, thank you guys so very much for being with us here today on Alpile's. It's been a great conversation.
I hope folks will interact with you all in this content on social media and start using this technique. Learn from what all you have done. You've given us some great tips on how to do this. And so thank you once again for being with us here today on Alpilets tips for agteachers podcast.
You hope you've enjoyed this episode of Alpilets. Check out our website for more information on this topic and to learn more about our guests. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to stay connected. And be sure to subscribe to our podcast so you'll never miss an episode.
For Mike and Becky, this is Brian here by The Outfellets saying thank you and we look forward to seeing you again on another episode of Alpilets tips for agteachers.