Case Study: Creative Scheduling and PBL - A Perfect Pairing In The Making?

A Work In Progress, But Progress Is Being Made

Education has gone through a change in BC, understanding that our focus has been too heavily reliant on outdated educational practices. Though some have struggled to understand the change and how it will impact our students, the push towards revitalizing our educational curriculum was still arguably needed. BC's new Education Plan focuses on 21st Century learning, specifically "a concept-based approach to learning, and a focus on the development of competencies, to foster deeper, more transferable learning". But how to implement this direction in the confines of our current schools has been the main discussion point of educators and parents alike. Many schools and districts have looked at assessment first, realizing that letter grades might not be a viable way of assessing in this new educational era as the main reason for assessment is touted AS learning instead of OF learning. 

When it comes to instruction, educators have taken to incorporating a Project Based Learning (PBL) approach. The rationale is that PBL is one way to help students understand the importance of competencies and their role in learning, something that is key in the new curriculum. Though this is fairly easy to do in younger grade levels, it can be more difficult to implement in upper grades. This is especially difficult at the high school level where courses are still quite compartmentalized and learning separate. It is true that the new curriculum has much cross over within specific subject courses, something that is evident if one were to look at one genre such as Literacy (English Courses). To clarify, here is what you would see: three of the Big Ideas found in every English course from grade 10 to 12 are the same. This fact affects literacy teachings in two ways: first, regardless of which English course you take (First Nations, Spoken Language, New Media), you will see these big ideas incorporated into your course. Secondly, students who are taking different English courses could theoretically work together on a cross curricular assignment and still fulfill the curricular needs of their individual courses. 

However, there are not many Big Ideas that cross over from one domain into the other. Therefore, students are still compartmentalized within their subjects, though with many more choices given to them inside of those subject areas to pursue. In a previous posting, I mentioned something that I have learned in my 26 years of teaching: if you want to change what happens in an environment, you have to change the environment. If I change the environment itself, what is in it will be forced to change. In Chip and Dan Heath's s book Switch, the author's says it this way: "What looks like a people problem is often a situational problem". So how do we change the environment at the High School level to break down the compartmentalization of subjects and allow for PBL to be effectively implemented? 

Let me offer one way that my school (Kamloops Christian School) is working on. 

Use Limitations as Strengths

One of the problems my school (and other K-12 or smaller high schools in BC) has faced is the problems that come from limited numbers of students at the high school level and the direct affect this places on the school's ability to offer courses. This is all due to finances: the amount of teachers hired is based on the number students in the classes. For example, if you only have 20-28 students in a specific grade, you probably only have one teacher hired for that grade level. However, at a high school, this problem is exasperated due to the fact that a school is mandated to offer numerous courses at every grade level to fulfill graduation needs. If we look at Science only, for example, high schools will offer numerous science courses to their students so that the students can check off needed courses for graduation and/or post secondary (ex: Science 8-10, and electives such as Biology, Environmental Science, Chemistry, etc.). Having one science teacher to teach all of these courses at every grade level means this teacher is very busy! In fact, this is a recipe for teacher burnout.

The solution, though simplistic in hindsight, took some time to design. What if we combined various courses? Now, this is almost always done in very small schools (ex: one room schoolhouses), but is usually left off of the planning stages for high schools that have at least one teacher per subject area. Though this might sound like an easy solution, there is an issue to note: time and course content will become a factor. If we were in a one room schoolhouse, we could put a few courses and student grade levels together once in a while (when it fits), but then we would always have the freedom of going back to splitting the courses up into their various subjects and grade levels when content required it. As well, in the schoolhouse scenario (or homeschooling scenarios where this type of teaching is one of the attractions), you will also have limited number of students, whereas in a bigger high school, you could be looking at 40 - 60 students for two courses. Therefore, cross subject and/or cross grade courses put together for the full year or semester becomes very challenging for the teacher: in essence, they are teaching two or three full courses at once. As mentioned above, this can be done within similar subject areas, but it is when you cross subject areas, it becomes a big challenge.

However, one big factor changed the game (in essence, it was the game changer): there are no mandated hourly amounts per course offerings anymore in BC. Though the total amount of instructional days per year is mandated for schools in BC, there are no specific instructional hourly amounts per course anymore (it used to be a minimum of 50 instructional hours for a 2 credit course and 100 for a 4 credit course). So, laying this all out on a table, we have the following pieces to play with: 

• No total instructional hours per course
• Limited number of teachers per subject area (one teacher per subject area, let's say)
• Limited number of students (one class per grade level, let's say)
• Mandated courses per grade and subject level
• Minimum number of instructional days per year

Is it possible, then, to take these pieces above and combine various courses? the answer is no... if you stick to the standard day calendar. It is the calendar that is the environment which creates the problem in this instance. So, how do we change the environment?

Let's take a look at a standard school calendar. I will use one from my school a few years ago as the example:

As you can see, we had a five block semester rotation schedule with courses lasting around 60 minutes on average. If we wanted to cross a few courses together in this calendar, it would be impossible, or near so. Furthermore, can you do authentic PBL in a 60 minute a day block? It is possible, but not ideal perhaps. Also, we would be forced to only put courses together that were already running at the same time in their respective blocks. Also, what about prep blocks off for teachers (7 out of 8 blocks of teaching is the standard full time teaching load for teachers in BC) - putting that together with room allocations and mandated courses needed by students in specific grade levels makes scheduling the bane of many school administrators and makes thinking about working within the confines of such a schedule... scary. 

Many small blocks with separate subjects does not help us to either bring students to that "deeper" learning that the new curriculum focuses on. The solution? Change the environment. We decided to do the following:

1. Make our schedule a four block schedule (longer blocks of time per course)
2. Take two courses per grade level out of the standard schedule and plan to teach them together.

So basically, we took the first block out of our schedule above and made each of the rest of the blocks longer. We then took the following courses out of our weekly schedule completely: 

• Grade 9 (Woodworking and Electrical)
• Grade 10 (Missions (Outreach) and Science 10)
• Grade 11 (English 11 and Socials 11)
• Grade 12 (English 12 and Environmental Science 12)

The above courses were to be taught in one week chunks throughout the year. We chose one week in October, one in December, one in February, a two week span in April, and then a final week in June. The idea was to have the teachers work together to create larger projects and tie-ins between the listed courses. The normally scheduled courses for the "Project Week" were paused. In essence, this created a scenario where two courses were simultaneously taught to a group of students by two teachers. For example, in the Grade 10 course, our Science teacher and our Missions (Outreach) teacher both taught the course together to the 20 grade 10 students.

Good, Bad, Ugly

Let's be honest, anytime a school tries something like this, there will be wins and losses along the way. Here is what we found:
GOOD
This style of teaching allowed for the potential for teachers to collaborate, push boundaries, and create very interesting units. For example, in grade 10 science, aspects such as plate tectonics and energy conservation and transfer were all looked at through the lens of a student humanitarian trip to Guatemala that the grade 10's will be going on. Students explored topics such as "What types of energy and renewable energy would we find in Canada and Guatemala?", "What role does Astronomy play in Science and Guatemalan Belief Systems?", "Plant and Animal life differences between Canada and Guatemala (DNA)", etc. For Grade 9 students, the teachers quickly morphed the course to be ADST 9 (Applied Design, Skills, and Technologies), and taught basic woodworking and electrical skills with culminating projects such as designing and building the stagecraft for a live theatre production. For English 12 and Environmental Science 12, the study of First Nations history, both in written stories as well as in environmental topics, was a natural fit. Things seemed to have a lot of potential!

BAD and UGLY
I would be lying if it was all rosy, though, and by the end of the first week, we could see some challenges that caused us grief. Firstly, teachers struggled to find time to collaborate enough to be able to make the units and courses seem like one thing and not two separate courses. This was exasperated by the fact that some of the teachers in the situation above were part-time teachers and so were not at the school during most of the day. Also, larger projects were much easier to do in hands-on and elective courses such as ADST 9, but were much more challenging to come up with in more academic courses such as English. In fact, English was a big concern as the amount of reading required by the students was too much to be done in week-long courses. Because of these challenges, some of the courses still felt very "siloed" for the students and so the connection we were trying to create was lost. Also, because the Ministry of Education still had an English 12 Provincial Exam in place for this final year, students in Grade 12 felt very stressed about not having English 12 more often than just during the project block weeks. 

QUICK FIX

To address the concerns, we switched the English courses with Career Education courses after two weeks of Project Blocks. Our thought was that project week could become time for the senior students to delve into the Career Education and Capstone graduation requirements. This is now being piloted and subsequent posts to this blog will share how it went. 

Overal

In a recent session with the teachers at this school where the project weeks was the topic, many ideas for making it better were listed, and I felt there was a lot of excitement in the air. We all seemed to believe that this type of scheduling can work to our school's benefit, but that there was still work to be done. As we move through the rest of the year, I will endeavour to update this topic here. If you have any thoughts or ideas, please comment below!