Welcome to the Binge PBL for Teachers podcast brought to you by Magnify Learning, your customized PBL partner. From over a decade of experience with you in the trenches, we are bringing you 20 episodes for inspired classroom teachers exploring project-based learning. Learn the lingo, develop your skills, teach inspired. Here's your host, Ryan Stoyer.
Episode 14 of 20. Three important distinctions to improve assessment in project-based learning. I failed because my group members were awful. Why did my daughter have to do all the work? Like, we've heard these things over and over again when anytime you're trying to do some kind of collaboration activity or group contracts are not involved. And grouping is pretty pretty pretty awful most of the time for us as educators, for your learners, for parents, pretty much everybody. If there isn't some kind of method to the madness, if there isn't, we haven't upfront done the work to figure out what does a learner's grade really mean? It's really important work. There's a chapter in the book PBL Simplified where I ask you this question. What's in a grade? What does a C mean in your class? Does it mean that I'm pretty good at content and I turned most of my stuff in? Does it mean that I aced the content, but I didn't do any of the homework? Did it mean I'm a really nice kid? I did all the homework and all the activities and I participated, but gosh, I don't know a darn thing about biology. It could mean any of those things. I know when I was first started in the classroom, I looked at my grades and I was just putting numbers in. And as I got into project-based learning, we started to parse out like what's a content grade, what's an agency grade, what's a collaboration grade, what's a presentation grade. And when we started to separate those out, you really have to look at your classroom practices with a magnifying glass and say, "Well, why am I doing these things? And what does it mean?" Super powerful, very intentional. And as you do that, you bring that same idea to your assessments. So now, why am I giving this quiz? What do I want to learn? What do I want my learners to to know about themselves now that they've taken this quiz or this test? Are we going to take this quiz and then build workshops off of it? Or are we going to take this test and never talk about it again? Sometimes when we reflect back on our practice, it's like, I used to do that. I did it all the time. We get a quiz. Okay, we get two out of 10 or two out of 20 to 20% and we would just move on. It's like, man, I hope you pick that up.
I don't know where you're going to, but I sure hope it works for you. You know, so being intentional in your assessment is really important. You've poured all this hard work into having a really well-defined and planned out PBL unit at this point and or even your traditional unit. You've done all the work in the activities, but are your learners actually learning things? Are they picking up what you're putting down? So, let's figure this out. Every teacher should create intentional events for assessment using these three Assessment distinctions. So the first distinctions for assessment is ongoing assessment methods. You want to evaluate collaboration, critical thinking, problem solving throughout the project, your content, right? So you've got ways to create some kind of an assessment. And as you're doing, especially as you first jump into this idea of assessing collaboration, for instance, it can be really daunting, right? So you look out, there's six groups all doing some things. Some are working together. Well, well, some are not, some are quiet, some are not. How do you assess that? And I don't at Magnify Learning like a lot part of our language is rubrics. We just like to talk in rubrics like what's the best case scenario? What's what's the basic, you know, what's at risk? Where do we want to move away from and move people towards? And so we create rubrics for just about everything just to kind of wrap our head around things. And we've got some rubrics around collaboration in the online community. And it really just starts to look at and communicate to your learners, this is what good communication looks like and are you going to take some grades on that? Yeah, you will use rubrics for grading. I would claim that the more important aspect of a rubric is the communication aspect. Before you're even starting to groups, put the rubric out there and let's do a rubric scavenger hunt, a deep dive, let's highlight this, whatever you want to call it, a great discussion, have a protocol, but let's parse out what it means to h have really great collaboration. It doesn't mean that one person is doing all the work. It means that we're looking at everyone's strengths and weaknesses.
It means that everyone's participating willingly. Okay. So, now you're in groups. You're doing some collaboration. Say, well, are you participating willingly? Oh, no. Or a better open-ending question might even be that's maybe a little less accusatory might be, where do you see yourself on this rubric right now in your collaboration? Everybody just take out your collaboration rubric and just point to where you're at right now. Okay, awesome. How can you get to the next level to the right? in the porch, what's one thing you could do? Just talk to the person next to you. What's one thing you could do? You're starting to move kids towards better collaboration. So that's that's just one example of these ongoing assessments that you continue to do throughout your PBL unit and throughout your year to improve these different skill sets. So one distinction is where are you going to have ongoing assessments that you're building off of? Formative assessments might be your wording, right, in content areas. So you might give, you know, uh an assessment on compound complex sentences and at the end say, "Okay, you've got 50%, I'm I want you to go to this workshop, and you got 75%, go to this workshop. You got 90%, you can move on, keep working on your PBL unit." However you like to do that. If you want to take a step further, you might have your 20 question quiz, and the first five are, can you identify? Second five, can you use, right? And you you break those out. So then it's really more of not just that final percentage, but maybe I got 90%, but I bombed the fourth section. Like, hey, you know what, Ryan? You gotta your grade looks great, but it doesn't seem like you fully understand how to put a compound complex sentence into a story. So, why don't you come to this workshop? It's 15 minutes and then we'll get you back on your way. Right? Starts to make a lot of sense. And that's an ongoing assessment practice. The second distinction is individual over group assessment. This is where we help groups be less awful. And we have because a lot of times when a parent comes and says, "Well, how come my daughter did all the work?" In my opening example, There's truth to that statement.
The daughter might have done all the work and everybody got this grade, right? So, we need to pull that out. I've been there, right? Guilty as charged, but how do we fix that is we're going to start looking at your individual grade. So, you want to be able to tease out each student's learning from the group project. And that's maybe more of an advanced move and you'll need to look at that and discuss that with your colleagues. One way when we look at the six steps of PBL, if you go to the book PBL Simplified, again in episode five, you got a free ebook of that, there is in there the six steps and you can do a lot of those first steps with a lot of individual research and work and a lot of your workshops are in there and you're taking grades in your workshops. So the bulk of my grade is really my learning right individually I've you've already assessed your biology standards, your social studies standards throughout these different workshops and you've got the quizzes and tests to show which of the content I've mastered and which I haven't. And same thing for my group members, right? So my other group members that are with me, they also have these individual grades. Now, we're going to come together and our collaboration grade might be tied together, right? And our presentation grades in some form are tied together and you're still going to pull out some individual presentation for me. But at that point, you know, 85 90% of my grade is individual at that point. So now when I come and say, "Hey, how come my daughter did all the work and she got this great?" Well, she really didn't. Like there's a lot of individual work. Or how come my kid failed because the group was awful? Well, Well, your group, your son was in a group that needed help. They were at risk, but his grade is his grade and here are all the individual quizzes that he did and didn't do very well on. Oh, okay. Right. We should be able to explain a learner's grade and without an ambiguous sentence of, well, group works messy. Sorry about that. It's just like the real world. No, that's not it. We need to we need to have some accountability for that and have a good explanation. And really, as you do that, you know, I gave a should statement.
that you should be doing that. So, I want to back up on that just a little bit, but it'll give you more confidence in group work, right? I know when I was doing groups and when I talked to teachers across the country, one of the hiccups of doing groups is actually grading. So, well, I don't want learners to have to do all the work. I don't want to have unfair grading practices. Great. Don't like the second distinction is to pull out those individual grades from the group assessment. The third distinction for assessment is self assessment over peer feedback. Because peer feedback is that's feedback. It's not assessment, right? That's not a grade. Sometimes in collaboration, we'll, you know, have kids give grades to each other and you're like, well, that gets tricky. What if somebody doesn't like somebody? It's like, yeah, that's true. Like, let's do some self assessment. Like, use that rubric again. Like, where do you think you're at? And you'd be surprised, I think, depending on how you see this, but learners will be very transparent with how they collaborate, right? Some of your learners will be like, "Yep, I didn't participate in that discussion. I should not get points for that, right? And some will be like, well, I kind of put some things in there like, okay, like this says that it should be meaningful comments. Did you have meaningful comments or you just say, "Yeah, me too." Well, I did have some, "Yeah, me too." So maybe I should pull that back. And so self assessment versus peer feedback, just know there's a difference and really kind of think through what that looks like for your groups and your grading process and your assessments, right? Because you really want to pull back and say, you know, what's the pro what's the real reason we have assessments? We want to figure out where we're at so we can figure out how to get to where we want. want to be right. So, we're trying to assess where we're at in that path and you're trying to assess all of your learners to see that process. I think we've given you this idea of this book already in the Binge PBL podcast episodes, but Life's a Project is a book from Andrew Larson that we really appreciate. You can go to pblpress.org to go get his book.
Go to pblpress.org. It'll take you to all of our books. But Life's a Project really has a just a wonderful story and really deep dive into assessment. I think Andrew is an expert in PBL and assessment and he's gone super deep and then put it into story form so that we can kind of understand a little better. So, I'd highly recommend that. If assessment is one that you're like, I really want to nail this so I can have confidence in PBL, Life's a Project by Andrew Larson would be the book for you. All right, let's roll into the next episode to find out how feedback is the lifeblood of PBL.
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