PBL

PBL Family Letter - November 26, 2024

Greetings, families!

The A2 STEAM Middle School EXPO was a great success. Thanks to all the families who came to show their support for student projects! After our scheduled break, we will return to school for two more EXPO events. Lower Elementary EXPO will be after school on Thursday, December 5th. Upper Elementary EXPO will be after school on Thursday, December 12th. Both events will begin at 5:30 pm and end at 7:00 pm. If this is your first time or your tenth time, please take the time to read and learn more about what you can expect.

How to Be an Excellent Audience Member

If you’ve followed along in our series describing the anatomy of a PBL unit, you know that PBL is not just “hands-on learning,” or a brief activity. PBL units at A2 STEAM are full courses — interdisciplinary units that are deeply rigorous and ask students to bring their full selves to their projects. They connect to projects, they research, collaborate, and create representations of deep understandings.

Good audience members are kind and respectful, but they are also engaged. We should endeavor to lift the esteem of our presenters with praise, but not shallow praise. We encourage you to ask questions about the learning journey such as:
What was the most interesting thing you learned in this project?
What part of this project did you find the most challenging?
…or…
How did this project change the way that you think about this topic?

We know that it may be most exciting for a family member to see their child presenting at EXPO. That said, we hope that each community member interacts with as many exhibits as they can at EXPO. There are many presenters at each exhibit, and many exhibits throughout the evening.

EXPO Schedule - Lower Elementary

At 5:30 pm, the doors will open for EXPO. If you hope to check out the Book Fair before seeing an exhibit, you may arrive as early as 5:15 pm. Check with your child’s teacher about the expectation for arrival for presenters, they may be asked to arrive a little earlier if they are presenting at 5:30 pm. The open exhibits at this time are:

• The Book Fair - MPR Stage
• Young Fives - Room 104
• Kindergarten - Rooms K-1, K-2, K-3

Presentations will continue at 6:00 pm. We ask that you allow Y5 and Kindergarten students and teachers to begin to dismantle their projects at this time. Spaces open from 6:00-6:30 pm are:

• The Book Fair - MPR Stage
• 1st Grade - Rooms 101, 102, 103

Presentations will continue at 6:30 pm. We ask that you allow 1st grade students and teachers to begin to dismantle their projects at this time. Spaces open from 6:00-6:30 pm are:

• The Book Fair - MPR Stage
• 2nd Grade - Gymnasium

Please refer to this flyer for a map of the exhibits and their times, and check out our trailer if you like your media in video format.

EXPO Schedule - Upper Elementary

At 5:30 pm, the doors will open for EXPO. If you hope to check out the Book Fair before seeing an exhibit, you may arrive as early as 5:15 pm. Check with your child’s teacher about the expectation for arrival for presenters, they may be asked to arrive a little earlier if they are presenting at 5:30 pm. The open exhibits at this time are:

• Farm Stand - Front Entrance
• Zine Gallery - Library
• 3rd Grade - MPR

Presentations will continue at 6:00 pm. We ask that you allow 3rd grade students and teachers to begin to dismantle their projects at this time. Spaces open from 6:00-6:30 pm are:

• Farm Stand - Front Entrance
• Zine Gallery - Library
• 4th Grade - Gymnasium

Presentations will continue at 6:30 pm. We ask that you allow 4th grade students and teachers to begin to dismantle their projects at this time. Spaces open from 6:00-6:30 pm are:

• Farm Stand - Front Entrance
• Zine Gallery - Library
• 5th Grade - Various Locations

Please refer to this flyer for a map of the exhibits and their times, and check out our trailer if you like your media in video format.

Remind Your Child

Now that you are an EXPO expert, talk to your child about this event and ask them if they feel ready. Teachers will talk through many of these expectations with this anchoring slideshow for Lower Elementary EXPO on December 5th, from 5:30-7:00 pm, and this anchoring slideshow for Upper Elementary EXPO on December 12th, from 5:30-7:00 pm. We are so excited to see you at this event!

It is my great pleasure to continue to serve this community. If you have questions about PBL at A2 STEAM, contact me anytime at hattn@aaps.k12.mi.us.

Nathan Hatt
PBL Coordinator
A2 STEAM - AAPS
 

PBL Family Letter - November 8, 2024

Greetings families!

The A2 STEAM Middle School EXPO is on the horizon! We are thrilled to see A2 STEAM families at our first formal EXPO of the season in less than two weeks. If this is your first time or your tenth time, please take the time to read and learn more about what you can expect.

How to Be an Excellent Audience Member

If you’ve followed along in our series describing the anatomy of a PBL unit, you know that PBL is not just “hands-on learning,” or a brief activity. PBL units at A2 STEAM are full courses — interdisciplinary units that are deeply rigorous and ask students to bring their full selves to their projects. They connect to projects, they research, collaborate, and create representations of deep understandings.

Good audience members are kind and respectful, but they are also engaged. We should endeavor to lift the esteem of our presenters with praise, but not shallow praise. We encourage you to ask questions about the learning journey such as:

• What was the most interesting thing you learned in this project?
• What part of this project did you find the most challenging?
  …or…
• How did this project change the way that you think about this topic?

We know that it may be most exciting for a family member to see their child presenting at EXPO. That said, we hope that each community member interacts with as many exhibits as they can at EXPO. There are many presenters at each exhibit, and many exhibits throughout the evening.

EXPO Schedule

At 5:30 pm, the doors will open for EXPO. Check with your child’s teacher about the expectation for arrival for presenters, they may be asked to arrive a little earlier if they are presenting at 5:30 pm. The open exhibits at this time are:

• STEAM Lab Open House
• 6th Grade - Gymnasium

Presentations will continue at 6:00 pm. We ask that you allow 6th grade students and teachers to begin to dismantle their projects at this time. Spaces open from 6:00-6:30 pm are:

• STEAM Lab Open House
• Downstairs Art Room Open House
• 8th Grade Fitness Films - IDEA Lab
• 7th Grade - Library

Presentations will continue at 6:30 pm. We ask that you allow 7th grade students and teachers to begin to dismantle their projects at this time. Spaces open from 6:00-6:30 pm are:

• STEAM Lab Open House
• Downstairs Art Room Open House
• 8th Grade - MPR

Please refer to this flyer for a map of the exhibits and their times, and check out our trailer if you like your media in video format.

Remind Your Child

Now that you are an EXPO expert, talk to your child about this event and ask them if they feel ready. Teachers will talk through much of these expectations with this anchoring slideshow. We are so excited to see you on November 21, from 5:30-7:00 pm.

It is my great pleasure to continue to serve this community. If you have questions about PBL at A2 STEAM, contact me anytime at hattn@aaps.k12.mi.us.

Nathan Hatt
PBL Coordinator
A2 STEAM - AAPS
 

PBL Family Letter - October 25, 2024

Greetings families!

This week, our series on the structure of a PBL unit concludes with Presentation. To recap, a PBL unit begins with a Project Introduction. A PBL unit is launched with an Entry Event to engage students in a topic. Once they hear the Driving Question, they ask questions as a way of familiarizing themselves with the challenge. This also sets the stage for inquiry. In the Middle Milestones, you will see a lot of activities that happen in a traditional classroom, but you will also see structured inquiry, creative skill-building, and the building of fluency for critical problem solving. Through these activities, students will attain knowledge and develop conceptual understandings. In the Synthesis & Emergent Creativity phase, students pull together that knowledge and those understandings to develop a solution to the dilemma presented in the Driving Question. Their creative expression, then, is made possible through the learning in each Middle Milestone. The skills emphasized in this phase are sometimes called “soft skills” or “21st Century Skills”. We refer to them as the 4 C’s: Critical Thinking, Collaboration, Creativity, and Communication. When planned and facilitated well, these skills can be seen throughout a project. That said, it is often the case that critical thinking will be emphasized during the Middle Milestones and somewhat during Synthesis & Emergent Creativity. In Synthesis & Emergent Creativity, the major emphasis will be on creativity and collaboration. When students have created these artifacts of learning called public products, it is important that they aren’t just seen by a teacher. By teaching communication skills, teachers ensure the success of a Presentation to a public audience.

An Authentic Audience

When we think of presenting our public products, we often think of EXPO. At EXPO, students present their public products to the community “formally” during an after-school event. During some of our very first EXPO events, students were asked to dress formally and adopt a professional personae. Check out this part of A Decade of Discovery to see more about our very first EXPO. While we still emphasize clear speaking and confident presentations, we’ve adapted the expectations for this event to include different products and different audiences. For example, a presentation that invites audience members to play a game that a student designed will be different from a presentation where audience members are tasting food made from indigenous people’s recipes. Both of those are far different than the kind of presentation that you would expect at a science fair. By asking students to engage with their audience in an authentic way, we motivate them to take ownership of their presentations.

Informal Presentations

It is also true that students will conclude a PBL unit without giving a formal presentation. Sometimes, they may engage in a community activity such as planting a garden as part of a unit on biodiversity, or cleaning up the playground as part of a unit on civic action. In fact, we’ve moved from hosting two formal EXPO events each year to hosting one formal EXPO in the autumn, and scheduling at least one informal presentation in the spring. This year, our EXPO dates are as follows:

• Middle School EXPO (gr6-8): Thursday, November 21, 2024 - 5:30-7:00 pm
• Lower Elementary EXPO (grY5-2): Thursday, December 5, 2024 - 5:30-7:00 pm
• Upper Elementary EXPO (gr3-5): Thursday, December 12, 2024 - 5:30-7:00 pm

In our next letter, we will share practical information about what to expect from EXPO.

It is my great pleasure to continue to serve this community. If you have questions about PBL at A2 STEAM, contact me anytime at hattn@aaps.k12.mi.us.

Nathan Hatt
PBL Coordinator
A2 STEAM - AAPS
 

PBL Family Letter - October 11, 2024

Greetings families!

Understanding how a PBL Unit is different from a unit in a traditional classroom can help families to know exactly how their children are learning. In the last newsletter, we talked about the Middle Milestones. During this phase, students are motivated to build knowledge, skills, and understandings through inquiry and other student-led activities. Once students have built a sufficient body of knowledge in different disciplines, they bring it all together to formulate understandings — ideas about what they’ve learned. They work on their own, in partnerships, and in teams to create artifacts that attempt to answer the Driving Question. This phase is called Synthesis & Emergent Creativity.

Synthesis & Emergent Creativity

There are lots of ways that students synthesize their knowledge at the beginning of this phase. When on their own, synthesizing is often a writing task. In partnerships and in teams, this kind of thinking and discussing is often facilitated by a Thinking Routine. When synthesizing all together, this is called consensus building. Consensus building is a critical practice in a PBL unit, because of the nature of inquiry. It is inevitable that students will have different perspectives, and will have different sets of knowledge. By building consensus, learners are able to build strong conceptual knowledge by comparing their findings with others.

Emergent Creativity

Creativity is a difficult thing to define, and takes many different forms. Some of the creative activities that appear in a PBL unit include idea generation, problem solving, and expression through the arts. Emergent creativity emphasizes novel ideas, expressions and solutions. It positions students to continue to drive their learning in this phase of a PBL unit. Watch this short video to learn more.

The 4 Cs

Collaboration, critical thinking, creativity, and communication are the emphasis of the Synthesis & Emergent Creativity phase, but they can also be seen in many other parts of a project. In a high-quality PBL unit, you will see many different activities that emphasize the 4 Cs. Structured synthesis activities are excellent examples of critical thinking. When done in groups, they are excellent examples of collaboration. We also use structures such as the Kanban board within this phase to facilitate collaboration. Creative endeavors in the classroom are structured to allow for novel, emergent thinking. Sometimes, these activities are extended into the Art Studio, the IDEA Lab, and the STEAM Lab. While communication is also intertwined with many aspects of the project, it is emphasized most at the final stage — Presentation.

It is my great pleasure to continue to serve this community. If you have questions about PBL at A2 STEAM, contact me anytime at hattn@aaps.k12.mi.us.

Nathan Hatt
PBL Coordinator
A2 STEAM - AAPS
 

PBL Family Letter - September 27, 2024

Greetings families!

Those of you who have been to an EXPO before understand the power of collaboration here at A2 STEAM. We’ve seen so many examples of creative ideas coming to life, and it is wonderful to hear student teams explaining the critical thinking that goes into each design. In the last newsletter, we talked about the Project Introduction. This set of activities will launch students towards the kinds of creative expressions we see at EXPO. They will have time to pull together their knowledge, skills, and understandings before they present. This is called the Synthesis and Emergent Creativity phase. What happens in between the Project Introduction and then are referred to as the Middle Milestones.

The Middle Milestones

In the graphic above, there are three milestones that read “Inquiry, Fluency Building, and Skill Building”. These categories describe the sorts of activities that might not always be found in a traditional unit of study. In the middle milestones, students will also be building knowledge (as is the goal of a more traditional learning unit). These milestones are bracketed, because there may be just two middle phases, and there may be four or more.

Inquiry

Inquiry begins in a PBL Unit when we collect questions from the Need-To-Know process in the Project Introduction. The questions students ask will guide the learning and help the teacher to plan activities and follow curate resources and activities as they proceed along the project path. There are also key science and social studies skills (depending on the content of the PBL unit) that students will practice within a PBL unit.

Fluency Building

When we hear the word fluency, we often think of literacy. In literacy, fluency is the skill of reading with speed, accuracy, and proper expression, allowing for better comprehension and engagement with the text. In the domain of problem-solving, fluency means the ability to generate a wide variety of ideas, solutions, or strategies quickly and efficiently, demonstrating flexibility and adaptability in addressing challenges. We structure many activities within a PBL unit to give students opportunities to think flexibly about how to solve problems. This might mean making connections between school subjects, or learning and expressing ideas in different ways. It often involves collaborative and critical discourse.

Skill Building

When children learn within the domains of traditional school subjects, they are learning knowledge and building concepts. They are also engaging in disciplinary practices, and learning the skills that compose these domains. For example, there are many skills that readers use. Readers use phonological awareness to recognize sounds, segment words into syllables, and identify sounds within words. Their skills in fluency help them to read with ease, accuracy, and appropriate pacing, phrasing, and intonation. They understand the meaning of words, their definitions, and their context with vocabulary skills. All of these reading skills can help a learner understand a book about the history of Ann Arbor. But a historian has their own disciplinary skills. A historian learning about the history of Ann Arbor may develop skills in sourcing information from primary and secondary sources (texts and also photographs and interviews for example), analyzing bias in texts, identifying key historical concepts, constructing historical arguments with evidence, evaluating the credibility of sources, and so forth. When we emphasize learning in school subjects, students are learning the skills that professionals within each discipline use in real life. Check out the Historical Legacy chapter in A Decade of Discovery for a great example of disciplinary literacy in a history-focused PBL unit. Skills can be found in every subject area, including technology and engineering, art, and physical education (to name a few).

In the next newsletter, we will explore the Synthesis and Emergent Creativity phase of a PBL Unit, and conclude with Presenting a Public Product. If you are interested in learning more about this process, and can’t wait, consider watching this five-minute video that originally premiered at our virtual EXPO in spring of 2022.

It is my great pleasure to continue to serve this community. If you have questions about PBL at A2 STEAM, contact me anytime at hattn@aaps.k12.mi.us.

Nathan Hatt
PBL Coordinator
A2 STEAM - AAPS
 

PBL Family Letter - September 13, 2024

Hello again families!

It’s exciting to see PBL up and running again for a new school year at A2 STEAM. During the past two weeks, there has been a tremendous amount of culture building, and even some Entry Events! Entry Events are an important part of the PBL Process.

The PBL Process at A2 STEAM: Project Introduction

For those of you who attended Curriculum Night, you may have seen the following graphic:

This is the outline of a PBL Unit here at A2 STEAM. Those of you who saw our documentary, A Decade of Discovery may have seen Ms. Waanders begin to discuss the features of unit design here in the film.

This graphic describes the journey that students, teachers, and other stakeholders take together. It starts with a launch called an Entry Event. The purpose of this activity is to generate interest in a topic and present a challenge to the students. That challenge is an open-ended question called the Driving Question. Before any other activities occur, teachers ask students to think about what questions they have about the challenge. This process, called the Need-To-Know, sets the stage for inquiry and gives the teacher an idea about what to start teaching next.

If your child’s teacher has launched a project or plans to soon, your child should have some questions about it already. Ask your child what they think, and what they plan or hope to learn next! 

At the end of the month, we will talk about the middle of the project, sometimes referred to as the Middle Milestones. We will then explore the Synthesis and Emergent Creativity phase of a PBL Unit, and conclude with Presenting a Public Product. If you are interested in learning more about this process, and can’t wait, consider watching this five-minute video that originally premiered at our virtual EXPO in spring of 2022.

It is my great pleasure to continue to serve this community. If you have questions about PBL at A2 STEAM, contact me anytime at hattn@aaps.k12.mi.us.

Nathan Hatt
PBL Coordinator
A2 STEAM - AAPS
 

PBL Family Letter - August 29, 2024

Welcome again to another year of PBL at A2 STEAM!

We've got a full decade under our belt, and that's certainly something to celebrate. During the past 10 years, we have built an impressive picture of PBL practice. This practice is built from our mission statement: At A2 STEAM, we provide an environment where students, staff, and the community are actively engaged in Project Based Learning through a student-centered approach with real-world applications. We foster students who lead and contribute to the world around them. It has been refined into a systematic framework that produces undeniable results. The proof is in the pudding. We had the opportunity to capture our thoughts and experiences last year that culminated in a documentary titled: A Decade of Discovery. If you haven’t already, we encourage you to watch this one-hour documentary with your family!

We are so excited to share our exciting journey of PBL in each grade with you all again this year. Please mark your calendars now for our Autumn EXPOs. We host three formal events to showcase PBL projects before our winter break:

• Middle School EXPO (gr6-8): Thursday, November 21, 2024 - 5:30-7:00 pm
• Lower Elementary EXPO (grY5-2): Thursday, December 5, 2024 - 5:30-7:00 pm
• Upper Elementary EXPO (gr3-5): Thursday, December 12, 2024 - 5:30-7:00 pm

In 2025, look out for information from your child’s teacher(s) about informal EXPO opportunities. These events and opportunities will vary from grade to grade.

If you still have questions about PBL, here are a few great articles from PBLWorks, our abiding institution:

• Main Course, Not Dessert
• Seven essential design elements of a PBL unit
• Seven essential teaching practices within a PBL unit

If you have any other questions, please email any time: hattn@aaps.k12.mi.us.

We are so happy that you are here with us on this PBL journey!

Nathan Hatt
PBL Coordinator
A2 STEAM - AAPS