Session Information
01 SES 14 C, Learning Approaches: Problem-based and Project-based
Paper session
Contribution
This paper reports on a pilot project in a public school (pupils aged 6-16) in a small municipality regarding a school development project that the authors have developed and facilitated in the school year 21/22. The goal of the project was to create knowledge about how to foster teacher development through an intervention centered around Professional Learning Communities (Stoll, et al., 2006; Doagan & Adams, 2018) and Action Learning (Aubusson, 2012; Revans, 1998). More specifically, the project sought to fulfill the ambition of the school administration who wanted problem-based and project-organized learning (PBL) to be the focal point for a pedagogical and organizational reorientation of the public schools in the municipality. A reorientation that held the potential to improve student motivation as well as increase the schools’ ability to develop students’ understanding of the world around them and foster their acquisition of 21st century skills (OECD, 2019) – a goal that is shared widely in the primary educational sector across Europe and described in the European Councils recommendation on key competences for lifelong learning (European Council, 2018).
PBL is an international recognized pedagogical approach. Evidence for PBL’s effectiveness in improving stu-
Dents’ outcomes is promising although further research is still needed (Condliffe, 2017; Grant & Tamim, 2019). PBL can be organised in many different ways and in very diverse settings. However, across the research literature there is general agreement on the common characteristics that form the basis of PBL in education (Barrows 1996; de Graaff & Kolmos 2007; Savin-Baden & Major 2004). As such, PBL is characterised by the following principles:
- Learning is organised around real and complex problems that links theory to practice
- The nature of the academic work that students produce is authentic
- Knowledge is constructed through active learning processes
- Learning is a social phenomenon based on students’ active participation and involvement
- Learning takes place in small groups in order to achieve a goal only reachable through collaboration
- Teachers acts as facilitators of learning
- Students take responsibility for identifying own learning needs and organizing own learning path.
The full paper describes the concrete background for the competence development project as well as the didactic and practical considerations behind the design. Through countless research projects, organizational researchers have documented the difficulties of implementing successful organizational change (Beer & Nohria, 2000; Hughes, 2011). Educational institutions are in no way more susceptible to change than other organizations - rather the contrary (Burner, 2018). However, Fullan (2011), points to four conditions that, if met, provides initiatives aimed at promoting educational change a greater probability of success:
- Cultivate the intrinsic motivation of teachers and students
- Engage teachers and students in continuous improvement of teaching and learning
- Inspire cooperation and teamwork
- Be sure to involve all teachers and students
Based on Fullan’s four principles and Hargreaves & Shirleys (2020) notion of Leading from the Middle, small groups of teachers met once a month with a university facilitator to develop pedagogical PBL-based experiments which were subsequently tried out in class and finally evaluated at the next meeting in the learning group. After one year, the project was subject to a quantitative evaluation through a survey questionnaire. Finally, focus group interviews with teachers and managers were conducted (interviews with students is to be completed in Spring 2023). The research question that the project sought to answer was:
Are the principles behind theories of Professional Learning Communities, Action Learning and Problem-based Learning an effective way to foster pedagogical development for teachers in all subjects and classes simultaneously in primary education?
Method
The study is based on qualitative and quantitative data. By the end of the project, a questionnaire survey (Martin, 2006) was administered to all participants (N=30), who were asked about their perception on changes in own learning and practice as well as the benefit for the students. Furthermore, two focus group interviews (Morgan, 2001) were conducted with eight teachers (four in each group) and one focus group interview was conducted with the school management team (3 persons). The interview guides were partly based on answers and themes from the questionnaire survey, partly theoretical concepts from the research literature. Interviews lasted approximately one hour. Interviews were subsequently transcribed and coded. All authors used an inductive approach to search for themes and provide preliminary codes (Coffey & Atkinson, 1996) of both the questionnaire data and the interview transcriptions. The authors compared and discussed the themes and the coding until consensus was obtained regarding themes and codes. The primary inspiration for the coding was a four-phase matrix model developed by Glaser & Strauss (1967): Conceptualization of the overall theme, rough division of data into general categories, division into subcategories and further division into finer categories. In this case, the data was categorized into four broad categories, ten subcategories, and fifty-three finer categories. Furthermore, the finer categories were analyzed based on Boeije's (2002) five-step approach to continuous comparison, where he emphasizes the importance of looking for patterns, or in other words for combinations of categories or codes (Ibid., 397). The data underwent several rounds of comparing and contrasting established patterns and representative quotations for reporting the themes were assigned (Miles et al., 2018).
Expected Outcomes
From the questionnaire we see that the teachers believe that PBL fits as a teaching approach in all educational subjects. However, even though all teachers feel that the training course has provided them with the necessary skills and tools to implement PBL they differ in their perception of the applicability of the approach. In this regard answers indicate that teachers within humanistic subjects and teachers in the younger classes (age six to nine) find it more difficult to apply the PBL principles than natural science teachers and teachers in the older classes. The qualitative interviews center around four basic themes: Teacher learning, Student learning, Professional Learning Communities & organizational learning. The interviews confirm and elaborate the findings from the questionnaire. The teachers report on changes in their professional role and identity and how their teaching style has shifted from transmission of knowledge to facilitation of learning. Furthermore, they describe how the fact that all teachers have worked simultaneously with the project has led to a change in organizational culture. Best illustrated through all the physical learning objects that are displayed throughout the hallways of the school. Moreover, teachers detect a change in their internal communication and their collaborative approach to pedagogical development brought forward by the dialogues in the professional learning communities. Overall, the teachers express a positive attitude towards the full-scale educational change approach based on the principles of Professional Learning Communities and Action Learning. However, they also raise concerns about questions of economy, resources, national legislation, different learning perspectives and whether it is possible to retain the established communities of practice when support from the professional learning consultants cease. In our conference presentation we shall further elaborate on these perspectives for us to be able to answer the problem statement of this paper.
References
Aubusson, P., Ewing, R. & Hoban, G. (2012). Action learning in schools: Reframing teachers' professional learning and development. Routledge. Barrows, H. S. (1996). Problem‐based learning in medicine and beyond: A brief overview. New directions for teaching and learning, (68), 3-12. Beycioglu, K. & Kondakci, Y. (2021). Organizational change in schools. ECNU Review of Education, 4(4), 788-807. Boeije, H. (2002). A purposeful approach to the constant comparative method in the analysis of qualitative interviews. Quality and Quantity, 36, 391-409. Burner, T. (2018). Why is educational change so difficult and how can we make it more effective. Forskning og forandring, 1(1), 122-134. Coffey, A., & Atkinson, P. (1996). Making sense of qualitative data: Complementary research strategies. Sage Publications, Inc. Condliffe, B., Visher, M. G., Bangser, M. R., Drohojowska, S. & Saco, L. (2016). Project-based learning: A literature review, https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED578933.pdf De Graaff, E., & Kolmos, A. (2007). Management of Change: Implementation of Problem-Based and Project-Based Learning in engineering. Sense Publishers. European Council (2018, May 22). lifelong learning. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:32018H0604(01)&from=EN Fullan, M. (2011). Choosing the wrong drivers for whole system reform. Victoria: Centre for Strategic Education. Glaser, B. and Strauss, A.L. (1967). The discovery of grounded theory. Aldine. Grant, M. M., & Tamim, S. R. (2019). PBL in K–12 Education. In Moallem, M., Hung, W. & Dabbagh, N. (Eds.). The Wiley handbook of problem-based learning. John Wiley & Sons, 221-243. Hargreaves, A. & Shirley, D. (2020). Leading from the middle: its nature, origins and importance. Journal of Professional Capital and Community, 5(1), 92-114. Hughes, M. (2011). Do 70 per cent of all organizational change initiatives really fail? Journal of change management, 11(4), 451-464. Martin, E. (2006). Survey questionnaire construction. Survey methodology, 13, 2006. Miles, M. B., Huberman, A. M. & Saldaña, J. (2018). Qualitative data analysis: A methods sourcebook. Sage publications. Morgan, D. L. (2001). Focus group interviewing. In Gubrium, J. F. & Holstein, J. A. (2001). Handbook of interview research: Context and method. Sage Publications, 141-159. OECD (2019). OECD Future of Education and Skills - Learning Compass 2030 – A series of Concept Notes. Paris: OECD. Revans, R. (1998). ABC of Action Learning. Empowering Managers to Act and to Learn from Action. Lemos & Crane. Savin-Baden, M. & Major, C. H. (2004). Foundations of Problem-based Learning. McGraw-hill Education. Stoll, L., Bolam, R., McMahon, A., Wallace, M. & Thomas, S. (2006). Professional learning communities: A review of the literature. Journal of Educational Change, 7(4), 221–258.
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