This past week I had the great opportunity to spend three days at the PBL World conference, which, fortunately for me, was held very close to home at Parramatta Marist High, Westmead. The conference was hosted by our own Catholic Education Diocese of Parramatta and the Buck Institute for Education (the people who know Project Based Learning)
I went into the conference knowing very little about the specifics about Project Based Learning is, and without any particular opinion as to whether it is something I should be doing. I also had the benefit of attending and participating with a number of my colleagues from my school, so that we can look PBL together. Certainly when a school makes such an investment into professional learning, it can be incumbent upon the attendees to do bring something back from the conference. Each day began with a keynote address. After morning tea, the rest of the day was primarily spent engaging in ‘101’ workshops that had us working, hands on, through the process to designing our own PBL experience and learning by doing. For our group, these workshops were led by the talented and engaging Gina Olabuenaga. There was such a positive atmosphere throughout the room all the time, and what quickly became evident was the risks we were prepared to take as learners because we were able to challenge each other within a safe environment. Yes, this is part of what PBL is and requires.
There is a lot I could say about what PBL is, and try to explain it in ways that would not do it justice compared to those with much greater experience than I. The explanation that resonated with me most over the three days, however, came from keynote presenter Glen O’Grady, who said that PBL is not just a method, it’s a philosophy. It managed to sum up exactly what I had been thinking. PBL is not about having to do different things or stringently sticking to a ridig process. Yes, there are essential elements within a project that are essential if it is to be effective. That said, however, from what I can see, you don’t abandon everything you once did as a teacher in order to ‘do’ PBL. What I did see was all the best practices teachers use and want to use, and all the great hopes and beliefs teachers have for learning and for their students, drawn together. What I saw was learning that was relevant, engaging, demanding, inquiry-driven, and that shapes people as learners and as people who can engage in society just as much as it shapes their academic knowledge and understanding. Certainly those of us who were there are now eager to go back and give it all a go.
Finally, if you want to browse through an amazing record of what was being said, done and thought about at PBL World, you must check out the hashtag #pblaustralia on twitter. I’ve been on twitter for a while, and used it sparingly, but during this conference, I tweeted like I’d never tweeted before! It helped me see just how powerful twitter is, and what can be gained from it. The end result from those three days (and from anything that follows) is an phenomenal bank of crowd-sourced information.
It's Crowded in Here 