Making PBL work at The King’s College

Dr Zoe Beringer - Head of Science, The King’s College

Why PBL?

The King’s College is a co-educational K-12 Christian school in Perth, Western Australia. We’ve got a broad range of students; about 30% are on Individual Education Plans (IEPs), but we also have a highly capable top group of students who are part of our Catalyst academic extension program. This is a challenge for every teacher; how to make learning accessible for struggling students, but challenging enough for the brightest minds?

Ultimately, I want to stoke the flames of curiosity in my students. I wanted them to get excited by learning. I wanted to see the moment when the light switches on behind their eyes. And I wanted to tell stories through my teaching, and use real-world examples to prompt students to ask “how can we use this? Why does this matter?”

This is why we started looking at project-based learning. It could provide the extra engagement which the lower-performing students needed to remain on task, but also provided the upside for higher-achieving students.

Why Cura?

When I started browsing Cura’s units, I could immediately see how they were both real-world relevant and engaging, but also closely tied to curriculum outcomes. Other PBL units we’ve tried before generally only did one or the other. They’re often only built for engagement, and don’t closely align with the syllabus. But we need to teach those outcomes – we’re accountable to parents, the school, and the Education Department – so seeing how well Cura blended hands-on engagement with teaching core outcomes meant it was easier to take the leap.

The other thing I loved was how practical and immersive the units were. Every Science lesson had at least one small experiment for students to work through. This got them away from their computer screens and working hands-on. It meant that each lesson saw impactful learning taking place. And, because it was so nicely set out, I could do three or four times the amount of lab work without an increase in my planning time. Instead of the four classes per week being one lab and three classes of ‘theory’/book work, we could do four lab classes with theory sprinkled across them. The students loved this!

How I implemented it

Last year, we started small. We tested Cura across a few classes and a few teachers. This year, we’re using Cura across the whole faculty.

We started with micro-units. We found that these were an easier entry point for teachers and students. I’d definitely suggest this for someone looking to get started with Cura. I’d also recommend giving students access to the platform, as well as teachers. Having students work in small teams and submit their work for me to assess formatively both increased their accountability and increased the speed of our feedback loop.

I was also flexible with how I used Cura. Some of my colleagues went ‘coast to coast’ with a unit, using it exactly as it was set out. I freestyled a little more; I skipped some questions, added more focus to a particular investigation, or gave students more time to go off on a tangent which I thought they’d find interesting. Because the work had been done for me, it was easier for me to identify opportunities to do this. And it will get easier once Cura release their unit editing feature.

The results

Differentiation

As I’ve mentioned, we’ve got a broad range of students. I found that I could use Cura to keep both the higher and lower performing students engaged, whilst still catering to their individual needs.

For the lower performing students who needed more support, I leaned more heavily on the instances of explicit teaching which were built into the units. I’d use this – and my own notes – to consolidate what they were learning through the practical tasks. For the high ability students, I let them run at their own pace. They’d work through the experiments and analysis questions fairly easily, and I’d give them some additional extension questions at the end of each lesson. They were even pushing me for this; they’d be asking questions about how what they were learning applied to the problem in a different way to what they were covering in the unit. They wanted to learn more than what they had to. How often can you say that?

And, to come full circle, because the high ability students wanted to take the unit and run with it, this gave me more time to focus on the students who were a bit slower. Normally, I wouldn’t be able to give them such individualised attention. But Cura’s units enabled me to truly differentiate within the same class, all while doing the same unit.

Engagement

I’ve already said that the Cura units made things much easier for me. They saved me a lot of planning time, but tripled or quadrupled the amount of prac work my students were doing. But the biggest impact was the change in student engagement in the classroom.

My Year 7 Catalyst class loved it. My Year 9 class were a bit slower to get into it; some were apathetic at the beginning and saw it as more work for them. But I knew they were getting engaged when I started hearing questions like “Oh! Why did it do that?” or “Wow, look at this, Miss!” Once they started to not just engage with what I was asking them to do, but go beyond that and start questioning outside that immediate context, I knew they were both curious and genuinely engaged. This was much more observable than in my other Year 9 classes who weren’t using a project-based unit.

Student performance

The most exciting thing for me is that this higher engagement translated into better results! We did a comparative analysis of student results by comparing their test scores on the parts of the topic which they’d learnt through the project-based unit, and the parts which they’d learned through our ‘standard’ teaching approach. Only 17% of the students performed worse on the project-based questions than on the ‘standard’ questions. And for the 83% who scored better or the same, the differences in scores were quite remarkable. I’m not talking about marginal percentage increases; I’m talking students who scored 0% on the ‘standard’ questions and then 85% on the project-based questions.

I think this shows that deeper engagement through a project-based unit led to greater long-term understanding. The hands-on work and transfer learning clearly had an impact. That’s why I think this approach to learning is so valuable, even for experienced teachers. Even if you’re pretty happy with your lessons, there’s so much value in delivering content in a different way!

Do you know an educator who wants to increase hands-on, real-world learning in their classrooms? If so, please share this article with them!

If you want to learn more, get in touch at hello@curaeducation.com.