What Is a Learning Mission and How Is It Different Than Normal Project-Based Learning?
Why Micro PBLs are so effective
Project-based learning can be misinterpreted as long-winded project ideas. The problem is that, with a long form project, everyone takes on this highly complicated view. It can very quickly turn into a mountain of craziness.
I started to realise that this idea of four weeks and having a public presentation and all this kind of stuff is not really needed. You can engineer it better. You can make the learning experiences one day, three days, and it’ll actually be better because you can then have a theme.
Let’s say you’re doing it about space and then you can have one mission: “We’re going to design a garden in space.” That’s a fun activity and then you go outside. The next mission is, “All right now we’re going to try and do it on Earth.”
They’re micro missions because in that mission you have a sequence of events, which is your activities of the day. The good events or the fun events are always third or fourth so you can actually sequence them a little bit better. I feel like you can have them as better planned units because they’re not so big and complex.
I realised that a shorter learning mission could work better than a four-week project because I just felt like you’re trying to catch people up as a specialist. Perhaps you have students once per week. If they’re away for three weeks, they have essentially missed the project and you sort of found that difficult.
The project, unless you’re there all the time, is going to fail but it’s kind of like that in real life. If problems happen there are other people who either take it if it’s a pretty hectic situation or they extend or get extra support. It’s kind of crazy.
You put all this pressure on to these kids to just produce something together in the right way and it’s not fair when some of them are sick or they got stuff going on at home or whatever.
I think it was a garden project that started this learning mission idea because there were so many things to teach that I would have multiple micro projects. I think it happened from that because I would have some people doing raking and some people watering the plants and they were doing their own little missions.
I would then teach them. I couldn’t teach them all at once so you’d have to work out how you can get people started into rotations.
If they need safety and things like that, if they’re doing shoveling and raking and things that are unsafe, if they’re getting weeding and they’re going to be with spiders, they need to know all the information. It probably did come from outside when I was a sustainability teacher.
I think the garden example is a good one because one complete learning mission looks like, from the moment students arrive to the moment that they finish, it’s different. Learning is different. You’re not just one thing happens all the time.
You’ve got skills that people are developing. Some kids have never raked, some people live in apartments. They don’t know what it’s like to rake leaves so you see that their skill is very low.
Ultimately you’re just trying to get them to pick up the rake. Raking is raking, as simple as that. Shoveling is shoveling so you could clearly see what mastery is. It was observable.
So when students pick up the rake, generally you scaffold it. You show them how to do it. Perhaps someone knows how to do it that can show other people. You might then get people that have never tried and they try a little rake together.
I guess you make sure that people can do the basic fundamentals and then off they go.
If they can’t then you need to support them or work out if someone can support them and then that’s it. After it you talked about what they did. They can show people, they can show you.
Generally I’d have a garden manager as a student that would go around and just check what everyone’s are doing instead of having to rely on me and then that person can teach others. Ultimately they just run it themselves, that is student-centered learning.
I then just sort of teach their key people the skills and that goes and filters through everyone.
This is a learning mission.
Phil