Behind the Curtain: Facilitation and Scaffolding
How will the teacher prepare students and the environment?
- In order to best prepare students for this PBL lesson, the teacher should teach and model 21st century skills prior to teaching this lesson. For example, the teacher should have previously modeled communication by providing constructive feedback to students and practicing having students justify their reasoning. To model collaboration, the teacher should try answering student questions with more questions and work through team-building exercises. To encourage creativity, the teacher should model different ways of presenting material and encourage a variety of approaches to solving a problem. The students need only be familiar with these 21st century skills; Expertise is not required since the students will build upon these skills throughout this unit.
- The PBL environment should be prepared by setting up the classroom according to the seating arrangement shown on the Facilitation and Scaffolding page. Student desks should be moved into groups of 4 and the teacher’s desk should be located on the perimeter of the classroom. This arrangement allows for collaboration and discussion among the members of the group. Additionally, this set-up reduces the prominence of the teacher in the classroom and creates a student-centric environment conducive to PBL.
- For facilitation and questioning strategies throughout the unit, see the “Facilitation” section in each of the lesson plans for specific advice and questions to ask during that lesson. In general, it is recommended that the teacher ask questions starting with the phrases such as “How”, “Why”, “What if”, and “What is your opinion of”, just to name a few. These types of questions will require higher-order thinking skills from the students.
- Questioning can also facilitate learning of 21st century skills with questions like "have we heard from everyone?", "what do you expect to happen?", "can you explain what you learned?", or "do you think your group agrees?" It is also important, though it seems inefficient, to pose questions to students when they are on the right track as well as when they are not.
How will the teacher collaborate with students and offer assistance without giving answers?
- This requires patience. As we’ve discussed in class, it is important to avoid “leading questions” that give the teacher the illusion of student engagement but really feed the students the answers. It requires proper questioning or sometimes even less - just listening and being a sounding board for group discussion.
- Regarding nanotechnology specifically, it will be important for students to have the right resources. If students' questions are redirected at themselves but they don't have the proper tools to answer questions successfully, then it will be frustrating for everyone. This may depend on the content, but nanohub.org is an excellent resource for students.
- It will be important that most if not all assistance that is provided is done as a peer rather than as a teacher. For example, in the How Big Is It activity, the teacher stops the inquiry process by saying things like "viruses are smaller than bacterium, right?" or in the Evolution of Cell Phones activity, "the first cell phone came out way before that". The teacher may be inclined to say things like this, but that just encourages students to look to the teacher rather than themselves for answers. Instead, ask questions like "are you confident enough to stand by that?" - but not just about what you notice may be incorrect or incomplete. This is still a form of students trusting the teacher for direction. The teacher must encourage appropriate questioning about correct work as well as incorrect work.
- For each activity, the teacher should have some good resources available to help students who are really struggling. For some this is easier than others. For example, during the Nano Jigsaw activity, students may benefit from simple.wikipedia.org.
- The teacher will allow the students to choose three peers they would prefer to work with, and will try to put at least one of those people in each student’s group. This grouping strategy allows students some choice. The teacher will try to group students that have different personalities and math abilities so that the group is diverse. (This PBL unit comes at the end of the year, so the teacher should be aware of students' personalities, math abilities, and conflicts between students.) In order to help students use time effectively the unit is structured so that there is no large block of group work time, forcing students to use the time they are given wisely. In order to ensure equal participation among group members, groups will fill our a peer evaluation both in the middle and at the end of the unit, evaluating both their own contribution and each member’s contribution.
- In order to facilitate student self-questioning, the teacher will ask questions like, Why do you say that? What is another way to look at this? What do you think causes this to happen? Why? These types of questions require more thought than yes or no questions, and they make students think about their own question or idea.
- By this point in the school year, students will have had practice working in groups and have already learned how to take responsibility in groups and for their own learning. In the beginning of the school year, team building activities will be done to get students used to working with one another and having to rely on one another to reach a certain goal. In addition to team building, a number of skills are constantly modeled by the teacher such as time management, presentation, collaboration, communication, data collection and analysis, etc. Through a team roles workshop, students will learn, discuss, and assume their roles for this unit. The teacher will provide students with descriptions of their roles and time for them to work with other people with the same role (see the team roles workshop lesson).
- In this unit, we see scaffolds being used more during some activities than others. For example, we won't always give students physical sheets of paper to fold up when we're asking them about nets, but this will be a scaffold used during the Nets activity day. As students progress, likely near the end of the activity even, we will pose questions without letting them use manipulatives. Another sort of scaffold we will use is when students are practicing their presentations, we will scaffold their presentation skills by offering a low-pressure environment where they have no audience (each group working on their own). This will obviously be removed when they actually present to the class.