Planting the Seed: Growing Community-Based PBL Teachers with BLOSSOMS

Abstract

Community-based Project-Based Learning (PBL) is a promising practice to improve secondary STEM education. In these projects, students design and conduct authentic investigations with community stakeholders and technical experts. The work culminates with a public display of authentic artifacts like evidence-based advocacy reports or engineering design prototypes. High-quality PBL in STEM demands rigorous disciplinary learning, develops generalizable skills like critical thinking, and inspires more students to pursue STEM-related pathways after high school. As the evidence base in support of PBL grows, so has the availability of high-quality, PBL instructional materials. However, the availability of materials has not substantially increased the number of students experiencing community-focused PBL. One barrier to implementation is that many teachers lack the confidence to use PBL in their classrooms. This paper describes the design and implementation of a half-day workshop to help teachers implement community-based PBL utilizing MIT’s Blended Learning Open Source Science Or Math Studies (BLOSSOMS) project. The workshop is designed for teachers to become familiar with existing instructional materials for PBL and develop an understanding of how these materials can be used in their future classrooms. The workshop utilizes the principles of PBL to develop confidence in novice PBL teachers to adopt this pedagogy in their classrooms. We suggest that pairing teacher workshops with a dynamic, open-source PBL curriculum repository has the potential to exponentially increase the capacity and quantity of STEM teachers who utilize PBL.