Professional Learning

Adult Project Based Learning (PBL): Our Summer of Joyful Hard Work!

Our Small House

Our small house was built in 1923 in a new unassuming middle class neighborhood that grew up on what had been German cherry farms, at the end of one of the spokes on the new Oakland, California, Key Light Rail System. Most of the houses in our neighborhood were California bungalow style, not the fancy Craftsman type but stucco. Ours is about 875 square feet, a “two plus one,” meaning two small bedrooms and one bathroom. In 1923, it was one of those neighborhoods that had covenants that excluded Blacks and Chinese. This of course helped to create the segregation that resulted in redlining and thus large disparities by race in generational wealth in Oakland, not so different from many other U.S. cities. Now called Upper Dimond, the neighborhood is still an unassuming middle class place (no gigantic McMansions here), but it is now quite diverse by race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, family type, age, political persuasion, national origin, and profession, among other characteristics. We moved in at the beginning of the pandemic. Since both of us are educators, we considered ourselves lucky to find a place we could afford where we were not outbid by someone offering three hundred thousand dollars over asking price in cash.

At the back of our small lot, listing sadly to one side, sat a small garage, probably built at the same time as the house. Like many in the neighborhood, it was built right on the property line. Too small for most of today’s automobiles, it had been converted by previous owners into a storage shed and makeshift workshop. Its situation was dire, siding slowly rotting away, a crumbling concrete slab instead of a foundation, infested with rats and strange insects, geological layers of roofing and interior wall facings added for support, weather proofing, and different ideas of what its purpose was. We were happy to have the additional space for storage, but with it slowly disintegrating, and with our small home too small to accommodate family visitors or other guests, it presented us with the combined imminent need for demolition and an opportunity for replacement with something that might add additional living space. We decided to build an accessory dwelling unit (an ADU) of about 240 square feet, a requirement being that any new construction on a property line cannot change the original footprint of the older structure, or it has to have a setback from the line of five feet, which would have taken up half our small backyard.

Basic Skills before Deeper Learning?

Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine, in their book, In Search of Deeper Learning, make reference a number of times to an idea scholar David Perkins describes as “playing the whole game at the junior level.” Perkins’ idea is a metaphor taken from sports: no high school coach would spend a whole year just running drills to develop skills and never play a real game. The incentive to learn skills is the actual use of them in situations that matter to the team, and from which they can learn, with real consequences and feedback, how to improve their performance. Thus, students will find learning skills more compelling and engaging, and rise to the occasion of higher and deeper levels of learning, if those skills are taught in the context of a meaningful real world challenge.

Perkins as well as Mehta and Fine strongly oppose the idea that students need to learn basic skills before complex academic learning. In fact, they argue that approaching learning that way is both inequitable (because of whom we decide needs to learn skills before engaging in more challenging work) and does not even create a setting where most students will want to learn those skills. Learning basic skills, they argue, should be folded into deeper learning experiences in an “as-needed,” “just-in-time” approach. Often that means as mini-lessons embedded in longer term units that students feel are consequential. Memorizing a vocabulary list for a Friday quiz is not as interesting as doing a collaborative word sort for key terms you’re going to find in a book you are excited to read because you’ve already done an introductory exercise about it that has engaged your interest.

Our Adult PBL Process

So we started with a compelling need and opportunity (We need to tear down this garage and build an ADU), what in PBL might be called an “entry event.” From there we went on to ask what would be called a “driving question” or a “compelling challenge” (How shall we go about designing and building this ADU?). We then engaged in an iterative visioning process to explore what we wanted our project to focus on. And we designed from there, discussing ideas, looking online and around our neighborhood for inspiration, sketching early versions of what we wanted, and refining those ideas and sketches. In our early planning, we sorted out what the various parts of the project might be. We did realize that there were certain parts of this project that we could not really develop the skills to accomplish, or if we could, we still did not want to undertake those parts. We decided to contract out the demolition of the old garage and the laying of the new concrete foundation. That would allow us to focus our efforts and our learning on the actual construction of the new building. Still, an early part of our planning process included trying to scope out what all the stages would be and then to ask ourselves what we would need to know or learn in order to accomplish them (This is what in PBL is referred to as the “need to know” questions.).

We developed a project management spreadsheet and calendar that included the various stages of the project and our anticipated timeline, as far as we knew at the time. This timeline was bookended by the fact that Jessica’s school year ended in May and her new school year started in early August. Our spreadsheet also included materials lists, sources, and costs for each stage, including framing, roofing, sheathing, windows, doors, and siding, plumbing, electrical, and on and on. But as every good teacher knows, and as President Eisenhower said, “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.” Our planning created an anticipation of what was to come, if absolutely not even close to a perfect roadmap. Once we started, though we felt some modicum of being prepared, everything changed. I don’t know how many iterations of technical drawings I made of various parts of the project as I learned more about what was needed and when, what would work, and what would not. For instance, when we changed from having a wooden floor on joists above the foundation (which would create too high an overall profile) to having a concrete slab inside it, I learned, from a plumber relative, that there is a whole system of below-slab plumbing that has to be very carefully planned and executed before the slab is poured. No mistakes, or you have to dig up the slab and start over.

As for the project management timeline, our contractor had assured us that demolition and foundation construction would take about ten days. His work ended up five weeks behind schedule. Many friends and neighbors with similar projects consoled us by sharing the reality check that this was pretty normal, though it made none of us particularly happy. But it set us back quite a bit in our presumed timeline. We used the time to research the phases of the project, to do detailed technical drawings of various details, to check in with builder and architect friends to confirm design specifications, to learn about the building codes for different parts of our construction. That phase was not an ideal way to learn, I want to tell you, as it was sort of like learning basic skills before doing the real work. Thus it created a lot of frustration and anxiety as we waited to get started on actually building something.

Early one Monday morning, on the hottest day yet of the summer, our first large order of materials and supplies arrived, and a huge flatbed truck with a large forklift unloaded four loads of materials into the street in front of our driveway. Jessica and I spent the day ferrying materials into our backyard, organizing them by type and by our idea of the order in which we would use them. 2x6’s, 2x8’s, 3x6 pressure treated mudsills, 4x4’s for the shear panels, 4x8 and 4x10 sheets of 15/32” CDX plywood, Hardie Board siding, framing nails to fit a nail gun her brother lent us, sheathing nails, roofing nails, siding nails. My fitbit recorded 10 miles of walking back and forth from the street to the backyard that day. We added more materials as we learned what it would take: “J” anchor bolts for the pressure treated mudsills, HD anchors for 4x4 posts for the shear panels we would need on two sides, A35 seismic anchors for the rafters, felt underlayment and starter shingles for the roofing, flashing, Tyvek house wrap, tape for the Tyvek, windows, special stretch flashing tape for the windows, dozens of tubes of caulking… the list went on and on.

You might be wondering how we knew to buy all this stuff. I want to tell you honestly, because it is such an important point, that though I had built many structures before in my younger days, none of them rose to the level of detail or building code requirements that this ADU did. We did not know most of this before we started. Each new phase of building required going down a rabbit hole of details nested within details of requirements, materials, and skills and knowledge. How can you build an ADU from scratch without knowing how?

This is the same as the student PBL process of learning skills and knowledge in a “just-in-time” process as they engage in a larger project. In the case of students, the teacher and other adults and students can be the resources that are needed just in time, providing the mini-lessons on skills and the practice with using them in less consequential ways. I can’t tell you how many YouTube videos we searched out and watched, and often over and over, about each and every detail in our construction process! In a similar way, students not only learn the skills and knowledge needed to break down and then complete a big project in little steps, but they develop the habit of mind of curiosity. They learn to identify the problems or questions along the way that they need to address. They learn to collaborate, develop their own voice, and make hard choices. They learn to raise issues and make decisions, develop the tenacity and perseverance to pursue what they need to move forward, what to do when they get stuck, and where to look for help as it is needed.

In our case, for instance, we practiced using the nail gun on scrap wood before we used it in framing, and we learned to pay attention to the feedback that happened each day (formative assessment). We learned to listen to our architect friend who stops by and points out where you need to add something or do something in a different way, the little and not so little mistakes that you make and have to correct for. We learned that errors compound, so if you make a little mistake, it’s a pretty good idea to correct that one before you move on, or else it will show up in a worse mistake later on. An inch or two in how you cut birdsmouths in rafters, or a few quarters of an inch in the spacing of them, results in roofing sheathing that does not fit between the rafters and overhangs that won’t line up with where your fascia boards are going to go. This is much like the process that students go through in a PBL unit, of formative assessment—feedback, reflection, and revision, iteratively, toward completing a high quality product.

You also learn what the order of operations is: for example, along with the sub slab plumbing situation, we learned what the layers of a roof are and in what order you have to install them. And there are rewarding kinds of feedback, as when we measured the two diagonals across the rectangle of the frame at the top plate as a check on our precision and there was only an eighth of an inch difference (a math problem!). And every top plate we laid above the 2x6 studs was absolutely level.

Contextualized Performance Assessment: Assessment as a Form of Learning

Many ADU’s are built with permits and regular inspections by city officials. But these days a lot are done without permits, and there is an ADU amnesty program in many cities for unpermitted construction. We followed code so that if we should have to apply for amnesty, we’d have done things correctly and documented those steps along the way. There are standards! In student PBL units, the presence of and feedback from trusted adults with expertise or an interest in the students or their topic is an integral part of the ongoing process of project development. This adult feedback is especially important for the exhibition of learning at the end, when students present their project or product or put into practice the findings of a project in their communities. And while good inspections can be useful for making sure that an ADU is safe and well built, in the case of student learning, often the kinds of traditional tests or assessments we use are not aligned with the extent, variety, or expanse of the learning that is happening for students in the complexity of their project work. Many district- or state-mandated assessments are reductive at best, or are so decontextualized as to be meaningless. They do not really show what the student has learned, demonstrating what is now referred to as “epistemicide,” narrowing what is tested and the underlying assumptions about what counts as knowledge and whose knowledge counts. The result is that the full range of knowledge that a really good PBL unit can help students to develop is either dismissed or lost or silenced. For us, having friends who are architect builders, or plumbers, or electricians to talk to along the way, who would come by and give us feedback and encouragement, was essential to our learning, our progress, and our eventual success.

And I do not want to forget the full range of emotions that a project such as ours elicits. Some days we were so discouraged and irritable, and admittedly awkward with new skills, we could barely stand to work together and would argue vehemently about each new step. But overall, most days were like what a student once wrote on Jessica’s classroom white board: “This class sparks joy!” No city inspection or permit is going to provide that level of understanding of or feedback on the whole complexity of our learning or our work process or our product.

So What Is a Powerful, Deep Learning Experience?

Jessica, who teaches English in a public health pathway in an Oakland high school, and Ron Berger, of EL Education, succinctly describe what a powerful deep learning experience looks like. I like to think our joyful and exuberant summer of adult PBL mirrored these:

“Work that matters (that is, meaningful to the students);

“The opportunity to engage in productive struggle, grappling with complex ‘texts’ (of various kinds);

“Opportunities for voice, choice, and agency;

“Iterations of practice & revision of work towards high standards of quality, with feedback from teachers and peers;

“Thus, learning that is active & sustained over time, that elicits rigorous and joyful engagement;

“Creating knowledge rather than just receiving information;

“Authentic audiences, & purposes, for the products students create that demonstrate their learning.”

This little essay may seem like it is just comparing our adult PBL experience building our backyard ADU with student PBL units. But I want to make an additional point: if you are a teacher who wants to teach complex PBL units, there is nothing like engaging in your own adult PBL “unit” to experience what it is like when it’s really happening in ways that are compelling, engaging, meaningful, complex, challenging, sustained, and somewhat indeterminate. It doesn’t have to be as challenging as our ADU project has been, but it certainly can contain all the elements. Do it yourself, do it with a partner, do it with your team of teachers at your school. But just do it. You’ll love the experience, and one hopes, the outcomes as well. And that will make you a better teacher of PBL for your students.

All photos, except where noted, by John Watkins and Jessica Forbes.