Comments on: Lies, Damn Lies, And Conscious Misrepresentation of Evidence

By: Those canny Finns! | @TeacherToolkit

Sat, 12 Nov 2016 07:18:08 +0000

[…] is equally disappointing to see some educators and ministers of education jump on the TES headline; that Project Based Learning doesn’t work and holds […]

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By: David Price

Mon, 07 Nov 2016 19:36:24 +0000

Steven, Thanks for commenting. The stats you provide are interesting, and consistent with other well-established schools in the US and, increasingly, in the UK and Australia. Those sorts of figures are just as valid forms of ‘evidence’ as RCT studies. In fact, I’d argue that, for teachers, they’re more influential. I think the more rigorous forms of PBL are relatively new to the UK, but people here still remember the laissez-faire, scaffold-less, form of PBL of the 1980s, and that was a disaster. Chains in the US like High Tech High and Expeditionary Learning have been doing this for some time (at least 9-10 years) and would confirm that it takes 3-5 years to really establish a whole-school PBL culture, and then the standardised results tend to be really impressive.

That said, PBL isn’t for all schools or all students, and it’s particularly difficult for schools that are in challenging circumstances. But it’s certainly not a ‘pedagogy of privilege’ as some are now suggesting – as your stats reinforce.

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By: Steven Zipkes

Sun, 06 Nov 2016 21:06:39 +0000

David, I very seldom respond to posts that I read, but after reading the complete study and your previous post as well as your post here I could not help myself. I not only concur with your analysis, but would take the critique further. The Summary concludes no definitive evidence and is extremely weak lending itself to be used as a position to denounce PBL.

Personally, I feel it was irresponsible for a study with so many flaws to have even been published. As a practicing practitioner and the Founding Principal who designed and ran one of the most successful 100% PBL schools in the United States for the last 9 years with “under represented students” as well as train teachers all over the world in PBL (China, UK, US, and soon to be Australia) with Think Global PBL Academies, I question the validity of this study all together.

As you pointed out they did not compare “apples to apples” for value added performance when looking at closing the achievement gap. This is a huge issue! Skimming over the essential 21st century skills the students gained appears irrelevant. I can almost guarantee those essential skills increased dramatically. For those that left the study as well as the PBL differences from teacher to teacher and school to school begs to the question if the teachers created standards based authentic student interest projects or were these canned projects. I also laughed at the comment that they saw no improvement in attendance. I admit to some ignorance on school attendance in the UK. We had significant raised attendance rates from students who previously missed school often. Over 9 years our HS attendance average was 96.5% often 97+% where the average HS attendance hovers around 92-94%. Our under represented students consistently out performed on State Exams, and in our 6 graduating classes thus far we had a 99.4% graduation rate with 100% of those accepted into College where 62% were first generation being the first in their family to ever go to college while many were the first in their family to graduate from HS! I know first hand the positive impact PBL has had on students and families not only at my campus, but others around the globe. If the President of the United States can see the significant student improvement in our PBL school and dedicate 300million dollar grant for others to replicate our practices and the US Secretary of Education can highlight our PBL school as a model school to reach under represented students I find it amusing and sad at the same time that educational leaders would jump on this to study to highlight the deficits of PBL.
I recently open another 100% PBL school and am seeing similar success results in only 5 months!

As someone who has participated in numerous case studies from George Washington University, University of Chicago, University of Texas, Dana Center, and others. I have found anyone can make numbers work the way they want. Being a standard bearer for educational transformation is not easy, but I can say over the last 11 years as a PBL guru those voices trying to negate PBL as a viable pedagogical shift for student achievement has declined and I believe will continue as more and more reliable studies take center stage. Thanks for the excellent post and the motivation to write. Former Founding Principal of Manor New Technology High School, Head PBL Potentialist; Advanced Reasoning In Education, and Founding Principal of Cedars International Next Generation High School

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By: David Jackson

Sat, 05 Nov 2016 18:55:16 +0000

Excellent post, David. Thanks. You’re also right that you couldn’t make it up.

Mayflower Academy in Plymouth has this headline on its Performance page: “Mayflower Community Academy has received a special letter of praise from Schools Minister Nick Gibb.” It is for being among the 100 top performing schools in terms of the progress made by pupils between Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2, between ages 7 to 11.

How is this achieved? Well you have guessed it: “Our bespoke and creative Academy curriculum is delivered through ‘Project Based Learning’ experiences.”

So, the ‘TES’ gives Stanley Park Secondary School of the Year. Nick Gibb writes in praise of a PBL school’s achievement. Ofsted consistently lauded the REAL Projects work in the trial schools (even when other aspects of the school were under pressure). Yet people would rather publicly celebrate a report so misrepresentative of the evidence that even the evaluation team are going to complain!

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