Too Much Independence | Internship Reflection 6

In the senior-level Biomedical Innovations (BI) PLTW class that I work with, a lot of the classwork focuses around providing the students with problems to solve on their own or, more recently, having them come up with their own problem that needs solving. At the end of this course, the curriculum has students develop and implement their own independent project for which they pick a biomedical topic and find a solution to a problem. Students are given the opportunity to do a research study, a fundraising event, an internship, and more. On the surface, the freedom of this project seems like an excellent way to get students engaged with science by allowing them to research something in which they are interested. However, in practice, students who are not used to taking so much responsibility for their own learning (and the demonstration of that learning) get overwhelmed by the openended-ness of an independent project of this type.

In March, we spent the majority of time in BI helping students plan, research, and implement their projects. After receiving a lot of push back from the students, I began developing extra scaffolding activities that would provide structure to the project that students were floundering without. For instance, I noticed that the students were really good at providing feedback for each other, so I had students get into groups and take turns describing their vision for the project. Afterwards, other students in the group would ask questions and make suggestions for moving forward. I also used drills at the beginning of class to ask questions that would help students complete sections of their projects. For one drill, I asked students to create a list of steps (shorter than 10 items) that it would take to implement their project. After creating this list, students had an outline for the methods section of their project. Breaking daunting parts of the project up into small pieces was a much more successful strategy for students who did not have experience with this amount of independence in the classroom.

What this experience made me realize is that it is important to get students engaged in independent learning from an early age so that they are comfortable with this sort of projects at the end of their secondary school career. If the seniors in my BI class had been engaged in inquiry and project-based learning throughout their educational experience, they may not have needed as much scaffolding during this course. But regardless of the age, it is beneficial to stay aware of the students' needs in the classroom and to be flexible enough to provide extra support when needed.