Honestly, why is there such a thing as project-based learning (PBL)?
“If project-based learning was a project assignment to the educators, most of them would get an ‘F’ grade.”
— I said it. Change my mind.
Before I go on to roast the much-hyped project-based learning (PBL), let me share some of my experiences with group project assignments as a college student.
#1 “WTF? All you did was copy-pasting a paragraph from a random website?”
Assignment: Write a paper on the topic “Should governments focus on taxing income or should they focus on taxing consumption?”
What happened: A groupmate lied to us all the time and didn’t do anything until six hours before the deadline. He finally put something on our Google Doc, which was some sentences he copy-pasted verbatim from a source that our teaching assistant specifically told us not to use. I had to sit for 4 hours straight to finish his part by myself. Feeling super pissed off, I wrote a long email explaining the situation to the teaching assistant.
Result: The essay somehow got an “A” and was made the sample essay for the next rotation. That groupmate needed to retake the course.
#2 “I’ve written the scripts for you. Just read them during the presentation.”
Assignment: Present a fund-raising pitch deck for a promising start-up project.
What happened: I did the first draft all on my own because I knew the subject well and I offered to do so. For the final presentation, my groupmates felt bad for not doing anything and told me to take a back seat and they would take care of the rest. But they didn’t do anything (as I expected) until the day before the actual presentation. Fortunately, I already had prepared everything and even wrote the presentation scripts for each of them. I told them to “just read off the scripts”.
Result: Everybody got an “A”, at least for the presentation.
#3 “Ok you are not presenting… NO, you are not.”
Assignment: Write a report on a major management issue of a big company; present a corporate management topic.
What happened: A guy in my group never met our internal deadline and we were all pissed at him. After the rest of us finished his part for him, he posted two slides on our final presentation deck with two random pictures that did not make any sense. We told him that it was bullsh*t and he shouldn’t present at all. He was not happy. Actually, quite unhappy. He left our WhatsApp group and threatened to report our bias against him to the professor. He also said that he would do the presentation himself… Well, you know what happened next. The rest of us reported his freeriding behaviour to the professor and the professor promised us that “he will get a much lower grade than you guys”.
Result: The rest of us got a fairly good grade.
I used three sentences I once said to my ex-groupmates as the titles of my personal PBL stories. These incidences actually happened in that order, which perfectly reflected the changes in my attitude towards PBL. How do I deal with this kind of group project assignment now, you may wonder? W̵e̵l̵l̵,̵ ̵I̵ ̵d̵o̵n̵’̵t̵ ̵g̵i̵v̵e̵ ̵a̵ ̵f̵*̵*̵k̵ ̵a̵b̵o̵u̵t̵ ̵i̵t̵.
Just kidding. My GPA is at stake, and I’m not cynical nor smart enough to drop out and survive in the jungle out there. But I do know that sometimes it’s just better to do the projects myself, for the following reasons:
- My groupmates may not deliver good work (not as good as mine).
- They may not do their parts as they have promised.
- They may talk nonsense, and you know they are talking nonsense.
- When you correct them, they get offended most of the time (no matter how polite you are) and may even sabotage your work.
So how do I approach group projects now? Well, it depends on what kind of groupmates I am working with. To me, only two attributes matter to a group project: capability & sensibility, which can be used to classify a groupmate into four categories shown below:
- The Ideal: able and willing to contribute/cooperate.
- The Likeable: not able to contribute but willing to cooperate.
- The Asshole: not willing to cooperate but contribute anyway.
- The “I-don’t-know-how-they-get-into-college” person: not able nor willing to contribute/cooperate and possibly eager to sabotage.
Unfortunately, most of the time, you don’t get to choose your groupmates for a project assignment. And chances are — you will definitely run into some PITA at least once in your college life. If you haven’t yet, just wait for it. When you stand on the stage at your graduation ceremony, and you haven’t had such a groupmate, you may want to ask yourself: am I the PITA all this time?
I’ve talked a lot of sh*t about PBL so far, but this is not really answering the question:
Why is there such a thing as project-based learning (PBL)?
So let’s take it seriously from here.
First of all, we need to take a look at the definition of PBL. Here’s how Wikipedia describes PBL:
“Project-based learning (PBL) is a student-centered pedagogy that involves a dynamic classroom approach in which it is believed that students acquire a deeper knowledge through active exploration of real-world challenges and problems. Students learn about a subject by working for an extended period of time to investigate and respond to a complex question, challenge, or problem. It is a style of active learning and inquiry-based learning. PBL contrasts with paper-based, rote memorization, or teacher-led instruction that presents established facts or portrays a smooth path to knowledge by instead posing questions, problems or scenarios.”
And here’s how the researchers describe it:
“Project-based learning (PBL) is an instructional model in which students work collaboratively to solve complex tasks (Thomas, 2010) that stem from “driving questions” (Larmer & Mergendoller, 2010). These complex tasks often times resemble real-world problems that students may encounter (Markham, 2011). They are interdisciplinary, complex and meaningful to learners (Larmer & Mergendoller, 2010). Throughout the process students are given the freedom to use innovative approaches to complete tasks. As students work to complete the tasks, teachers act as facilitators by guiding students towards the learning objectives, providing feedback along the way, and encouraging students to reflect on their progress (Markham, 2011).”
Never mind the empty rhetorics up there, here’s what it’s about:
- What is PBL: a teaching method where students are required to solve a complex, real-world question or challenge (in a group setting).
- What is it for: it is believed that students could acquire a deeper knowledge in this way compared with paper-based, rote memorisation or teacher-led instruction.
- How is it done: students are “given the freedom to use innovative approaches to complete tasks”, while teachers are supposed to guide students towards the learning objectives, provide feedback along the way, and encourage students to reflect on their progress.
Now, let’s study each of the points against our “real-world” experience with projects.
1. What is PBL
I actually spent some time listing out all the group project assignments I’ve done for the past 3 years. (There are simply too many so I put them in the appendix.)
First of all, a very obvious pattern in the list is that almost all group project assignment involves presentation. For the record, I’m not trying to downplay the importance of presentation here. Quite the contrary, I believe presentation is an essential skill for anyone to pursue any career. The problem is since it is a skill, it needs to be taught and acquired and I would argue that presentation itself can be a one-semester long course. But how many universities are actually teaching students that? I don’t know. At least I’ve never been systematically taught how to do it in college. The professors make the first assumption here:
Assumption #1
Students know or should know how to do presentations.
My question is if this is something important & essential to the students’ academic and career success, why and how do you assess it without even teaching them?
Now, let’s look at the assignment questions themselves and see if they fit into the definition of PBL — “to solve a complex, real-world question or challenge”. First, how do you define “complex”? For students from different academic backgrounds and with different levels of understanding on the topic, the complexity of the problem can vary drastically, not to mention the fact that some students are smarter than others. So here’s another assumption professors make they have:
Assumption #2
Any assignment question will be equally challenging to each student. Even if it’s not, that is ok.
Next, according to the definition of Google dictionary, “real-world” refers to “the existing state of things, as opposed to one that is imaginary, simulated, or theoretical.” Well, take a look at the list in Appendix 1 and recall the projects you have done. How many of them are actually asking you to solve “real-world” problems?
2. What is it for
The definition of PBL abovementioned states that PBL is “believed” to help students “acquire a deeper knowledge” compared to “paper-based, rote memorisation or teacher-led instruction”.
Since it is “believed” so, is that the case in reality? If you search on the topic, researchers have vastly divergent opinions on the effectiveness of PBL judged by the learning outcomes. However, it’s safe to say that badly designed PBL is not effective in helping students understand new concepts. Even worse, they can be a total waste of time as we can see from the next section.
But before we move on, take a step back and reflect, so far are we assuming all along that all the professors will always have the students’ best interest at heart? What if they can exploit PBL to benefit themselves rather than the students?
I don’t have answers for that because no professors will admit it. But there are some benefits to them:
- Fewer efforts needed to grade the assignments: compared with 40 papers from each student in the class, 8 papers from groups of 5 students are much easier.
- Fewer lecture time: students are usually told to do presentations using the lecture time and professors will take a back seat and listen. For those lectures, if not more relaxing, they certainly save professors the efforts to prepare for the lectures.
- A more “interactive” or “engaging” course: almost all professors want to make their classes more interesting, possibly for the purpose of impressing their bosses (e.g. deans).
If professors do it solely for their own good, then we don’t even need to know how it is done. It is doomed to be a failure.
3. How is it done
Since it’s called “Project-based Learning”, then by definition any group project assignment should be a “project” in the first place. Now go ask your professors: what exactly is a project?
Actually, don’t bother. Chances are they themselves can’t even tell what a project is. FYI, here’s the definition by Project Management Institute (PMI):
It’s a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service or result.
A project is temporary in that it has a defined beginning and end in time, and therefore defined scope and resources.
And a project is unique in that it is not a routine operation, but a specific set of operations designed to accomplish a singular goal. So a project team often includes people who don’t usually work together — sometimes from different organizations and across multiple geographies.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa! Take it easy, man. It’s just a school project…” you may say.
I admit that the definition can look intimidating, but if you look closer, what it describes is no different from our school project. And there is a simple reason why project management has become a profession, a discipline or even a science: you can’t successfully run any project without tested methodologies and essential skillsets. So, another assumption made by the professors:
Assumption #3
Students should know or learn how to manage the project themselves. Any group project assignment would be a good learning opportunity for them.
Following that logic, a swimming coach should simply throw any toddlers in the middle of the sea. If the kids got drown or eaten by sharks, their parents are to blame for not passing the swimming genes to them.
But let’s dig even deeper anyway and find out where exactly professors have failed. I’ll use the 4 Disciplines of Execution, an absolutely simple but effective framework to tackle any project-level or organisation-level commitments.
Discipline #1
Focus on the Wildly Important — clearly identifying what must be done.
Discipline #2
Act on the Lead Measures — doing the work that truly matters.
I would say most professors are responsible enough to give clear rubrics or marking sheet, detailing what objectives are to be met and what content and format are expected in the assignment. But there are some laissez-faire-style professors who would like the students to “surprise” them, giving the students very general topics to work on and encourage them to use “creativity” to solve the problem. Unsurprisingly, the lack of standards could easily lead the students to produce works that fail the professors’ expectations.
Discipline #3
Keep a Compelling Scoreboard — reminding the people if they are keeping score.
Work can be divided and distributed, deadlines can be set, but nothing can be done if someone fails to fulfill her/his responsibility. When a person can get away with underperforming, there is no point to keep scores. It is why accountability is important as Discipline #4 will illustrate.
Discipline #4
Create a Cadence of Accountability — holding each member accountable for her/his responsibilities.
This is where the professors fail spectacularly. No one could be held accountable for what she/he does in the group project setting. Sometimes the professors even tell the students to figure it out all by themselves — “You are all adults, and you should know how to resolves conflicts among yourselves.” It would sound even more ridiculous if it is said by some management professors because there is not a single organisation in the world which does not reward the good and punish the bad. This is essentially a Communist way of doing things, assuming that
Assumption #4
Every student wants to get good grades so they will work equally hard even in a group setting.
Truth is, there are students who simply do not care. As a fellow groupmate, most of the time you can’t do anything about these slackers.
Finally, to conclude…
A s we have seen above, professors make a lot of assumptions about the purpose, the desired outcome, and the mechanism of PBL, most of which do not stand to reason in real life. Educators boast about the benefits of PBL but neglect the prerequisites for a successful PBL experience. It seems to them that any assignment done by more than one student should be better for the students than done alone.
I got one more year left to complete my bachelor's degree and I am not expecting anything to change soon. All I am asking from the college is — since you are devoting less time to each student, can we at least get a discount on the tuition fee?
Appendix List of group project assignments I’ve done in the past 3 years
- [Economics / Paper & Presentation] Write a paper on the topic “Should governments focus on taxing income or should they focus on taxing consumption?”
- [International Business / Paper & Presentation] Write a paper on an HBR case study on Four Season’s expansion strategies.
- [Industrial Engineering / Paper & Presentation] Write a thesis on the impact of one specific cognitive bias on decision-making in production management.
- [Industrial Engineering / Problems] Complete a case study on distribution network design.
- [Innovation & Entrepreneurship / Presentation] Present a business proposal for a start-up idea.
- [Electronics Technology / Hands-on Task & Presentation] Construct a robot and a website.
- [Economics / Paper & Presentation] Write a paper on any topic that’s related to the course content (China and the world economy).
- [Architecture / Paper & Presentation] Write a paper on an architect’s work (Children’s Creative Centre Playground by Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, Montréal, Canada, Expo 1967)
- [Cantonese / Video] Shoot a video in Cantonese.
- [Finance / Paper & Presentation] Write a paper on a case of novel risk-mitigating innovation (financial instrument or social institution coupled with cultural norms).
- [Entrepreneurship / Presentation] Present a fund-raising pitch deck for a promising start-up project.
- [Marketing / Paper & Presentation] Write a marketing plan proposal for a company.
- [Management / Paper & Presentation]Write a report on a major management issue of a big company; present a corporate management topic.
- [Accounting / Presentation] Discuss the ethical issues in an accounting misconduct case.
- [Information System / Hands-on Task & Presentation] Develop an APP prototype based on a business opportunity.