Challenge Based Learning: Engage (English Version)
I’ve had my first CBL student experience in November, 10th 2018. Was an memorable experience and I want to share with you. But first, is important to bring some context.
The Challenge Based Learning was created in 2008 named as Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow. Created inside Apple, had as proposal identify the essential principles of 21st century learning environment design with a focus on high school.
Basically, the method addresses an engaging and multidisciplinary way of teaching and learning that encourages students to use their everyday technology to solve real-world problems. CBL is collaborative and active, students work in groups, with teachers, experts, communities, learning to ask good questions and trying to find answers to them in certain ways (even when there is no answer you are led to think of a list of tasks to find the answer).
Before going any further into the method, my pedagogical heart does not allow me not to talk about the skills of the future professional. CBL does not make sense without them. There are 10 skills that will be indispensable for entering the job market in the digital age (which is now !!!!!).
- Resolution of complex problems
Skill consists of the ability to solve new and undefined problems in real environments and builds from a solid foundation of critical thinking.
2. Critical Thinking
Critical thinking involves logic and reasoning. The professional should be able to use logic and reasoning to question a particular problem, consider various solutions to that obstacle, and put the “pros” and “cons” on the scales with each new approach.
3. Creativity
To be creative is to be able to connect seemingly disparate information and, from this connection, to construct new ideas to present something “new”. The avalanche of new products and new technologies have demanded professionals a good deal of creativity so that they can benefit from all these changes.
4. People management
Managing people means being able to motivate teams, maximize productivity, and respond to employees’ needs. Managing people is a very important tool and connects directly with emotional intelligence.
5. Coordination with others
Coordination with others is an important social skill, which involves knowing how to communicate, working with people of different personalities, and, above all, dealing with the differences found in each one of them.
6. Emotional intelligence
Emotional intelligence also includes identifying our own feelings so that we can motivate and manage the emotions within us
7. Judgment and decision-making
In the face of the sheer volume of data organizations are gathering today, there is a growing need for professionals not only to read and interpret this information but also to make crucial decisions.
8. Service Orientation
As values are changing rapidly, knowing how to properly guide customers will be an essential skill in the job market. More than knowing how to guide, the professional should know their audience, study their clients, to adapt the products and services offered to the reality of the consumer.
9. Negotiation
The ability to negotiate with colleagues, managers, clients and teams will be high on the list of desirable skills.
10. Cognitive Flexibility
The more flexible a person is, the more easily he will be able to see new patterns and make unique associations between ideas.
Okay, but what do I mean by that?
Let’s go into the CBL a bit more to understand where the two things intersect.
The CBL is divided into 3 major parts: Engage, Investigate, Act (Engage, Investigate and Act). In this reflection, I will concentrate on the first part, Engage.
Engage
This first part I believe was the one I liked the most. Basically, we have a target, “Big Idea”. This target is one (or several) global impact issues. In my first contact with the CBL, we use the Global Goals. They were created by world leaders who put 17 goals to make the world better by 2030. After some time researching on each of the goals, we had opportunity to decrease the number of goals to 3 until the mentors raffled among the three, only one that would remain. In the case of my group, we are aiming at reducing inequalities worldwide.
We asked a question (Essential Question) that would guide our work and below it we put 10 Challenge Objectives and actions that could be taken in relation to the problem. We have selected two of them to guide our solution.
Still in this problem, we were prompted to write 30 questions (Guiding Questions) about the problem that would be generated through a discussion with the group. We were able to write a list of tasks to answer the questions that did not have answers and answer the ones we knew the answer. The result looks like this:
In this first experiment, he had found everything very fast, we hardly had time to follow what was happening and with the very rapid introduction of the methodology, there were also many doubts about rules that could (or could not) change the direction of the task that we were doing.
An interesting feature of CBL is precisely the incentive to work in groups. Basically, almost all the work is done in community. If I had to describe it in one word it would be cocreate.
Taking this into consideration and already making a comparison with the skills of the future professional, people management, coordination with others, negotiation and cognitive flexibility are skills that we can only develop in group and practice. How does the CBL do this? Motivating us to solve complex problems, which by chance is also one of those skills.
Last year I started working with this new world, Lean Startups. There, I discovered that everything, absolutely everything, needs a PURPOSE. The most successful Startups in the world had a clear purpose, a well-defined culture and talents that could help make that possible. The CBL engagement reminded me a lot about this relationship between the purpose and success of a Startup.
From the moment I helped manage this Startup, I realized that it was not just the sale of products and services that the company “fed”. The culture in the 4.0 market is one of the influential factors in the purchasing power of the end user. Therefore, a company’s success can't be measured only by the sales force, but rather by the impact of its culture and purpose on the market. And that has a lot to do with the Engage phase.
Finding your purpose is essential and primordial; without it you have nothing.
And, as Walt Disney said:
And so, after much waiting, on a day like any other, I decided to triumph …I decided not to wait for the opportunities and, yes, to get them myself. I decided to see each problem as an opportunity to find a solution. I decided to see each desert as a possibility to find an oasis. I decided to see each night as a mystery to solve. I decided to see each day as a new opportunity to be happy. That day I discovered that my only rival was no more than my own limitations and that to face them was the only and best way to overcome them . That day, I discovered that I was not the best and that maybe I had never been. I stopped caring about who wins or loses. Now I mind simply knowing better what to do. I learned that the difficult thing is not to get up there, but rather to stop climbing. I learned that the best triumph is to be able to call someone “friend”. I have discovered that love is more than a simple state of falling in love, “love is a philosophy of life”. That day, I stopped being a reflection of my past few triumphs and I became a dim light in the present. I learned that it’s no use being a light if it does not light the way of others. That day, I decided to change so many things … On that day, I learned that dreams exist to become reality. And since that day I no longer sleep to rest … I simply sleep for to dream.
On my second experience with Engage, our Big Idea was Smart Cities. In it, we had more time to understand the theme better, to consult specialists, to take a series of doubts, to start developing the rest of the activities.
After reflections and lectures on Smart Cities, we gather in groups drawn to create the Essential Questions. At that moment, I noticed a movement of the team to develop the negotiation skills, so that we reached conclusions before the deadline. It also took emotional intelligence to be able to deal with different opinions and know the perspective of the other.
Then we validated our work with other groups and had the opportunity to comment on the work of others. At that time, the critical thinking skill was the one that came on the scene. Personally, I try to give increasingly constructive feedbacks, trying to better describe what I’m feeling is missing or could improve. Constructive feedbacks are not only pointing the error but rather presenting the way to concert it and it takes emotional intelligence to convey this feedback.
While validating the work of the other groups, I noticed that the CBL, as a method, has some flaws. I believe that because our basic education is very regulated and square, we are not accustomed to certain types of “freedom”. I’ll explain in steps:
1. They asked us to ask questions
2. We were in doubt as to the model of these questions
3. We wonder how we should write these questions
4. We asked the teachers and mentors what words we should use the questions
This indecision and insecurity in this case for our group was not quite a problem, although it took some of our time. But it could be and I explain how:
The creative process needs excitement to happen. Emotion is a key element in learning and triggers a process of senses. The teacher should always seek the student’s perception, considering the essential circumstances of the moment they appear.
Within the creative process, the human being is conditioned to react to certain stimuli and uses the emotion to do so. Emotions can be good or bad and result in actions that can be assertive or not:
What I mean by this? A method that creates insecurity for the student, even if it is in an activity and that is fast, can lead to bad feelings of the student that result in fast actions in a contrary movement than we would like as mentors and mentors.
On the other hand, I agree that the method must be open and general, so that it does not limit creativity (which is one of the skills of the future and is also developed in the CBL). But he would make that change little by little so that it would not be felt by the students.
To facilitate: You as a student, have always been taught to follow models already ready for classroom activities, since before learning to read or communicate with words. At some point in your life, when you already have your personality formed, you enter a course that changes your whole paradigm and now, that you are already accustomed to following models for everything, you have to deconstruct this constant. I can list two problems here:
1- Change occurs suddenly and you do not have time to adapt
2- You may not have developed the skills needed to study without a ready-made model that brings you security
In this way, I believe that every change must be done in a few steps, in an almost imperceptible way, altering small parts of the routine, developing those skills and then changing the paradigm completely.
Anyway, I noticed that this feeling went through not only my group, but many others. From another point of view, I see this insecurity in a positive way. In a way, all this feeling brought us a sense of community that brought together 4 groups in one place and we all validated the questions at the same time, making a preview of the presentation and giving feedback. This sense of community had long ago not seen in a group that knows each other so little.
