January

Project-Based Learning

What is project-based learning?
Project-based learning is the use of in-depth and rigorous classroom projects to facilitate learning and assess student competence. Project-based learning is an instructional method that provides students with complex tasks based on challenging questions or problems that involve the students' problem solving, decision making, investigative skills, and reflection that includes teacher facilitation, but not direction.

Project-Based Learning is focused on questions that drive students to encounter the central concepts and principles of a subject hands-on. Students form their own investigation of a guiding question, allowing students to develop valuable research skills as students engage in design, problem solving, decision making, and investigative activities. Through Project-Based learning, students learn from these experiences and take them into account and apply them to the world outside their classroom. Project-Based Learning is a different teaching technique that promotes and practices new learning habits, emphasizing creative thinking skills by allowing students to find that there are many ways to solve a problem.

What every good project-based learning project needs:
A project is meaningful if it fulfills two criteria. First, students must per¬ceive the work as personally mean¬ingful, as a task that matters and that they want to do well. Second, a mean¬ingful project fulfills an educational purpose. Well-designed and well-implemented project-based learning is meaningful in both ways.

1. A Need to Know - launching a project with an “entry event” that engages interest and ini¬tiates questioning. An entry event can be almost anything: a video, a lively discussion, a guest speaker, a field trip, or a piece of mock correspondence that sets up a scenario. With a compelling student project, the reason for learning relevant material becomes clear: I need to know this to meet the challenge I’ve accepted.

2. A Driving Question - A good driving question captures the heart of the project in clear, compelling language, which gives students a sense of purpose and challenge. The question should be provocative, open-ended, complex, and linked to the core of what you want students to learn. Without a driving question, students may not understand why they are undertaking a project.

3. Student Voice and Choice - In terms of making a project feel meaningful to students, the more voice and choice, the better. However, teachers should design projects with the extent of student choice that fits their own style and students.

4. 21st Century Skills - A project should give students oppor¬tunities to build such 21st century skills as collaboration, communication, critical thinking, and the use of tech¬nology, which will serve them well in the workplace and life.

5. Inquiry and Innovation - Students find project work more meaningful if they conduct real inquiry, which does not mean finding infor¬mation in books or websites and pasting it onto a poster. In real inquiry, students follow a trail that begins with their own questions, leads to a search for resources and the discovery of answers, and often ultimately leads to generating new ques¬tions, testing ideas, and drawing their own conclusions. With real inquiry comes innovation—a new answer to a driving question, a new product, or an individually generated solution to a problem.

6. Feedback and Revision - Formalizing a process for feedback and revision during a project makes learning meaningful because it empha¬sizes that creating high-quality products and performances is an important purpose of the endeavor. Teachers can arrange for experts or adult mentors to provide feedback, which is especially meaningful to stu¬dents because of the source.

7. A Publicly Presented Product - Schoolwork is more meaningful when it’s not done only for the teacher or the test. When students present their work to a real audience, they care more about its quality.

(Project needs from “7 Essentials for Project-Based Learning” by John Larmer and John R. Mergendoller)