In an elementary school classroom (or any classroom for that matter), what is the role of the student? What is the role of the teacher? These are age old questions brought to us by educational theorists such as Dewey, Piaget, Vygotsky, and others. My goal for my students using the Project Based Learning approach is to tie together what I feel are the most important facets of childhood cognitive development in the school setting: the expertise and knowledge of the classroom teacher and the interests and motivations of the student.
Throughout my many years of being a K-6 classroom teacher (and as a student), I have always been interested in how projects drew my students into their school work. As for me, I’ll never forget the project I did on The Battle of the Little Bighorn in my 11th grade American Studies class. I created a 3D model of the Little Bighorn Valley and read and studied extensively about Custer, Sitting Bull, and general US history as it related to the relationship between the US government and indigenous peoples. What is most striking to me about this memory is not the details of it, but rather that I have memory of it at all. I picked the topic. I was given the latitude to go and research it. I was given a wide variety of options on how to display my learning. I firmly believe that as a student, my personal investment in my own learning was pivotal in not only my acquisition of knowledge, but the retention of it as well.
I recently did end of the year projects on topics of the students' choice in my fifth grade class. After demonstrating and practicing the format and organization of different kinds of projects, they picked the topics. I got developmentally appropriate resources for them and they had to choose how they were going to display their knowledge. We worked on these for about 6 weeks. Students chose topics that ranged from wolves to Pompeii, from rain forests to Frederick Douglass. The topics reflected how varied the group was. It was then that I wondered whether this is a practice that could be carried throughout the year and a question both Allison and I are interested in exploring.
Project Based Learning facilitates learning in a systematic, diagnostic, and intrinsically motivating way. Children are able to dive into their passions and deepen their understanding of them, and do it in a way that respects their differences as readers, writers, artists, and learners.
This by no means substitutes or supplants the need for concrete skill development (developmental spelling, guided reading, etc.). Children will still learn skills in a measurable and developmentally appropriate way, but project based learning allows them to practice and demonstrate these skills in a way that is relevant and engaging to them.
By giving children the ability to explore their interests and loves and then create products to present and share, we all get to see the power of following what is true and relevant in their hearts and minds. Project Based Learning can be an amazing way to provide students a place of curiosity and love of learning about the world around them, while maintaining and supporting the high expectations we have around traditional academic skill development.
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