Essential Question: What does the most effective method of learning look like?
On one hand, there is the traditional method of instruction. A teacher stands in front of a classroom full of students. The teacher lectures. The students take notes. The quality of the notes depends on the wide range of engagement and interest in the topic. After a while, the teacher stops lecturing, and the students receive a worksheet. This worksheet allows them to practice the skills or insert the information they’ve learned. When enough worksheets and lectures have taken place, the teacher will administer a test. After the test, the students will retain some of the information they’ve crammed into their brains while preparing, but most of the information, lacking a critical context and with no authentic transferability to the real world, will diffuse into the ether of the universe, forgotten forever.
This lecture-and-test method of instruction dates back to the Middle Ages. Imagine if medicine or technology hadn’t changed since the Middle Ages. Doctors would still be draining patients of blood for every minor ailment. The catapult would be considered a novel idea. Yet the lecture-and-test method of learning is still prevalent in education today.
Project-based learning, on the other hand, engages and motivates students in a way that traditional methods of instruction cannot emulate. Rather than accumulate and regurgitate facts, students actively pursue the answers to real life questions in a manner consistent with how they’d encounter these problems beyond the walls of academia. This makes sense. If your profession happens to be a doctor, you aren’t given a weekly multiple choice exam with an essay question. You are tested in every interaction you have with a patient. Each and every day you apply your knowledge and experience. This is what makes project-based learning so effective.
In social studies, instead of merely reading about the work archaeologists do, students become archaeologists. They excavate a site, label and store their artifacts, look at primary and secondary sources to check their findings against what is already known, and present their conclusions to classmates. In science, psychics students do not merely read about Newton’s laws, they design roller coasters, which, in order to be successful, must show an understanding of these laws. Project-based learning allows for trial and error. If at first students do not show understanding, they are challenged to experiment, retry, and reassess the direction they are going until they find a solution. They don’t just get it wrong and move onto the next unit. This is why project-based learning allows for a greater depth of understanding.
The role of the teacher is also drastically different in project learning. Teachers are not the authoritative fountain of knowledge that doles out information to an eagerly awaiting classroom, as we see in the traditional model of instruction. In contrast, a teacher who uses project-based learning is a guide and a facilitator. This way, the student becomes accountable for his/her own learning. The teacher, as the more experienced learner, can point students in the right direction, but the critical decisions, and thus the critical lessons, are the responsibility of the student.
In short, project-based learning is a hands-on, collaborative, active, technology-enhanced style of learning. In addition to the content, it also teaches the skills that our students need to be successful in the 21st century: communication, presentation, organization, time management, research, reflection, and self-assessment. Seymour Papert, professor at MIT, sums up the benefits of project learning best when he describes it as “the individual having the right to pursue individual interests, and this is where you get deep and wonderful growth.”
