🛠️Project Learning: Are You Doing It Wrong?
Are Projects Really the Best Way to Learn?
I love a project - as I write this my kids & their cousins are building a boat to sail around the tip of Africa to find India as part of our history lesson on the silk road.
However, there is a right way & a wrong way to use projects for academics.
Let’s start with the wrong way.
When I was in graduate school, project-based-learning (PBL) was IN. We were required to take PBL every semester & they built rooms specifically for this fancy-new way of teaching.
But project-based learning classes were a joke to us students.
Why? Because we knew they were ridiculous. We were asked things like “design a brand new deep brain simulator” you have 3 hours.
None of us has the background knowledge to do this. Nor did we have the time to become experts. So we’d write a bunch of stuff down & presented it with confidence.
We got As but we walked away wondering what was the point?
What my university learned (and us) the hard way is that there is a right & wrong way to do PBL - and they were doing it the wrong way.
Here’s how to do Project-Based-Learning correctly.
1. DECIDE LEARNING OBJECTIVES - for example: students will understand what deep brain stimulation is & how it works
2. TEACH STUDENTS - TEACH students about deep brain stimulation. Give them the proper background knowledge to do a project.
3. NOW DO PROJECT-BASED LEARNING: Develop a project that allows them to use the knowledge they just learned to do something new - in other words apply & solidify the knowledge
If you skip steps 1 & 2, students will get very little out of the project. Sure they’ll learn how to “brainstorm” or do “online research” but they’ll learn very little about what you are trying to teach them.
Now I know what you are saying “My kid just learned [insert skill] all on their own & projects was how they learned it.”
Being intrinsically motivated to learn something is an entirely different situation than when a parent or teacher is teaching a specific topic.
Student-driven projects based on a child’s unique interests are nearly universally useful & teach a whole host of additional skills like problem-solving, logic, & reasoning. I’m a fan!
Though I'll point out in nearly ALL cases, children seek outside support & guidance for those projects either from an adult, video, or book.
So should you use project-based learning. Absolutely! Just do it right.
Happy Learning♥️
~Claire Honeycutt, PhD
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This is actually an important topic, at a broader level. But I guess professional educators define 'project' differently. To me, a project isn't something you can complete in a few hours, but rather a longer-term activity that takes place over days, weeks, months or (outside academia) even years, and which consequently must be planned out as a series of intermediary steps to the end goal.
In the tech world, there's always something new to be learned, and a lot of folks try to use projects to learn a new programming language or other technology. And there seems to be a growing number of startup companies that have extended that idea even further, as a means of basically assembling and teaching a whole team of folks how to build something. SpaceX's Falcon 1 rocket and Tesla's original Roadster are prime examples.
So I guess what I'm trying to say is that project-based learning can be a valuable method, but it's still early days in trying to codify how it can best work, whether used more like unit studies in homeschooling, where 'projects' may just be an afternoon of activity, or something far more extensive.
Thank you! I think project-based learning is great in theory, but in practice (especially in university settings) it leaves a lot to be desired. The worst form of this is when students are given no prior instruction, so the project becomes the entire basis for learning, with typically disastrous results. So I'm delighted to see you point out that you have to teach first, and then do the project.
Even so, it seems to me that PBL works best with motivated and talented students. If someone doesn't engage with the project then the method is ineffective. So I'm not confident that this is something that scales well across large institutions. But for homeschooling it can be very effective, especially since you can tailor the projects to the specific needs of just a few students.