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When I started doing project-based learning with my students, I noticed two immediate changes in my classroom. First, my students were far more interested in doing projects based on the content we were learning than they were in simply listening to me give a lecture on the topic. Second, attendance went up and classroom problems went down. These factors contributed to a higher degree of interest and involvement in what we were learning than I had ever had before.
Our first projects were simple and not very technically oriented. The students quickly learned that planning was the most critical part of the project process. Much to my delight, they soon realized that the process was actually more important than the final product. They discovered, for example, that if they sat down at a computer and tried putting a project together without any planning, it took much longer to get anything completed. Why? Because they were always changing something as they worked. Then, that change would affect something somewhere else that would have to be changed, and so on. As a class, we decided that our first criteria for doing projects had to be a thorough planning process. Soon, projects that were being developed as part of our class were being used by social studies teachers, science students, the Library Media Specialists. Our work began to have value outside of the classroom. Students began receiving requests from other departments to use their planning and project-building skills to create multimedia products for those disciplines. Real people wanted and stood to benefit from the work they were doing. ...meeting the expectations of someone other than their teacher was a definite eye-opener...
Before long, we were getting requests from community organizations who had heard about the students’ projects. They wanted to meet with these talented teams of students and have them complete important projects for them. The students suddenly had an opportunity to do “real” work, not an assignment for a class.
The reality of designing a project and meeting the expectations of someone other than their teacher was a definite eye-opener, and doing “real world applications” took on an entirely new meaning. My students rose to the challenge and completed some awesome work for several community organizations. You can see an example at: http://www.teachers.ocps.net/moa/ Knowing their work had to meet the scrutiny of the community made the students more aware of how important it is to be able to take their knowledge and demonstrate how that knowledge can be useful to others. In other words, they had to know what they were talking about or the whole world would see their mistakes. They also gained a great deal of satisfaction (and a lot of self-confidence) when they were recognized for the work that they had done.  |
