Teachers at Wheaton High School in Montgomery County, Md., are encouraging students to answer their own questions by trial and error, cooperation with other students, independent research, and other methods that are a far cry from lectures, the Washington Post reports.
The projects aren’t unlike what they used to be when teachers lectured in front of the class. Students have always dissected frogs or built castles out of sugar cubes. But the style of project-based learning emphasizes cooperation, the article said.
“It’s much different, more interactive,” the Post quoted one student as saying during a biomedical innovation class. She said the new style has helped her overcome her shyness. “It forces you to communicate because you have to work in groups.”
The change in teaching style, which school leaders hope helps to teach important, 21st-century skills, goes along with physical renovations to the school. The new school in Silver Spring is expected to open in August 2015. A group of parents and business and community leaders working with school officials will develop a vision for the new Wheaton by the end of the school year.
“Critical competencies for workers now include skills and knowledge acquired beyond a high school education as well as the ability to apply learning, think critically about information, solve novel problems, collaborate, create new products and processes, and adapt to change,” schools Superintendent Joshua P Starr was quoted as saying. If the change proves to be successful, he believes some form of the program could eventually propagate to several other county high schools.
Supporting teachers who teach actual skills
What happens in classrooms that use project-based learning is that the teacher becomes more of a facilitator and less of a lecturer. Don’t think this involves less “teaching” than the lecture model; in fact, it involves more teaching, since resources available to students exceed the knowledge of any one teacher.
As we have written on our front page, the most efficient way for kids—or anyone of any age—to learn is through “autonomous, firsthand, curiosity-driven, wide-ranging, self-directed, trial and error, immediate feedback, personal experience.” We were quoting veteran educator Marion Brady, who originally wrote those words.
Classrooms across the country, such as those at High Tech High in San Diego, that use project-based learning are finding that the principles of personalization, adult world connection, common intellectual mission, and “teacher as designer” drive home lessons, allowing students to be responsible for their own learning and retain information better. To drive them home even deeper, students at High Tech High are required to complete internships in the community.
One student at Wheaton, who completed an internship at a physics lab at George Washington University, found that some of the tools she used at work, such as software, were the same as those used in her high school class. “It helps me in ways to actually get the general idea of things I might face in the future,” the Post quoted her as saying.
Thus it is important to make that adult world connection and provide the tools of those adult worlds to students in high school if project-based learning is to reach its full potential.
To detractors, this is a sure sign of corporate sponsorship of our schools. Creating a need to supply students and teachers with software and other tools from the real world, some people believe, forces those schools to waste money in purchasing those products from for-profit corporations. These folks argue that most adults learn how to use whatever tools they need on the job, on the job. Educators need to prepare kids to become quickly adept at the use of any new tool, not to master any one tool in particular, they say.
But the other side of that argument is that if we say we want high school graduates to be prepared for careers or college, shouldn’t we provide training in the use of some of the tools they’ll be using in their careers or in college?
For example, if I want to train students to develop websites, which is a growing 21st-century career, what good would it do to train them to write programs in C++? The web uses languages like Java, PHP, and so on. On the one hand, they will learn what object-oriented programming is about, but on the other hand, they could learn about object-oriented programming and develop a mastery of the programming language they’ll actually use on the web in college or in a career. Best of both worlds—if wise investment decisions can be made by the high school.