In the last decade, project-based learning has become a laudable model for student choice and learner-directed education. The framework is simple: students choose a problem to solve or a question to answer, and through self-directed investigation, they solve the problem or answer the question and learn new skills along the way. Students work in groups and individually. At the end of the project, students unveil a product that represents what they’ve learned. And they show off that project to people outside of the classroom — parents, scientists, city planners, engineers, or businesspeople (Krajcik and Blumenfeld 2006).
The projects are complex, multitiered, nonlinear, and always real-world. Students are involved in every level of the project, from the framing of the initial problem, to setting goals, to determining instructional activities. Teachers facilitate these projects, but they don’t control the process or even issue any explicit goals. The students do all that good, good work.
The research on project-based learning concludes that students in this instructional framework feel more ownership of their own learning and report having higher attendance, more self-reliance, and more retention of core subject material. In addition, students gain greater problem-solving abilities when learning information through its application (Vega 2015; Thomas 2000; Krajcik and Blumenfeld 2006).
In a true project-based classroom, students are in control. If this gives you hives, I understand, but it’s not the frat-party-meets-prison-break you might imagine. Student-centered means that students’ questions become the focus of learning. Their desire to learn creates a need to know, and in the midst of that energy, they solve problems, analyze data, think critically, and develop soft skills like self-control and tenacity.
Project-based learning was the framework I’d been looking for to simultaneously protect the creative processes of 148 students while helping them learn to manage long-term writing projects, the kind of projects they would be doing in college or in a career. I realized by transferring the project-based learning tenets into a regular English classroom, my students could develop skills to become independent readers and writers.
Enter project-based writing. In project-based writing, students manage their writing project with systemized external supports like pitches, proposals, project goals, and schedules, but the process remains wholly the student’s, and the resulting product is also the student’s from conception to rendering to delivery. The steps of all writing projects are clearly parallel with the steps of project-based learning.
References:
Krajcik, Joseph S., and Phyllis C. Blumenfeld. 2006. “Project-Based Learning.” In The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences, edited by R. Keith Sawyer. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Thomas, John W. 2000. A Review of Research on Project-Based Learning. www.ri.net/middletown/mef/linksresources/documents/researchreviewPBL_070226.Pdf
Vega, Vanessa. 2015. “Project-Based Learning Research Review.” December 1
