Tryangulation

Reinventing project based learning

I just had a great experience participating in NECC (National Educational Computing Conference) in Atlanta, Georgia, from my desk here in Ankara.

Around the same time I wrote a post about project-based learning I got in touch (via Ewan) with Jane Krauss, who has just written a book with Suzie Boss titled Reinventing Project-Based Learning: Your Field Guide to Real-world Projects in the Digital Age. Jane and Suzie also write a blog on the same theme and created a Flickr group to collect photos of school projects around the world. Yesterday in Atlanta Jane and Suzie gave a presentation on project-based learning. They surprised me by inviting me to join in the presentation via Skype, along with Linda Hartley in the UK. It was a little strange talking to a room full of people I couldn't see, and because of the headphones I had some trouble hearing my own voice as well, but still it was very cool and fun. Linda created a wiki to write a summary of the presentation.

After my little piece during the session, I started wondering (since I couldn't see faces) if maybe I miscommunicated one of my points, so I'm offering a clarification here by way of a short case study:

Our school is in the vicinity of one of the last remaining habitats of a critically endangered wildflower that in Turkish is called yanar döner (Centaurea tchihatcheffi). Teachers and students had been thinking about how the school could get involved in this problem, but a lot of the thinking was limited to what students could do inside the school building, so most of the suggestions were for creating a website, slogans, a poster contest in the school, and other media projects targeting the school community.

I conducted a simple problem analysis exercise with the students and one of our biology teachers, where we stated the problem (threat of extinction), and then ask why (loss of habitat). You ask why again (urban sprawl, intensive agriculture), and keep asking why until you get the big picture that shows how this problem relates to a larger system. As we looked at the bigger picture, we saw that a media campaign in the school community would not touch people who were close enough to the problem to make much of a change. But we did realize that we could take a different  and more effective approach by collecting seeds in the wild and propagating them on our campus. The creative juices started flowing and we saw the potential for producing enough seeds to share with other schools in the area, and even for establishing a low-tech seed bank to help protect other endangered wildflowers in our province.

Although some of our students might have felt content with a nice website and a contest, bringing in a learning tool from "the real world" helped us find a solution that could have a genuine and sustainable impact.

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Can project-based learning learn from project management?

I've had more professional experience with "real life" projects in rural education, rural health, refugee services, and so on,  than with "project-based learning" as conducted in the classroom.  I continue to do a fair amount of reading in project management and how it benefits from the fields of knowledge management and organizational learning, and have been contemplating for several months how there ought to be more convergence of learning from real-life projects with learning from classroom projects.

One major difference between these two kinds of projects is this: Real-life projects (please be patient -- I know that classrooms are 'real' too and I'm working on a fairer way to distinguish) have as their main objective the creation of something you can leave behind for others; these projects are evaluated for the effectiveness and appropriateness of their outcomes.

Classroom projects, on the other hand, will also create something, but the main objective is that the persons who design and execute the project will have also achieved one of the school's learning objectives, and they will be graded according to what is learned; ideally a classroom project might even fail, yet the student could still succeed if she/he learned the intended lesson inherent in the project. In high school I tried to manufacture rayon in a lab experiment; I failed to create rayon but I still got a good grade on my analysis of why the experiment failed.

So can project-based learning learn from projects? Managers interested in organizational learning look at how to learn from mistakes, how to learn together,  and how to improve their success rate. Classroom projects, though, are still going to put priority on learning subject content: biology, history, physics. The assessment might include the student's collaboration, communication, and meta-learning, but these will still be secondary to the content learning objectives.

I'll keep mulling over this during the summer, and will try to put together some readings that would be of special interest to teachers who supervise classroom projects. Your comments are welcome!

Image is of children participating in the planning of a village reconstruction project in India following the tsunami of 2004.

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Resources for student leaders (and everyone else)

Thanks to a tip from Lifehacker, I just found a blog that provides resources for student leaders. My first foray into studentl.inc was to look at their Meeting Planner|Organizer|Worksheet but as I browsed through the site I was pleased to see other good resources on leadership, planning, and management issues relevant to leaders of student organizations. If you are involved in student-led activities, be sure to browse their archives (check the Categories listing on the right side of the screen) and pass this on.