Busy With Learning: Serious Fun

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An episode of television's Everybody Loves Raymond has father and daughter grappling with completing an overwhelming school project. The comedy's main story line keyed on the school's curriculum decisions and balancing homework with time for just being a kid. An instructive point left untouched was, How can parents know if a project is worth the child's, and often the family's, time?

Keeping kids busy for the sake of keeping them busy is not what project learning is about. Rather, project-based instruction should be a carefully thought-out and managed learning strategy that draws on how kids' brains work and how they learn. In fact, it's a method designed to get kids hooked into the material—and remember it. It reaches beyond the isolated classroom into the world of grownups where knowledge and productivity are expectations.

Whether it's called project-based instruction, learning by doing, or constructivism (meaning that kids learn by building on and adding to what they already know), the idea is to motivate the learner by tapping into topics that kids can relate to their own experiences. Its intention is to connect learning with reality outside the classroom, helping the learner to recognize relationships and connections among the academic disciplines, and to expand skill-building opportunities.

While there's no one "correct" way for schools to carry out a project, it's important that the goals for the project are clear and the project is specifically linked to the curriculum and student performance. Learning academic content drives what the project is and how it is carried out. For example, "using algebra to solve everyday problems" or "to write persuasively" might be two learning objectives for a project. If parents want to know if assigned projects are worth the student's time, they might ask the teacher: What are your instructional goals for this project? How is this project linked to the curriculum and student performance?

A booklet, Project-Based Instruction: Creating Excitement for Learning, is part of the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory's By Request series. It provides an introduction to the approach and gives important features and elements to think about. There are brief project-learning profiles and contacts at five different Northwest schools, and a list of resources to help with ideas for project-based instruction.

The booklet is available online [www.nwrel.org/request/] and for sale.

This column by Karen Lytle Blaha is provided as a public service by the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory, a nonprofit institution working with schools and communities in Alaska, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and Washington.