Explore, Question, Ponder, and Imagine

Projects give kids the chance to delve deeply and find their own way through challenging intellectual terrain

By Lee Sherman

Illustration by Antonia Manda

With his little boy cradled in one arm, a young father hurriedly locks the front door and strides toward the family Volkswagen. He's running late for work, and he still has to drop 18-month-old Benjamin at the day-care center. He doesn't notice the trio of crows that is just then flapping over his northeast Portland home. But Ben's brown eyes turn to the beating wings at once. "Bird!" he exclaims, pointing toward the sky. His dad pauses in the walkway to look up. "Yes, Ben, look at those birds," he responds, smiling with pride at his son's growing vocabulary. Just for a moment, the harried dad shares his child's fascination with this plainest of creatures, this most ordinary of events to touch their urban neighborhood.

For little Ben, Tuesdays aren't days for routine stresses and rigid schedules—Tuesdays are days for mysteries and discoveries. Safe within his parents' ever-watchful love, he crawls over every inch of his world. He sops up sights and sounds like an insatiable sponge and delights in every new find.

In a few years, he'll take that roiling curiosity to school. If he's lucky, his teachers will work to nurture his innate longing for learning.

Wide-Eyed Wonder

It's children's natural bent for discovery that fuels the project approach. Arguing that a slavish devotion to textbooks and lectures too often leaves kids' intellects pinched and withered, project proponents point to the wide-eyed wonder with which toddlers like Benjamin meet life each morning. The challenge for schools, they say, is to keep that thirst for understanding unquenched—not only for the duration of formal education, but for the span of a lifetime.

A rich and full education encourages kids to "pose questions, pursue puzzles, and increase their awareness of significant phenomena around them," assert Lilian Katz of the University of Illinois and Sylvia Chard of England's College of St. Paul & St. Mary. "An overall aim" of the project approach, they write in their 1999 book Engaging Children's Minds: The Project Approach, "is to cultivate the life of the child's mind. In its fullest sense, the term mind includes not only knowledge and skills, but also emotional, moral, and aesthetic sensibilities."

In Understanding by Design, Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe argue this same point with passion and eloquence. "Students need to know what scholars know if they are to understand their work: how key facts and principles are the revealing and powerful fruit of pondering, testing, shaping, and rethinking of experience," the researchers write in the 1998 publication from the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. "When the student does get underneath or inside knowledge production, he learns something shocking. Much of what we call knowledge is the result of trial and error, inquiry, and arguments among experts." Knowledge, they say, is "pondered, imagined, analogized, tested, argued, and hammered out"—not, as some students may imagine, plucked whole from a metaphorical tree or lifted from a library book. Rather, to be fully understood, ideas need to be "explored, questioned, played with, used in realistic contexts, rephrased, and verified."

Wiggins and McTighe don't toss around all those active verbs just to liven up their writing. Rather, those strong images nail the mental athleticism of project learning: You could call it minds in motion. Or, like William Heard Kilpatrick, you could call it "more or less of an adventure." Kilpatrick's words, gleaned from a series of articles on the "project method" in the Teachers College Record, sound as if they could have come from the keyboard of any current proponent of active learning. So the publication date on the series—1921—appears improbable. But Professor George Douglas Hofe, writing in the Record in 1966, traces project-based teaching to another professor from Teachers College, John Francis Woodhull. This trailblazer is on record for advocating projects for teaching science way back in the early 1900s, coinciding with writings by philosopher and educator John Dewey, who advocated learning by doing rather than learning by drilling.

Over the intervening years, other theories and trends have added weight to the project approach. Among them are Jean Piaget's theories of child development—which argue for concrete tasks and active learning over abstractions and passive learning—and the related but more recent notions of "constructivist," "experiential," and "discovery" learning. Influential also have been the "multiple intelligences" and "learning styles" ideas of Howard Gardner and others. Woodhull's notions—which he probably scrawled in longhand or banged out on one of the original manual typewriters—might seem prophetic now. Yet, on second look, it's clear that although kids have different toys and tools today, the essence of childhood is timeless and universal. The project approach was a good practice then and remains a good practice today because of the way kids take in and process concepts and information.

Some of the best ways of engaging kids are set out in a list by Wiggins and McTighe. They say kids respond to "hands-on tasks, mysteries, a combination of cooperation and competition, real-world challenges, role-play, provocative case studies or mock trials, audiences for products and performances, choices in process and product, and the ability to personalize work." This list captures the essence of project-based learning, though it's not all-inclusive simply because the possibilities for projects are infinite. In an effort to give shape to the endless project variants, Katz and Chard group them into three broad categories: investigations, constructions, and dramatic play. Rebecca Novick of the Northwest Laboratory echoes these notions in her 2000 report, The Unity Project. "Not only reading and writing, but play, visual art, music, dance, drama, observation, and investigation" allow kids to "get to the heart of a subject," she notes.

Where The Meaning Is

For maximum student engagement, a project should be bigger than the classroom, broader than the schoolhouse. It should reach into the community, into the world, maybe into the solar system—casting out into the farthest reaches of the starry universe, if that's where the child wants to take it. Researchers agree that projects should be linked, first, to things that matter in the real world. And second, they should have a connection to the child's personal history and particular place on the planet—her ancestors, her neighborhood, her village or city, her natural environment.

Researcher Fred Newmann says that applications and importance beyond the schoolhouse are what make schoolwork "authentic," and, therefore, laden with meaning for students. In Authentic Achievement: Restructuring Schools for Intellectual Quality, published by Jossey-Bass in 1996, Newmann defines authentic achievement in its broad sense as "intellectual accomplishments that are worthwhile, significant, and meaningful, such as those undertaken by successful adults: scientists, musicians, business entrepreneurs, politicians, craftspeople, attorneys, novelists, designers, and so on." Applied to academic achievement, authenticity can be discerned through three criteria, which Newmann judges to be critical to "significant intellectual accomplishment." They are:

• Construction of knowledge—Building on a foundation of prior knowledge, students "hone their skills and knowledge through guided practice in producing original conversation and writing, repairing and building of physical objects, or performing artistically"
• Disciplined inquiry—To meet this test, student work must draw upon an existing knowledge base, strive for "indepth understanding rather than superficial awareness," and express ideas and findings through "elaborated communication" (verbal, symbolic, or visual)
• Value beyond school—Student accomplishments should not be indicators of success in school alone

Newmann and his associates at the Center on Organization and Restructuring of Schools at the University of Wisconsin recently contributed significant findings to the field. A five-year study in the 1990s funded by the U.S. Department of Education looked at student engagement in about 130 classrooms in 24 restructured elementary, middle, and high schools. After controlling for students' gender, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and academic background, the researchers found that academic performance of students in both math and social studies skyrocketed after their teachers switched to "authentic pedagogy" (instructional practices rooted in the real world). If translated into rankings, the average student would have jumped from the 30th percentile to about the 60th percentile as a result of high versus low authentic pedagogy, Newmann reports.

Testing and rankings bring up one big worry of parents and teachers—that kids will miss basic skills and fundamental knowledge in the free-wheeling project environment. How will these kids fare on standardized tests for college admission, or even high school graduation? This worry is related to a common misconception about project-based learning, the experts say. Project critics often assume that project-based instruction replaces systematic instruction in key content and skill areas. Project proponents are quick to reassure these doubters that projects are meant to complement and supplement—not shove out—basic instruction.

"Bear in mind the underlying principle of the project approach: Skills applied to meaningful activities are more likely to be mastered," Katz and Chard insist. "Systematic instruction is formal, and project work is informal."

Newmann expands upon this point. "Repetitive practice, retrieving information, and memorization of facts or rules may be necessary to build knowledge and skills as foundations for authentic performance," he writes. "The point is not to abandon all forms of unauthentic work in school, but to keep authentic achievement clearly in view as the ideal valued end."

Projects help anchor the discrete bits of information that might otherwise float around amorphously in a student's brain. The student in a sense makes that information her own as she examines it from every angle. As she tests its validity and worth. And, finally, as she finds where it fits inside her very own store case of knowledge and experience.

"Our research suggests that students who think carefully about subjects, study them in depth, and connect them to their personal experiences are more likely to remember the facts and definitions called for on conventional tests," Newmann reports.

And, as Newmann notes, even high-stakes tests are beginning to reflect the project philosophy. "Support for authentic achievement also can be found in the changing content of conventional tests themselves, which increasingly include more items requiring higher-order thinking, depth of understanding, and elaborated written communication."

Designing For Standards

A related worry on the minds of project critics is the value of the work for larger learning goals. Although they agree that projects are enjoyable for kids, they counter that schools can't afford the luxury of lively learning when virtually every state in the union is riveted on reaching challenging new standards for learning—and the public is watching for results. Schools, they say, need to pound away at facts and skills, hammer away at reading and math, teach the textbook cover to cover, and practice, practice, practice. Otherwise, students will face a handicap when it comes time to take those all-important standardized tests.

Newmann argues against this viewpoint unequivocally: "A significant body of evidence contradicts this concern." He cites a study of alternatives to conventional practice by Michael Knapp, Patrick Shields, and Brenda Turnbull. In 1992, the research team examined the teaching of math, reading, and writing in 140 classrooms in 15 elementary schools serving disadvantaged students in six school districts. The researchers found, Newmann reports, "that when teachers taught for understanding and meaning rather than memorization, and when they connected the materials to students' experiences, their students consistently outperformed students in more conventional classrooms on advanced skills and did as well as or better on traditional tests."

Still, the danger of careening away from learning targets is a real one for teachers when they're working in the loosely structured project environment. Elaine Wrisley Reed, writing in the winter 1997-98 issue of American Educator, cautions that project-based learning has, for some practitioners, become "an educational fad gone awry." She charges that "projects frequently wind up keeping youngsters busy without really teaching them anything of importance."

Conceding that activity and inquiry alone do not guarantee educational value, project proponents affirm that standards ought to beat at the heart of the classroom, feeding and sustaining every activity. "The challenge," Wiggins and McTighe say, "is to point toward what is essential, not merely provide work that is entertaining. The design must blend what is engaging with what is effective."

Here's where the teacher's role becomes critical. Hands-on for kids doesn't mean hands-off for teachers. Fully eight decades ago, Kilpatrick was counseling teachers to plan projects strategically and guide students artfully to make sure important learning goals weren't lost or overlooked. "The teacher," he cautioned, "must set the stage and control the situation so that valuable purposes are likely to be proffered."

Nearly 80 years later, Novick reiterates the critical part a teacher plays as the project unfolds. "In the inquiry model of learning," she says, "the teacher's role moves from interrogator to a collaboration in joint inquiry. The ability to ask meaningful questions and formulate alternative solutions is critical to higher-order literacy demanded by today's society."

The trick for teachers, the experts agree, is finding the balance point between too much and too little involvement. The project must provide enough latitude for student initiative, creativity, and exploration. At the same time, it must (gently) funnel students toward mastery of challenging standards. It's a tightrope for sure.

A "Big Idea"

When 18-month-old Benjamin sees a flock of birds go by, he's not yet ready to ponder the mystery and complexity of what he has seen. But as he grows, he'll begin to ask questions, and the answers to those questions will lead to new questions in a never-ending spiral of inquiry. Starting with the simple observation of a crow in flight, a child may take an intellectual journey through the vast landscape of natural and human history. If a teacher provides the avenue, that journey will trample the boundaries between academic disciplines and range naturally from physics to American history. From biology to ancient Greek literature. From paleontology to Egyptian art. From ecology to world geography.

This cross-disciplinary approach to instruction turns around what Wiggins and McTighe call a "big idea." To make a big idea understood, they say, educators should design activities not for "coverage" but for "uncoverage."

They write: "Beyond learning about a subject, students will need lessons that enable them to experience directly the inquiries, arguments, applications, and points of view underneath the facts and opinions they learn if they are to understand them. Students have to do the subject, not just learn its results."