Tuesday, March 16, 2010
project learning
This is what it is all about. By the seventh or eighth grade year, students should be actively engaged in this form of learning. You might ask why. I believe that students will get more out of their education by seeing and experiencing first-hand how subject material comes to life and is used. One thing that really comes out of project learning is the life experience that comes along with the learning. Another important benefit is that, through the experience of projects, the students can "fail" without actually failing. That may sound a bit funny, but we can't expect that all projects that are undertaken by the students will be successful. However, if the students do everything that they are supposed to do and perform well, the "failures" that they may experience won't be crucial. In fact, it would do the students well to occasionally "fail" a project. Now I'm using quotes around the word fail because they are still learning. It's not like they are designing the new engine for the space shuttle and if they mess that up, okay, that would be a critical failure and lives would be lost. By experiencing their mistakes through project learning and actually learning from these mistakes, those mistakes won't be made when it actually counts in real life. Project learning is like a simulation machine for life; if you screw up, it's okay---no one gets hurt but you see where you made your errors so you don't make that error next time. Life is not a multiple-choice test, though sometimes it seems like it when we're faced with options and more than one answer seems likely. I'm pretty sure I would get a failing grade if that were the case. Let me get back to the word "fail" again for a moment. I don't want to come across as believing that the students will fail. I want to come across as being the one to say, "Okay, so this didn't go as planned; let's back up and see what went wrong and correct it." By doing this, the students get to deal with temporary failure, but eventual success. After all, isn't this what we want the students to do?
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I like your discussion of the word "fail" here. And I agree that we probably should shelve that word in most cases because, as you said Paul, in learning we all need multiple chances to try things out. In baseball, a hitter is wildly successful if he/she gets ONE hit every three times. And yet in school, we expect our kids to be successful 100% of the time. Kids learn best in an atmosphere where risk-taking (academic risk-taking) is encouraged and where they are supported in all of this.
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