Teaching and Life as Project Based

Christopher Start
Sep 8, 2018 · 3 min read
Photo Credit Daniel Galleguillos

When I started learning about project based learning, I never imagined it would influence not only how I teach, but how I view working.

Project based learning is based on the idea that we learn by constructing meaning through experience. When given a juicy, or just-right challenge, a child’s natural curiosity is piqued. The teacher then becomes a coach, or as one trainer put it, a meddler-in-the-middle of learning. This is a very scary place for a professional who is used to (or is expected to have) complete control of the classroom. However, once the culture is established, and learners are engaging (in age-appropriate ways) their own voice and agency; guided by the teacher. An entirely different world of school emerges. In this world, what matters is both process and product. It radically changes the teacher-student relationship. It is not egalitarian, but a relationship of respect and growth, instead of authoritarian structures (OK, I’m oversimplifying).

What surprised me as I plunged into this new world of education is how much it has altered my expectations about work. Focusing on process and product; building rapport; and favoring depth and quality over breadth and quantity means I do not see my job as a deliverer of content and controller-of-behavior. However, in a check-the-box world of main-line education, this is not a tolerable position.

I see not only education as something that should be project-based, but work as such. Project based work: it isn’t the titles and corporate ladders, but the different tasks you get to tackle with different teams. Managers are coaches in on the field with you, not bearers of the carrot and stick sitting at a safe distance. To use another image, it isn’t the factory-floor, but the master’s workshop.

To be clear, it is simpler when the curriculum is check-the-box and the boss can simply give you a carrot (or the stick). However, given the vast numbers of disengaged learners and workers in our schools and workplaces, it is clear to me that these old structures are no longer acceptable (even if they were once tolerable). We are not made for simple. The human brain is the single most complex thing we have yet discovered and it is wasted on the simple.

And so, I discover myself to be on the outside of a profession I worked so hard to enter, that of teaching. I know from experience that students flourish in the messy, occasionally loud, project based environment. I know from my own life that I flourish when I have a space that lets me treat my job as a project and not a checklist. However, I’d rather create and build than go through the motions.

And you? What are your projects? Do you have voice and agency? How do you spend your precious time on this earth? Life is too short and the human potential too great to waste on the check boxes.

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