What is the buzz about Project Based Learning?
Here’s everything you have to know about PBL!
In academic literature,
Project based learning is a modern pedagogy that got popular over the years within STEAM education for its efficiency and its future-forward model that allows educators to prepare a generation of pragmatic and innovative learners.
To put it simply,
Project Based Learning is where we learn by doing. Let’s look at some important insights and highlights about this trending topic of modern learning.
Project based learning: Your manual to life
At some point we all wish we had a manual to life. PBL will be the closest thing you will ever experience as a trial before facing real-life!
Experience is the best teacher after all. The truth about learning is that we learn more effectively from experience and practice, and that’s why PBL allows you to learn from the experience of solving real life problems.
“Learning is the process whereby knowledge is created through the transformation of experience” (Kolb)
Experiential Learning is the underlying principle of Project Based Learning that encourages learners to gain both theoretical and practical knowledge of a subject simultaneously as they solve the ‘problems’ that are based on real world events.
Real-life problem solving is an essential skill in the dynamic world which you cannot master by just reading a textbook. You got to actually do it!
For instance, you cannot drive a car by reading a ‘how to drive’ guide, you have to actually drive one before they give you the license. Consider Project Based Learning as your driving license to face the real world!
The Projects
Let’s understand what these ‘projects’ look like
Seymour Papert, a dedicated proponent of PBL and a distinguished Professor from Massachusetts Institute of Technology claims:
“In real life, everything is a project ‘’
Look around you, from landscaping your garden, making a presentation for work, to launching your own business, everything out there is a project.
In a PBL classroom, students will tackle purposeful projects that are set around common day-to-day tasks and challenges.
The students are expected to take realistically applicable, creative, analytical and strategic measures to complete the task at hand.
These projects come in the shape of open-ended questions/ problems/ puzzles, instigating the learner’s curiosity. For example, ‘Provide solutions to a potential energy crisis’ or ‘Strategize for a post-pandemic recovery’; where they are encouraged to discuss, debate, analyze, formulate theories or provide long-lasting resolutions and implement them.
These projects could even be modelled to accomplish specific goals like “Promote your online business” or “build your own colony on Mars”
Steps of a Project in Project Based learning
As an illustration, take ‘Promoting an online business’ as a project:
As their first step, students may fractionate the project into a sequence of smaller problems that they will tackle strategically one after another as follows:
Researching the business model, defining a target market, exploring social media platforms, creating a website for the product, making creative content such as fliers / blogs / videos, promoting content through different channels, Defining a one-year strategy (or even something completely different to these steps).
As their second step, they may get into teams like the ‘marketing team’ or ‘programming team’, etc. to distribute the problems and solve them as a team.
Or they might even take positions in a group as a ‘Creative Designer’, ‘Writer’, ‘Programmer’, working together in one team to tackle the problems.
As they complete each problem component, they would attain specific educational goals. For instance, they would learn a programming language as they create a website for their business or they would master copywriting/ writing skills in a marketing context as they promote their content.
Most importantly, they will also be encouraged to brainstorm ideas, be creative and collaborate with each other as they solve these stimulating puzzles.
The final step will be a session of reflection. Here, we would like to encourage our learners to revise on what they’ve learned, analyze the strategies of other teams or members to learn what went right and wrong.
A ‘lesson’ in a school and a ‘project’ in a PBL open learning environment
In school you would sit through a painful forty-five-minute computer lesson where your teacher is giving you notes and a standard practical to teach you basics for programming and familiarize you with a simple coding platform.
In a PBL classroom, you will learn the basics to ‘programming’ as you complete a project, developing a simple game for your friends to play with you. Unlike a typical lesson of ‘Programming’ which has narrow and specific goals; projects are designed to contain multiple learning outcomes.
For example, in a ‘Game Design’ project, students will look at storytelling, character design, animations, user interactions and experience, while also learning the basics of programming and programming platforms.
They will systematically break down the project into different steps and learn everything from soft skills like communication and coordination and hard skills such as software applications, mathematics, etc.
More importantly, you are not just learning programming, but you are learning its contextual application (the way that you will use it in the real world) along with other related subject areas and competencies, which facilitate the contextual awareness of skills and competence-coordination respectively. Because when you step out of your classroom, your project that involves programming will ideally require a whole gamut of related skills and not just programming!
Learning for a purpose
It’s not one of those ‘science projects’ that you used to do in school that lead to nothing, but an engaging, purposeful exercise:
In an insightful interview on PBL, Seymour Papert mentioned:
“Problem solving in school usually means somebody gave you a problem and then you gave the answer. That problem was not a part of a purposeful project where you solved it in order to do something else … This makes a lot of what’s artificial in school’’
He posits that conventional education is missing the element of ‘purpose’ whereas PBL is modelled like real life where problem solving is to attain meaningful goals.
In the light of this statement, we can surely agree that learning is distasteful and inefficient when you are just forced to find answers to isolated problems that lead to nothing and you become disconnected with what you are learning. Questions like “why am I learning what I am learning’’ or “how will I apply this new found knowledge in the real world?” will often come up. Sure, it will help you ace standardized tests where you train yourself to answer specific questions and copy / memorize textbook definitions, but when you finally move out of the classroom to face the real world, all of that loses meaning and value.
Think like an Engineer or a Writer!
The coolest thing about PBL is that they get to mimic real life roles of professionals like one of an Engineer, a Social Worker, a Scientist, Actor or a Teacher as they have to approach the challenges or the projects from a professional standpoint. They effectively put themselves in the shoes of their future selves and imagine what it would be like to do their dream job.
Isn’t it too much on my child’s shoulders?
As educational counsellors for PBL, we get this question a lot!
It is only natural for you to wonder how this works for learners of different age groups, especially the young ones as the ‘real-life projects’ may sound a little too complicated or irrelevant for their ages. The educators can choose the appropriate project parameters determining the ultimate learning outcomes, the levels of competence and such to fit the age-group and the interest of their students.
Moreover, modern advocates of education agree that exposure to cross-discipline learning and instilling the problem-solving mindset should start from the primary stages of education itself. Hence, it is never too early to start preparing your child to the real world.
PBL fosters Creative and Analytical Thinking
Analytical and Creative thinking are both essential skills that steer problem solving and innovation. While the traditional educational curriculums do not prioritize these skills, PBL caters to an open learning environment that fosters the learners’ thinking capabilities encouraging them to think out the box!
Your child is one opportunity away from being the next big inventor!
Think of every great invention and solution around you, they are the result of someone’s ability to identify a problem and process a solution. Children are naturally curious and originally creative. That is why we believe that given an opportunity and the right guidance, we can wake their inner innovator.
PBL puts your child in a stimulating environment where they have the opportunity to be creative and analytical while solving engaging, real-world problems. We also encourage divergent thinking where they have to generate ideas that lead to authentic solutions.
‘’ In the modern world, increasing students’ capacity for problem solving and critical thinking is presented as a goal of education in all fields (OlszewskiKubilius & Thomson, 2015; Paul & Elder, 2012). ‘’
Ability to think and find solutions on their own adds value to an individual’s future education, career and beyond.
For instance, soft skills like creative thinking and analytical thinking prepares you to be a more adaptable individual that allows you to respond to sudden changes efficiently and confidently. It is not only a skill that is on demand in the modern workplace, as we like to call it, adaptability is also a surviving skill in the ever-changing dynamic world.
Need we explain more, if we remind you of the pandemic we just faced as a world and how much adaptability was essential to face that new challenge and its changes?
Other than adaptability, the ability to innovate, find solutions, increase productivity, etc. can all be considered as benefits for a well-rounded person who can think creatively and analytically.
A Student-Centered Pedagogy
When it comes down to the method of teaching in PBL, it is more student-focused where they are expected to take the lead in their own learning while the teacher takes the role of a ‘facilitator’. Students are encouraged to ask questions, choose projects of their interests and actively engage in the learning process while the teacher merely guides them and remains as a resource for the student.
The sign of a well curated PBL experience is that it will balance freedom to explore with specific learning outcomes. For example, PBL facilitators can have “the ability to design graphics” as a learning objective in the project. The facilitators can set constraints on the project like “design your own flier” and include learning rubrics [see beyond rubrics] which will ensure students achieve the said learning objective.
The other unique thing about this experience is that students can decide for themselves what they want to learn within the constraints of the projects, which will lead to a more enriching and personal learning experience for all students.
END
Whether you are a teacher, a parent or a student it is not too late to try PBL and discover for yourself how refreshing and transformative this style of learning is. PBL is not just an educational concept, it is a movement revolutionizing the future of education, and that future is NOW!
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