How Student Autonomy Leads to Empowerment and Achievement
Pure project-based learning (PBL) is an instructional model that is always of interest to me, as it focuses on empowering students to put their best effort forth by affording them the autonomy to make choices, which combined with appropriate resources and support, often leads to high student achievement. As much as this seems ideal, the implementation and cultivation of an effective classroom environment in which students have virtually full autonomy has often remained just beyond my reach.
When given the opportunity to teach a computer science course, anchored primarily in skill development with the goal of showing mastery through content creation, it felt like the right time to shine for PBL.
My Personal Journey With PBL
As someone who experience a more traditional education paradigm, the notion of a student-driven classroom seemed disheveled and chaotic. The disparity between what a PBL classroom would look like and how I was taught in school seemed incredibly vast.
This concern quickly faded. I found, on my own journey for learning, that the easiest way to test and demonstrate skill proficiency in learning a new subject, such as computer science, was to create a product that met a set of specified requirements and an overall goal. While most…
