At the Intersection: Project-Based Learning

The future of education lies at the intersection of home and school.

Prepared Parents believes that the future of education lies at the intersection of home and school. As parents have stepped in to manage their kids’ learning during the pandemic, they’ve peeked behind the curtain at what it takes to educate a child.

Through this series, Prepared Parents founder and Executive Director, Mira Browne, shares how to support success at home and champion change at school.

Does the traditional school model of passively learning facts by rote prepare our kids for life’s 21st-century demands? Today employers actively recruit candidates who show potential for leadership, critical thinking, and cross-cultural understanding. The top five skills kids need for future employment are:

1. Creativity: generating original ideas and solutions.
2. Persuasion: convincing others to support your creativity.
3. Collaboration: working as a team to reach a common goal.
4. Adaptability: thriving in change and uncertainty.
5. Emotional intelligence: understanding and modulating your emotions and understanding the emotions of others.

Kids develop these skills through project-based learning (PBL) — exploring and solving real-world problems. This type of learning by doing helps kids:

• Explore their curiosity
• Gain a sense of purpose
• Learn teamwork and collaboration
• Ask for help when they’re stuck
• Develop intrinsic motivation to become life-long learners

A sampling of tips from the Prepared Parents resource archives

Designing meaningful projects

Let’s start with what we know: kids learn best by doing.

We also know that kids retain what they learn better when the learning is associated with strong positive emotions. In fact, science says that negative emotions like stress and low motivation actually stop information from reaching the higher thinking areas of the brain where memory consolidation and storage happens.

So, what key ingredients should be included in projects to make them both fun and educational?

1. Incorporate your kid’s interests. Kids are motivated when they’re doing something they’re interested in like writing, building, or cooking. And they learn universal skills through PBL. Designing and building a treehouse integrates elements of math, language arts, and critical thinking like planning, designing and budgeting.
2. ​​Make it authentic and real world. An effective project has direct impact on or use in the real world. Focus on a problem, issue, or topic that is relevant to your kid’s life. A project on social justice will activate a kid’s compassion. Designing a park or planning a neighborhood environmental clean-up effort speaks to climate concerns and developing more green space.
3. Add rigor and fun. A project that is fun, but doesn’t build content knowledge or critical skills is what long-time educator and Founding Executive Director of Marshall Street Initiatives, Adam Carter, calls a “dessert project” loaded with empty calories.
4. Consider PBL that helps kids build upon their content knowledge on a subject, and tests it by doing.
5. Be intentional. Begin with a question or challenge, and end with the kid performing a task that directly addresses the problem, answers the question, or meets the challenge.
6. ​​Collaborate. While PBL fosters individual growth, learning together is a key element. Step in to help plan the project together and then provide regular feedback on progress. When your kid comes to you for help, listen and provide thoughtful feedback. Be a mentor, not a director. If your kid has a team of friends or relatives they’re working with, that’s an opportunity for consensus, another important skill, that encourages reaching a decision together as a team.
7. Celebrate small wins along the way. Your perception of losses and wins might be different from your kid’s. Ask them what they consider the wins to be and record their responses as reminders. Each small win is an encouragement to move forward. Small wins add up to big progress.

When you’re ready to start, draw inspiration for project ideas from this list.

Taking projects to the classroom

If well-designed projects are the most effective way to learn, what can this look like in the classroom? They are the “main course” in schools that teach PBL. Each project tends to include five components:

1. Essential question: key question your kid is answering or exploring e.g. How do ocean waves affect the shoreline?
2. Skills, habits, and content to be learned: specific universal skills, habits of success, and content knowledge that will be learned e.g. oral presentation, self-direction, and wave characteristics.
3. Final product: a final deliverable — such as a presentation, piece of art, physical or digital model, report, or performance — that shows what your kid learned.
4. Project objective and steps: what your kid will learn and the steps to get there.
5. Supporting resources: materials that will be used to learn content and develop skills e.g. book chapters, videos, articles, etc.

🔬 What a science project might look like:

Acting as engineers, students design actual physical models of buildings and the electrical systems that power them. What students might learn: How engineers apply scientific knowledge to make predictions, create accurate designs, and achieve engineering goals.

✍️ What an English project might look like:

Students explore one of the most powerful tools we have: speech. What students might learn: How to inspire people through the art of persuasion — presenting a piece of writing to a live audience to convince them to take action regarding an unresolved problem.

Ultimately, projects are real-life and hands-on and mimic what professionals do every day. They can span time, as much as two to six weeks, and engage an entire classroom or send a kid into deep research and thinking.

Mira Browne is founder and Executive Director of Prepared Parents, an initiative of Marshall Street, a K-12 solutions lab of Summit Public Schools. Prepared Parents pulls from the best of learning science to create tips and tools to help parents focus on what matters most. Their goal is to be a trusted resource — a trusted friend — who’s right there with parents, families, and caregivers in the day-to-day.

Check out Prepared Parents UNBOXED, a free digital monthly learning kit for students in grades 4–9 available to parents, caregivers, community organizations, and learning pod leaders.

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