Project-based learnig

Or how to move from curricula to chaos

License Creative Commons

Pedro López Tolosana

Any high school from anywere. Third grade math teachers decide to do a Project-based learnig work. The students will have to research by themselves how to find out the price of a cupcake recipe, since a vote showed up cookcakes is the most motivating subject for the majority of students involved. In view of the fact that they are not at all clear where to start, theachers will first explain how the activity will go on, and let them to know the calculations to be done providing them with a Power Point, just in case the young researchers get disperse. As soon as it seems to be clear that they have grasped the key «operational» ideas to be executed and gathered in different groups, they go to the market to look for the prices of the ingredients they need to calculate how much it will all eventually cost. One of the groups find a clerk that realizes the students are absolutely lost, but she’s got on ok with them and gently solves the problem for them. Lucky, yes, but this was not suposed to be what the project had been conceived for. The second group was not that lucky as the first one. The Clerk was not that kind and they had to copy carefully the prices of the ingredients on a sheet. Nevertheless, they unfortunately forgot to write the required weight of the packages. It never mind, perhaps they had not realized the weight and the required amount of any ingredient is fundamental to the recipe. By the way, a third group had a much clearer plan of action, they went to a supermarket below the market and got plenty of goodies.

The teacher in charge tries then to manage the situation as best he can, it doesn’t seem very appropriate that a math class should have been about gorging on candy. Since the inquiries in the market as motivating action have already taken too long, it’s time to put things into practice. Then the most repeated question among students is “how is this to be done?”, because no one remember the previous explanation about the subject, nor the power point. So the teacher decides to make the formula easier, because otherwise no one will know what to calculate. Then, as usual, the smartest students in the classroom manage to figure out how much they will have to pay to make those cupcakes. Finally, the teacher decides to make herself the cupcakes for all the students, to somehow round everything off with a good twist.

Since I felt curious after having heard this story, I asked the teacher what she thinks about this cup-cake Project-based learnig activity. According to her, the lesson could have been done in two days, but it has taken four instead, and the results have been rather meager. But they all had a good time and fun in the meantime however, and that’s worth… As long as you don’t think about time-to-learning ratio, which, she admits, you’d better forget about. Anyway, considering the goal of this methodology is to ensure that the learning remains more etched in the memory, I ask her if she thinks itl has been achieved, and she is very clear about: they will remember her cupcakes, that’s for sure.

No doubt there are many misconceptions behind the idealization of project-based learning methodology, but two of them especially highligth among all of them. The first one, based on the pernicious denigration of the masterclass, is the idea that children are inactive when they are «just» listening to the teacher in the classroom. An idea that is far from true. Acording to this theory, all radio listeners of any radio program would be inactive and passive beings too, and they would be as well unable to take the information that is being instilled in their minds, nor to evaluate it, select it, discard it, or get excited, get busy, rejoice, etc. This conception just overlooks the «small» fact that cognitive activity is invisible, something that does not mean to be cognitively inactive, not at all.

The second one is that doing repeated exercises on any area of ​​knowledge is not innovative and therefore does not work and makes students to hate the subject. Let’s compare the previous story with another starring one of those republican teachers who had to set up academies to earn a living once they were expelled from the public system after the spanish civil war. A seventy-year-old man who attended his classes explained to me that “first we learned the mechanics by heart, with little songs, and little by little we understood why,” and he adds “you can’t pretend to start by understanding everything at once”. According to him, that teacher spent many days without lunch keeping an eye on the punished students meanwhile hi was correcting exams. In the classroom he was demanding, he did repeat things until they were learned. The man I was talking to was an advanced student and sometimes he stayed up to the evening in the classroom to help this old teacher. When his familly moved somewhere else and went to another school, the new teacher called his father to tell him, very surprised, that his son was eight years old, but he knew how to do exercises at the same level than fourteen-year-old students did. It seems that, aside from the student’s abilities and skills, the repetitive ditties had worked quite well. When I asked him about the results of that procedures, he  replied that later on, “the whole class came out with technical careers”. And also, “all those students always kept a very good memory of that teacher.”

Source: educational EVIDENCE

Rights: Creative Commons