Project Fundatur Cognita

Not to sound cliché or anything, but PBL is the best of the techniques I know of yet. The coolest. The most practical and engaging and useful and entertaining. You can have your normal, traditional, boring class every day, add aside a fun project for your students they can learn interesting facts from by working on, and you automatically can get them committed to the subject. I mean, it’s not this easy of course, and there is no fixed formula, but that’s how useful these projects are. And don’t get me wrong here, because not any kind of project you know of works. If we go back during our education years, we’ve done them a lot. Head online, check a couple of links, copy some information, shuffle the paragraphs and voilà! A+.

PBL is much more than that, and by reading your good posts, I know you already know.

But I’d like to offer some retrospective for y’all, during the last year of my high school, on the subject of literature, where we were asked to do a project, more of a research work, about all the teachers of literature that worked on my high school since the beginning of times. We had to find life facts about them, the exact work years, and other details of their work we could find useful. We were divided into groups and had a whole semester to complete the project, to later present it as a whole class in a conference, that would come to the help of a book about the history of the school that was later o be published. During that experience I remember being so anxious, because there was nothing online, no books about it, and no instructions given by the teacher. All of the work had to be done by asking the elders, other teachers and getting information at the office of archives. And it was a massive work of us (read: me) having to do countless visits at that office and at the library, reading vast volumes of old registers, where some of the print would be unintelligible. Anyway long story short – even though it didn’t impact my learning in the subject, it certainly affected my problem solving skills, time efficiency, it helped me write a proper article, challenged my thinking, and improved me in a lot of other competences. Reflecting upon it, the project even helped me unearth things I didn’t know I enjoyed doing. It made everyone at the end of the project, feel like they contributed to something bigger, and what’s most important, appreciate what is authentic. Do you feel any kind of accomplishment when you send in a copy-pasted project? Because I don’t.

That said, us, the teachers, have the possibility to cultivate this sort of learning to our students. The example I gave may not be the best example, because it had a lot of drawbacks I’m not going to focus on, but imagine getting your students to work on a project that really interest them and they’re passionate about. It can work wonders with their learning abilities. It’s all about giving them a purpose and get them to think outside the box and beyond borders. It is how deep learning happens, utilizing the academic content in new context, in the real world, applicable especially in the subject English, where the project can be about ANYTHING in the world, except that in the English language xp. If there is anything more student-centered than this, I don’t know what is.

And it can be complex, yes, but it is in your hands not to make it stressful for your students, so be kind, because at the end of the day it’s just a project and they can lean in a million thousand other ways, so it’s best to be realistic and understanding that not everyone is cut for it.

Thassit! Thank you for reading, really. ♥