No Easy Project

Science teacher Jeanne E. Smith and her colleagues at five small high schools in Charlotte, N.C., are working to make project-based learning a success in their classrooms. The approach is a prime feature of ongoing efforts nationally to make high schools more engaging for students.

—Jason E. Miczek for Education Week

Project-based learning is a hallmark of many of the nation’s new small high schools, but teachers are finding that it takes a lot to get it right.

By Bess Keller

Charlotte, N.C.

When he got the chance to transfer into one of five new small schools opening here last year in a restructured high school, Timothy S. Cagwin didn’t miss a beat.

Feeling stifled at his old school, the 39-year-old English teacher was particularly attracted to the new schools’ plans to focus on “project-based learning,” a pedagogical approach high on the list of high-school-reform ideas championed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and other like-minded philanthropies, academics, and critics of the status quo.

Like school leaders elsewhere amid the ongoing national push to improve U.S. high schools, those at the new community of schools believed that the approach would rally both teachers and students to work toward new,...