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Teaching Opinion

Deeper Project Based Learning

By Tom Vander Ark — July 26, 2013 4 min read
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Project-based learning is a great way to engage students in interest-based activities but sometimes that’s all it is. Good projects are deep not thin,
rigorous not easy. Good schools help students’ frame compelling questions and use standards-aligned rubric assessments.

We’ve been visiting and interviewing schools that provoke deeper learning. They ask students to think and
struggle. Larry Rosenstock, High Tech High, likes students (and teachers) to experience a bit ofperplexity often resolved in a focus on production of high quality products.

We’ve summarized

How Digital Learning Contributes to Deeper Learning

and think tech-enabled project-based learning holds great promise to boost college and career preparation. We found a couple schools that are particularly
good examples.

Casco Bay.
Principal Derek Pierce said, “We challenge and support our students to become college-ready through our 3Rs: Rigor, Relevance, and Relationships.” Casco Bay High School in Portland Maine is an Expeditionary Learning school which keeps the school’s goals “clear, ambitious and essential: a community of
learners where the wonderful in each student is known and nurtured, where learning is catalyzed by student inquiry and academic adventure, and where every
graduate is prepared for college, work, and citizenship.”

Casco juniors engage in a long term interdisciplinary project that results in demonstration of learning. Last year, they visited the coalfields of West
Virginia. The culmination of this Junior Journey was a multimedia presentation of oral histories.

“Learning expeditions, a central curricular structure at Casco Bay, are founded on the belief that students should and can solve real-world problems while
mastering skills and content,” said Pierce. “The projects within each learning expedition require students to think critically.”

“Communicating ideas is a core component of literacy across the disciplines,” said Pierce. “For example, science classes have a ‘scientific communication’
course standard,” and all the learning expeditions contain strong writing and presentation elements, each of which uses rubrics to foster strong
communication skills.

Learning how to learn means, from an Expeditionary Learning perspective, teaching students to be “meta-cognitive”. Reflection and revision, as well as
self-assessment against learning targets, are core practices of the Expeditionary Learning design. In each class, teachers use assessment-for-learning
practices on a daily basis.

DSST.
Bill Kurtz asks two big questions, “What’s your view of the human condition?” and “What do people want?” He suggests that most people want to be connected
to a bigger story and they want to be affirmed for their unique gifts and talents.

Kurtz is founder of Denver School of Science and Technology, nowDSST: Stapleton High School, the anchor of a Denver STEM network. DSST uses Big History Project, a compelling history of how we got here, as a 9th grade block.

Big History “covers the history of the universe, the planet, and human history,” said teacher Jim Stephens, noting that problem solving is the core of
their innovative 9th grade curriculum. “Students have to have an understanding of how the earth works in order to decide how humans have interacted with
it. They need to look at the history of the problem, and solutions that have been tried or suggested already, before they can try to solve it. This is
problem-based learning.”

Students may “find it hard at first, but once they start to get it, they really get it, and they start to make connections themselves--often ones their
teachers didn’t think of,” said Stephens.

Big History has been the spark for so many other initiatives. DSST is introducing a capstone project for the 10th graders to allow them to concentrate a
good amount of time on a subject they really care about.

Odyssey.
Also in Denver is the Odyssey School, and Expeditionary Learning school. Executive Director Marcia Fulton explained that Odyssey
strives to “harnesses children’s natural passion to learn and helps them develop the curiosity, knowledge, skills, and personal qualities they need for
successful adulthood.”

The school is founded on the philosophy that children learn best through personal, direct experiences designed to take advantage of their natural curiosity
about the world. Fulton explained that Expeditionary Learning “harnesses children’s
natural passion to learn and helps them develop the curiosity, knowledge, skills, and personal qualities they need for successful adulthood.”

The expeditions that are central to EL are planned backward from guiding questions that require critical thinking. Expeditions “go in depth on important
subjects and topics,” said Fulton. Students are required to complete significant research and writing and, in order to complete their work, they must
address multiple perspectives and form their own opinions regarding politically charged topics such as social progress, access for the disabled, pollution
and waste disposal, and educational equity.

Lessons.
High Tech High, Casco, DSST, Odyssey and other schools we’ve studied suggest that to avoid low-level activities and promote deeper learning projects it is
helpful to:



  1. Pick compelling subjects: help students frame big but specific questions;

  2. Set rigorous goals: outline high quality products that will be produced and judged with standards-based rubrics

  3. Make the projects long enough to go in depth; build in milestones to keep teams on track.

  4. Ask students to publish their work and create venues for presentations of learning to the school community.

The opinions expressed in Vander Ark on Innovation are strictly those of the author(s) and do not reflect the opinions or endorsement of Editorial Projects in Education, or any of its publications.