NEW SKILLS FOR

2006 JUNE EDUTOPIA 51

In each issue, Edutopia publishes an essay focusing on one of ten ideas for improving our schools (www.edutopia.org/bigideas). The eighth in the series, this one focuses

on an aspect of our first Big Idea, Engage: Project-Based Learning.

Email your thoughts to bigideas@edutopia.org.

BigIdeas

A NEW CENTURY

B Y B O B P E A R L M A N

Let’s assume the No Child Left Behind Act works fine andthat by 2014 every student meets the targeted standardsand passes his or her state’s exit exam. Will those stu-dents be successful as citizens and workers in the twenty-first century?

Not a chance.Let’s further assume that each state’s governor gets

the one-on-one computer bug and equips all of eachstate’s students with top-flight portable PCs. Will thesestudents now be successful as citizens and workers inthe twenty-first century?

Again, not a chance.No matter how sophisticated the tools we put in class-

rooms, the curriculum designed to educate students tomeet the new standards is sorely inadequate to helpthem after they leave school. In short, learning—andschooling—must be totally transformed.

“Today’s graduates need to be critical thinkers, prob-lem solvers, and effective communicators who are profi-cient in both core subjects and new, 21st-century contentand skills,” according to “Results that Matter: 21stCentury Skills and High School Reform,” a report issuedin March by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills.

Project-based learningteaches kids the collaborative

and critical thinking abilities they’ll need

to compete.

52 EDUTOPIA JUNE 2006

Don’t confuse project-based learning with simply doing activities. Real PBL is complex, rigorous, and integrated.

These include learningand thinking skills, infor-mation- and communi-cations-technology liter-acy skills, and life skills.

Students of today enter an increasinglyglobalized world in which technology playsa vital role.They must be good communica-tors, as well as great collaborators.The newwork environment requires responsibilityand self-management, as well as inter-personal and project-management skillsthat demand teamwork and leadership.

Enter project-based learning, designed toput students into a students-as-workers set-ting where they learn collaboration, criticalthinking, written and oral communication,and the values of the work ethic whilemeeting state or national content standards.Homewood School, inTenterden, England, in thatspirit, calls its PBL programTotal Learning.

In traditional class-rooms, students typicallywork on simple assign-ments that emphasizeshort-term content memo-rization; they work alone,write for the teacher alone,and rarely make presentations.But don’t con-fuse PBL with simply doing activities injectedinto traditional education to enliven things asa culminating event for a learning unit. RealPBL, by contrast, is deep, complex, rigorous,and integrated. Its fundamentals are fourfold:1. Create teams of three or more studentsto work on an in-depth project for three toeight weeks.2. Introduce a complex entry question thatestablishes a student’s need to know, andscaffold the project with activities and newinformation that deepens the work.3.Calendar the project through plans, drafts,timely benchmarks, and finally the team’spresentation to an outside panel of expertsdrawn from parents and the community.4. Provide timely assessments and/or feed-back on the projects for content, oral andwritten communication, teamwork, criticalthinking, and other important skills.

One place where it’s working is the New

Technology High School, in Napa, California,a thoroughly PBL school since its launch in1996.“We needed a new type of instructionthat better reflected the goals we wantedeach student to achieve, demonstrate, anddocument,” says Paul Curtis, one of the origi-nal lead teachers at New Tech and nowdirector of curriculum for the NewTechnology Foundation.

New Tech teachers build their instructionaround eight Learning Outcomes—contentstandards,collaboration,critical thinking,oralcommunication, written communication,career preparation, citizenship and ethics,and technology literacy—which they embedin all projects,assessments,and grade reports.Instructors start each unit by throwing stu-dents into a real-world or realistic project thatengages interest and generates a list of things

they need to know.Projectsare designed to tacklecomplex problems requir-ing critical thinking. Theschool’s strategy is simple:

To learn collaboration,work in teams.To learn critical think-ing, take on complexproblems.To learn oral communi-

cation, present.To learn written communication, write.To learn technology, use technology.To develop citizenship, take on civicand global issues.To learn about careers, do internships.To learn content, research and do allof the above.

Examples of projects include presentinga plan to Congress on solving the oil crisis,addressing economic issues as a team of thepresident’s economic advisers, or inventing,under contract from NASA, new sports thatastronauts can play on the Moon for exercise.

PBL gets even stronger when projects,and courses, fully integrate two or more sub-jects, such as English and social studies ormath and physics.

At the MET/Big Picture Company networkof small high schools, for example (see “HighSchool’s New Face,” November/December2004), the main component of every stu-dent’s education is the Learn Through

Internships program,in which students com-plete authentic projects with the guidanceof expert mentors a minimum of two days aweek.One student, for example,worked in afish hatchery to learn about the industry anddevelop a business plan.Others helped repairracing cars.“I’ve learned a lot about cars andhow math relates to the world,” says studentClarence Wells,who worked at Gallant RacingSupply, in Oakland, California. “I’m taking aphysics class, and that’s tied in with the stuffI do here. I wrote a paper about aerodynam-ics, and I’m learning a lot about that.”

Students at the Marin School of Arts andTechnology, in Novato,California,meanwhile,complete schoolwide thematic and inter-disciplinary projects. Last year, they com-pared the Indian Valley watershed, wheretheir school is located, to other local ones.

Christopher Tan’s Knowledge Communitystudents in Hong Kong and Singapore “formcommunities to solve problems, constructknowledge, explore ideas, and build proj-ects.”Their 3-I (Interdisciplinary, Inter-school& International) Project Learning experi-ence focuses on environmental protectionof local communities.

Good projects engage students on theirown need to know in tackling complexproblems and working in teams to generatesolutions, products, and presentations. Inevery project, they touch all the bases thePartnership for 21st Century Skills consid-ers fundamental outcomes of a successfulPBL program.

Measuring Results

How do we know PBL is working? Project-and problem-based learning doesn’t workunless learners obtain feedback. Currentassessments don’t do the job. State testingand accountability are aimed at schools, notindividual student learning, and reports arereleased once a year, after students havemoved on to other teachers. Periodic assess-ments in managed curriculums mainly pro-vide information to teachers. Students can’timprove or become managers of their ownlearning without constant, real-time assess-ment and feedback, referred to in PBLinstruction as assessment for learning, asopposed to assessment for school,district,or

2006 JUNE EDUTOPIA 53

classroom accountability. (See “HealthierTesting Made Easy,”April/May 2006.)

Assessment for learning starts with out-comes, proceeds with projects, products,and performances that map to the outcomes,and completes the loop with assessment andfeedback to students.

Rubrics, or scoringguides,delineate the criteria.But they are not just a wayfor teachers to evaluate stu-dent work. In the best PBLclassrooms, students see therubrics when they start theproject and deploy them astools to both self-appraisetheir work in progress anddirect their own learning.

Most schools give students a single gradefor a course, often losing important dataabout their skills and abilities.At New Tech,by contrast, the grade report shows separategrades for content, critical thinking, writtencommunication, oral communication, tech-nology literacy,and any of the other LearningOutcomes appropriate for the course.

At New Tech, the grade book is online,accessible to students, their parents, andteachers with a password, and it is a livingdocument—updated whenever new infor-mation is available. Students thus remainconstantly aware of their strengths andweaknesses and can target their effortstoward improvement.This continuous feed-back is critical in helping students becomeself-directed learners.

New Tech has developed unique waysto assess certain modern skills. At the endof every project, students assess their teammembers, anonymously, using the onlinePeer Collaboration rubric. Scores go into adatabase, where students, through a securepassword, can see them. Students can thenpublish these scores as evidence in their dig-ital portfolios.Teachers and visiting commu-nity experts, meanwhile, score the similaronline Presentation Evaluation rubric.

Tech in the Classroom

In England, the government has increased itsinvestment in technology for schools everyyear for the past seven years. Schools therenow surpass U.S. schools in technology use,and many now have one-to-one computerenvironments. But go into a typical British

school,and you’ll see not much has changed.Teachers still lecture, only using PowerPointand interactive whiteboards, and studentsstill take notes, though now on laptops.

Many schools here and abroad are experi-menting with one-to-one computing and

finding the results lacking.This is due to a traditionalcurricular approach that failsto engage students as direc-tors of their own learning.Project- and problem-basedlearning, by contrast, bringone-to-one computing to life.

Technology plays a criti-cal role in supporting PBLenvironments. Equippedwith their own computers

and Internet access, for example, New Techstudents can research any topic, communi-cate with experts and teachers, write jour-nals and reports,develop presentations withPowerPoint, video, and podcasts, and devel-op their Professional Digital Portfolio,demonstrating their mastery of the school’sLearning Outcomes.

PBL comes alive when schools go beyondone-to-one computing and provide a technol-ogy platform that serves as a collaborativelearning environment.At New Tech, that envi-ronment, the New Tech High LearningSystem, includes the curriculum and the stan-dards, as well as assessment, reporting, andcollaboration and communication tools.

The Learning System immediately anddynamically publishes all project materialsto the Internet.And because all projects arehoused online, they are available year to yeareven if teachers leave. Also, instructors canshare projects between schools. Fourteenschools throughout the nation based on theNew Tech model are doing so.That numberwill nearly double this fall.

The PBL Challenge

PBL has one factor in common with tradi-tional education—it takes good teachers tomake it work well. It’s hard work designingeffective projects, scaffolding activities,benchmarks, rubrics, and culminating prod-ucts and events.And it’s a challenge to man-age the PBL classroom and orchestrate allphases of the project. But PBL leaves tradi-tional education in the dust. It sets studentsto work on their own juices, as self-directed

learners. It enables them to master state stan-dards and a lot more.

Today’s new efforts in PBL are fully stan-dards based and methodologically soundand utilize some form of technologicallybased collaborative-learning environment tosupport these students-as-workers class-rooms and schools.

New research demonstrates that PBLmakes a difference. A recent study of eightNew Tech graduating classes shows that 89percent attended a two-year or four-yearpostsecondary institution, 92 percentapplied some or a great deal of what theylearned at New Tech to their postsecondaryeducation or career, and 96 percent wouldchoose to attend the school again.

Researchers in Singapore, who publishedthe book Engaging in Project Work, havefound a significant value add in studentlearning achieved from PBL since its nation-wide implementation in 2000.

NCLB tells students that mastery of coresubjects will lead to success. By contrast,Thomas L. Friedman, author of the best-seller The World Is Flat, tells his daughtersan updated version of the old eat-your-supper-children-are-starving story: “Finishyour homework. People in India and Chinaare starving for your job.”

What do you tell your children, and yourstudents? Just this: Globalization is flatteningthe world and chal-lenging the UnitedStates as never before.Students here and in other advanced coun-tries must move up the value chain and leada new era of global cooperation as twenty-first-century learners.

Tell them this, too:You, students of today,need a lot more than core academic sub-jects.You need to also learn teamwork, criti-cal thinking, and communication skills. Lookfor a school where you can do real-worldprojects, where you are given assessmentand feedback on all the skills essential in thiscentury, and where you and your fellow stu-dents are provided with the workspaces andtechnology tools to become successful citi-zens and knowledge workers. d

Bob Pearlman, director of strategic planning for theNew Technology Foundation and a consultant ondesigning twenty-first-century secondary schools, isformer president of the Autodesk Foundation. Writehim at bobpearlman@mindspring.com or throughwww.bobpearlman.org.

Get StartedFor more on PBL, go towww.edutopia.org/1546