I had a little epiphany this morning. I was reading an Edutopia article about Project Based Learning and my thoughts were something like this. "I wish I could do that creative stuff in my classes, instead of just teaching them how to use Excel and PowerPoint." I was picturing students moving around the classroom from station to station, collecting data, doing Internet searches, discussing how to present their findings -- the ultimate science classroom. Here's when the epiphany hit me. Almost every lesson that I do is project-based, if that means what I think it does.
Here's a typical scenario in the lab. The kids find their way into the room, log into the network and settle down to listen. I ask them a question or give them an idea to get them thinking. "What news did you recently hear about the planets?" -- that was for a database lesson. "Suppose you had a million dollars to spend. Which companies would you buy?" -- that leads off the Excel unit where we play the stock market game. We talk a little about the idea. Then I fire up my projector and show them how I made the table or the spreadsheet. By then they are itching to get started, so I turn them loose and they spend the rest of the class making their own version, preferably with good content and lots of creativity.
Since I always teach this way it had not occurred to me to think of it as project-based. But now that I think more carefully I see that I could do some sort of drill-and-practice routine where I pushed a button or opened a menu and they followed along in a horrible lockstep way. I did a lesson once like that last year and it was awful. We were setting up a desktop shortcut to a network folder and I had everybody do it together because there were over fifteen steps in the process. It was a very bad lesson because the kids did not learn a thing except that computers can be complicated, which is exactly the opposite of what I am trying to teach them in the other thirty-four weeks. So we'll do without the desktop shortcut this year and use that time more wisely. Maybe I can put together a fun science lesson --- ecosystems anyone?