What I Learned from my 3-Year Experiment with Project-Based Learning

I want to tell you the story of my journey in project-based learning and what it has taught me as a teacher an administrator.

In 2015, I took a job as director of E. O. Smith High School's Depot Campus. It's a program based on the Big Picture Learning model that focuses on learning through internships, advisories, and independent learning projects. I was excited. I had been experimenting with innovative models of education for years as a science teacher at the main campus. I'd created online and flipped classes, and had just finished what I considered my greatest achievement, a mastery-based, differentiated biology class. I saw the Depot program as an extension of what I'd been doing and an opportunity to continue to learn about and develop constructivist learning approaches like project-based learning. But as I walked past the several unfinished student murals on the walls of the little school, I should have known I was in for a challenge to my assumptions.

Year 1: Netflix and disillusionment

It is a pretty cool idea, when you think about it--kids engaged in things they're interested in. And if you take a look back at some of my blog posts from that first semester, you will pick up on the excitement I felt. But if you continue to follow my posts through the winter and into the spring, the story takes a twist. What I expected to see was students motivated by autonomy, mastery, and purpose and engaged in their independent work because they had the freedom to work on what interested them. But instead of working on their own projects during their daily "self-directed learning time," many watched YouTube or Netflix, played video games or just chatted. Only a couple of students ever completed the independent projects they had planned with their advisors that year.

I was disillusioned. What was going on?

Year 2: Hitting an invisible wall

So I gathered my team, and we all agreed that we needed a bit more structure. We reasoned that the students lacked basic organizational and other project-management skills, so we created "Project Block" to replace their "self-directed learning time." During this block, I would guide the students through a series of guided science projects, each one focusing on a different "project" skill, such as planning, troubleshooting, or research. Each project also allowed for student choice, and during the course of the year I tried a few different methods of tracking and monitoring student progress on their work. The goal of Project Block was that each student would successfully complete an independent project after the initial 8 canned projects.

While nearly all students successfully completed the first 8 structured projects, only a couple of students successfully completed the fully independent project. It was as if they hit an unseen wall when they were fully on their own.

Year 3: Back to the drawing board

Maybe what the students needed was guidance all the way through the project process. So instead of a series of canned projects, the following year I worked with my students in small groups to develop science project ideas and carry them out. One group built a maze and started running experiments to see if hamsters could learn the maze. The other decided to try aquaponics. They grew trout in a fish tank and circulated the water into a second tank containing lettuce plants. The fish water fertilizes the pants, and the plants clean the water.

Both were very cool projects. It was exciting at first, but as time went on, it became harder and harder to maintain the students' momentum for new learning. The hamster project team resisted my efforts to encourage them to do more research and improve their experiments. The aquaponics team never developed any experiments, and though they successfully grew both trout and lettuce, they spent most of the time during Project Block on their phones, YouTube, or chatting.

Year 4: A new hypothesis

During the summer after the third year, I read a new book by John Hattie and his colleagues called Visible Learning for Science. In that book, he addresses the nagging question of why inquiry-based learning, problem-based learning and other such approaches, which make so much intuitive sense, have such low effect sizes. In other words, why aren't they effective? His answer is that they are effective if they are used at the right time--after the students have learned the basics. They are useful methods for extending and deepening learning, but not for initial knowledge acquisition.

And so I had a new hypothesis. Students could not do independent projects, not because they lacked generic project skills, but because they lacked the fundamental content-specific knowledge and skills needed or the specific projects they were working on. So I began the fourth iteration of our project-based learning experiment. I decided to teach students the basics of electricity and electrical circuits using the CASTLE curriculum, and then have them each do an independent electricity project after they mastered the skills they needed.

Year 4, Take 2:

The CASTLE curriculum is really cool. It is a hands-on, self-guided curriculum in which students read instructions, set-up experiments, make and test predictions, and then read summaries of concepts. But about half of my students were not able to progress quickly enough. This could have to do with the reading level, but I had solved that by making a series of instructional videos, and students still struggled to progress through the curriculum on their own. The CASTLE curriculum, it turns out, is actually more of a constructivist approach, and I'm not sure why I thought it would solve my problem in the first place. I think I was driven primarily by the need for a canned curriculum that required little lesson prep.

In any case, it was failing for most of my students, so I decided to give them two options: Continue with the CASTLE curriculum, or switch to lessons delivered by me. I would put together mini-lessons and hands-on activities and projects on a variety of science topics selected by the students. All but one chose the lessons.

And thus the final nail was hammered into the coffin of the 3-year long experiment in project-based learning.

Some may say that it's just a problem with this particular population of students. Many of our students struggle with attention, hyperactivity, impulsivity, anxiety, depression, and other issues that affect their ability to stay on task, complete work, and in general, find success at school. But it turns out that this is exactly the kind of student for which the project-based approach is often offered as a solution. And what is the goal of the projects anyway, if not learning? How did the projects become and end in themselves? When did "independence" start to trump learning?

For me, the experience of the past three years has been a cautionary tale of confirmation bias. I started with the assumption of project-based learning and then went through several cycles of trying to justify it. Ultimately, like a creationist finally coming to terms with the evidence for evolution, I have to go where the evidence leads.

Year 4, Update:

It is now March of Year 4 of my experiment, and my new approach of explicit instruction followed by projects has devolved into pure guided project work. It proved too difficult to use an explicit instruction approach while having to create a curriculum from scratch and on-the-fly.

For several weeks now, we have been working on optimizing baking soda rockets, and the students love it. They look forward to Project Block, but I have to remind myself that having fun is not the same as learning. Video games are fun. We need both.

Looking ahead

At this point, there are two paths I am considering:

1. Spend the summer developing a science curriculum based on Hattie's layered approach: Explicit instruction first, then projects.

2. This may seem like it comes out of nowhere, but I am toying with the idea of trying Mike Schmoker's approach next year. In his book, FOCUS: Elevating the Essentials to Radically Improve Student Learning, he argues for a greater emphasis on literacy across the curriculum. I am considering a reading- and writing-based approach to science at the Depot. Not only would this be a way to help them acquire the foundation of science knowledge they need, it would focus our energies where they need to be focused. Many of our students are at-risk and behind in their basic skills, so building confidence in reading, writing and math could trump any benefits hands-on science could offer.

My current working hypothesis is that engagement is not about student interest, but about their sense of competence. And I think this holds true for reading, writing, and math as well as anything else. My real goal is to prepare these kids for college or career, and I want to do whatever will move them in that direction.

You might think that this entire four year sequence represents a retreat from independent and personalized learning, and if you thought that, you would be correct. But I believe we must go where the evidence leads, and we do what is best for the students, even if it means abandoning, or at least revising our beliefs about learning. As John Hattie says, we must not "hold any instructional strategy in higher esteem than students' learning."

The procrastination equation: Putting research into practice at the Depot

They were discussing different forms of government, and the conversation had degenerated into a frustrating chorus of "There is no right answer. It's all just a matter of opinion."

"That's not true," I said, trying to keep the frustration out of my voice. "There are benchmarks. Some forms of government work better than others."

I'm not sure they got my point, but that kind of relativism is one of my pet peeves. Unfortunately, it infects many parts of society, including education. People in education often think that there are no real answers--no reference points by which to judge between the myriad of models and practices that promise to improve student success. But that's not true. Research has shown what works. The same science that brought us modern medicine and discovered global warming can help us educate our kids, and if we're not using it, we're fighting this battle blindfolded. Here's the story of how we're putting research into practice at the Depot, and how it's impacting our kids.

Last year was my first year at this little non-traditional school, and it soon became obvious that motivation was a serious problem. Motivation was low, engagement was low, attendance was low, task completion was low, and procrastination was high. Then I came across this article on procrastination from psychologist, Piers Steel. It was a thorough review of research related to motivation, and his "procrastination equation" became my guide. I took the liberty here to make it a bit more user friendly:

Utility is "how desirable a task or choice is for an individual." Expectancy is whether we think we will be able to complete the task, value is how much we value the outcome, the more impulsive among us will have a greater tendency to procrastinate, and the further away the deadline (the greater the delay), the more we'll put off the work.

Using the equation is simple. If utility is low, we procrastinate. To decrease procrastination, we need to increase expectancy and value and decrease impulsivity and delay. At the Depot this year, we're attacking all four factors of the equation.

Expectancy: According to Stanford psychologist Albert Bandura, "efficacy expectancy is somewhat susceptible to verbal persuasion and emotional arousal but is especially influenced by modelling and actual performance accomplishments." With this in mind, we are increasing our use of explicit instruction at the Depot, and our new Project Block is designed to provide students with a string of small successes to build upon. As of last week, about 60% of our students had completed 8 science projects, including hands-on projects, lab reports and a research paper, and had begun their first independent project.

Focused work during Project Block

The ALEKS online math system, which we also started using this year, is another way we're building self-efficacy. It offers a mastery-based approach the kids love, and our students' average progress on their courses is 54%.

And finally, we've really ramped up the 1:1 support this year. With a combination of interns and an instructional assistant, we are able to assign struggling students one-on-one help during ALEKS, Project Block, and any other time they need it.

Value: Dr. Steel points to classical conditioning as one way to increase the value factor. During our summer program, we were having trouble getting kids to do their online math work, so I was tossing around the idea of a token-based incentive system with Ellen. I had planned to make the tokens worth credits. "But what if they don't care about credits?," she asked. 

She was right. Many of our students don't seem to be motivated by threats of credit loss or offers of credit. So what did we do? We still offered credit, but we also tied the tokens to a field trip reward, and it worked. They really valued that reward!

We carried that same approach over into this year: Students earn poker chips for on-task behavior, and if they earn enough, they qualify for special field trips. Many students use our new progress tracking system to keep track of their chips and they value them so much that their anxiety about the chips has actually become a bit of a problem. My hope is that this system will build the habits of work that we adults call intrinsic motivation. According to Steel, this is exactly what happens--students associate reward with the work, and the work becomes intrinsically rewarding.

(Of course, they don't always succeed. The other day, I told a student he would not have enough chips to qualify for the field trip the next day. He pushed his few chips away on the table as if to disavow them and said, "I don't want any more chips!" His protest reminded me of my son when he was young. He wouldn't eat his Thanksgiving dinner, and the consequence was not getting any pie. "I don't like pie!," he repeated, as he marched around the table. The fact that chips can tap into their emotion is testimony that we've tapped into the value factor.)

Impulsivity:  Impulsivity is considered a personality trait, and Steel questions whether we can influence it much, but he does suggest two possibilities: stimulus control and automaticity. "Stimulus control," says Steel, "helps to direct behavior by indicating what is appropriate (i.e., rewarding) under any given circumstance," and I think the chips serve this purpose also. If students stay off their phones and on-task for 10, 15, or 20 minutes (we gradually increase the blocks of time), they receive reward chips. Most students earn the full amount of chips available during ALEKS Block and Project Block, and it's surprising to see how easily most of them can focus for 20 solid minutes under these conditions.

To increase automaticity, Steel recommends schedules and routines. This year we've implemented a new blocked schedule at the Depot, but there's more we could do with routines within the blocks themselves. Interestingly, Steel also mentions reducing choice as a means of helping those with high impulsivity. I think the blocked schedule has also helped here, especially the replacement of "self-directed learning time" with Project Block, but I'm still chewing on this one.

We've also added another research-based strategy to the mix to try to address the impulsivity factor--one that Steel didn't mention. Stephen, one of our teachers, has been teaching mindfulness during morning pick-me-up since the beginning of the year. They've gone over several techniques, from focusing on the breath to mindful eating, and they had a great time identifying thoughts and feeling invoked by popular songs the other day. Several students have said they have started to practice meditation on their own. Our hope is that this will help them not only manage stress but also increase focus.

Delay: Our new progress tracking system is designed to give students continuous, rapid feedback about their progress, and the timed chip blocks have provided small chunked goals for the students, but I think we can help students a lot more with handling delays. My goal for the second semester is to explicitly teach the students two methods of time/project management, and then reward them for each box checked off their to-do lists. (Hat tip to Elizabeth Brott Beese, a Ph.D. student from Purdue who spent some time studying our program, for pointing me in this direction.)

That is how we're using science to help our students. That's our goal, anyway, and so far it seems to be working. Engagement is up, attendance is up, and even task completion seems to be up. I was so excited to find Steel's article last year. It has provided a framework--a science-based guide for improving our program. So often in education, we bounce from one model to another, often without much confidence that any of it will work. But there's no need for that. There is a research base in psychology and education that we can use and build on. We're not blind, we don't stumble in the dark, and we don't have to reinvent the wheel. We can't afford to. Time is precious for every one of our students.