By Amber Chandler
In project-based learning (PBL) activities, students investigate, ask questions about, and design hands-on solutions to real-world problems and challenges. These opportunities to “learn by doing” and connect classroom concepts to their experiences help students acquire deep knowledge and skills that enhance their academic achievement. That’s why experiential learning is one of the key transformative learning strategies addressed through the AFT’s Real Solutions for Kids and Communities campaign to help children recover and thrive. (Learn more at aft.org/realsolutions.)
Share My Lesson has dozens of resources—including lesson plans and activities, blog posts, webinars, and more—to help educators develop meaningful PBL activities for the classroom. Here, Amber Chandler, a regular Share My Lesson contributor and presenter, describes how PBL can accommodate students’ differing needs. (To read this blog post on SML, visit sharemylesson.com/blog/pbl-journey.)
To learn more about PBL lesson plans and projects that you can adapt for your classroom, visit the Share My Lesson collection “Growth Mindset and Project-Based Learning Lesson Plans” at go.aft.org/vvs.
–EDITORS
I’m just going to rip off the Band-Aid and say this part up front: as a result of the pandemic, many students are not equipped to do project-based learning (PBL) like they may have been in 2019. This is not because of some “learning loss” or failure of their families or teachers to keep them moving in the right direction. Instead, students will struggle with PBL because they don’t have the social skills scaffolding in place right now. What do I mean by this, exactly? Take, for example, the collaborative project from 2019 that my students did after reading The Giver.* This project required students to plan out a utopia—working in groups, on a single document, from multiple computers—after brainstorming with each other and me. If I had tried to do this project when we returned to school, in masks, six feet apart, it would never have worked, for obvious reasons. So, like so many others, I sacrificed PBL to work with students on regaining some of the other stunted “school skills,” particularly helping them with social and emotional skills and helping them to regain stamina for academic work and interpersonal interactions.† My lesson “Using Biography to Build Community” (available at go.aft.org/w2i) is one example of how I tried to help students reacclimate to school and to build stamina.
Read the rest of the piece here.