This week we've been looking at the differences between Projects, and Project-Based-Learning as a teaching methodology. In brief, one of the main differences is that in the former, students are guided through a fixed process towards a more-or-less pre-defined end product, while in the latter, students are given a problem, and have a degree of liberty in what they want to produce as a response to it.
It's an exciting idea, but one which also makes me a little nervous. All of my classroom experience has led me to believe that clarity is one of the most important qualities of a good teacher: making sure that students understand what they have to do, and why they have to do it. Allowing students to decide for themselves the direction in which they will take a project goes against all that, but it also prepares them far better for the demands of adult life (in the problems we face from day to day, we sadly cannot normally count on someone to tell us exactly what we should do).
So I've been thinking of how I could incorporate PBL into my own teaching practice: how can I give students creative freedom while also helping them to understand what they have to do? Reflecting on it, I think that this kind of creativity - coming up with new, original, solutions - is a skill in itself. And just like we do with the English language, we can use scaffolding to help us,
The idea of scaffolding is to provide decreasing levels of teacher support, so that students gradually are able to resolve problems on their own, rather than just throwing them in at the deep end from the jump. Why can't we apply this logic to the learning process itself? Asking students used to the rigid Spanish education system to decide for themselves what to produce for a final project might cause a certain degree of stress. But with scaffolding, we can, for example, start by offering a detailed specification of the information the final product should represent, or by giving a range of different options to choose from, before reducing the level of specification in future projects.
All this is to say, we need to take what we have "trained" our students to do, in terms of their learning strategies, when we ask them to do something new, which breaks from that. And while innovation can offer great learning opportunities, we also need to take our students into consideration when making a drastic break from what they're used to.
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