What would you say to your Board of Education?

David Warlick, in his sbe_comments blog post, asked for input into include in his standard presentation to a school board. He issued this challenge.

“What would you say to a group of school board members, in the interest of promoting progressive schools — and you have only that 10 second elevator ride?”

I don’t think I can keep it to 10 seconds, but he goes.

I used to teach my 3rd grade class the parts of a plant, the life cycle of a plant, and how bees and flowers interact with worksheets and a textbooks. This year every student grew flowers in our classroom. We predicted what we though would happen. We observed and measured our plants everyday. We used scientific tools like magnifying glasses and forceps to help us produce plants. We graphed our measurements and drew pictures of our plants in our science journals. We took pictures of them with digital cameras and recorded student reflections with a digital recorder. We observed (dead) bees and pollinated flowers with them. We will watch the flowers turn into seed pods, and then we will harvest seeds just like the ones we started with.

The kids love the project, because they are doing science, not just reading it. They are much more fully engaged than they could ever be reading the chapter and doing the worksheet. They know flowers inside and out in much more detail than I could have dreamed for 3rd graders. This paradoxically simple (growing flowers), yet very complex experience (examining them in scientific detail) immersed the students so completely that they will probably remember it for the rest of their lives, not just until the end of 3rd grade.

My conclusion is this:

Project based learning encourages higher-level learning by exponentially increasing the complexity of learning. The more complex the learning, the more connections students create with the content. The more connections they have, the more likely they are to remembered the information later, maybe even for a life time. Technology is a tool that amplifies learning like a microphone amplifies sound. However, it’s not about the technology tools. It’s about what you do with the tools to encourage a deep kind of learning.

I couldn’t keep it to 10 seconds, Dave, but it is difficult to reduce a significant experience to a sound byte. However, if you want to convince someone, tell a story.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

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