The differences between projects and project-based learning

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There are many differences between 'doing' projects and taking a project-based learning (PBL) approach. But what are they? 

The chart below by Amy Mayer of friEdTechnology is helpful to clarify the important differences between projects and project-based learning – the main difference being the process itself. As you can see, this view of projects vs. project-based learning is slanted in favour of PBL, but it’s interesting nonetheless. 

You can also download the table as a printable word document here.

Projects…	Project-based learning…
Can be done at home without teacher guidance or team collaboration.	Requires teacher guidance and team collaboration.
Can be outlined in detail on one piece of paper by the teacher.	Includes many ‘Need to Knows’* on the part of the students and teachers.
Are used year after year and usually focus on product (make a mobile, a poster, a diorama, etc.).	Is timely, complex, covers many TEKS**, and takes a team of highly trained professionals significant time to plan and implement.
The teacher work occurs mainly after the project is complete.	The teacher work occurs mainly before the project starts.
The students do not have many opportunities to make choices at any point in the project.	The students make most of the choices during the project within the pre-approved guidelines. The teacher is often surprised and even delighted with the students’ choices.
Are based upon directions and are done ‘like last year’.	Is based upon driving questions that encompass every aspect of the learning that will occur and establishes the need to know.
Are often graded based on teacher perceptions that may or may not be explicitly shared with students, like neatness.	Is graded based on a clearly defined rubric made or modified specifically for the project.
Are closed: every project has the same goal.	Is open: students make choices that determine the outcome and path of the research.
Cannot be used in the real world to solve real problems.	Could provide solutions in the real world to real problems even though they may not be implemented.
Are not particularly relevant to students’ lives.	Is relevant to students’ lives or future lives.
Do not resemble work done in the real world.	Is just like or closely resembles work done in the real world.
Do not include scenarios and background information or are based on events that have already been resolved.	The scenario or simulation is real or if it is fictitious, is realistic, entertaining, and timely.
Are sometimes based around a tool for the sake of the tool rather than of an authentic question. (Make a Prezi.)	Use technology, tools, and practices of the real world work environment purposefully. Students choose tools according to purposes.
Happen after the ‘real’ learning has already occurred and are just the ‘dessert’.	Is how students do the real learning.
Are turned in.	Is presented to a public audience encompassing people from outside the classroom.
Are all the same.	Is different.
Example: Make a model (or diorama or mobile) of the school/town/local site of interest.	Example: Design a fortification that would take your community through a bio or other non-traditional attack and make a recommendation to the city council for future planning.

 © Amy Mayer, @friEdTechnology, The Original WOW! Academy www.friEdTechnology.com. Please copy and use freely!

* ‘Need to knows’ – things that will need to be learned or discovered during the process of creating the product.

** Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) – the state standards for what students should know and be able to do. The Texan equivalent of the National Curriculum or Common Core Standards.

Language out of context

The ‘back-to-basics’ test of spelling, punctuation and grammar was first revealed almost two years ago and met with much criticism from both teachers and unions. It was sat by around 600,000 primary school students for the first time this summer. The results, published this autumn, show that one in four children are supposedly leaving primary school with poor standards of literacy. 

It would be useful to know this if we are assured of the validity of the test. It would also be useful to know why the billions spent flogging synthetic phonics to death in schools has failed to improve literacy standards.

Debra Myhill, a professor of education at the University of Exeter and a member of the national curriculum review team, was among experts who originally raised concerns about the spelling and grammar (SPAG) tests when consulted by the government.

Professor Myhill warned the government that it was wrong to test children on grammar out of context and suggested that it would give a false impression of their literacy skills.

She said: “I did a very detailed analysis of the test and I had major reservations about it. I think it’s a really flawed test. The grammar test is totally decontextualised. It just asks children to do particular things, such as identifying a noun.”

In fact, she points out, 50 years of research have consistently shown that there is no relationship between doing the kind of work demanded in the test and what pupils do in their writing. It does not ask students to use grammar in context, which means they are not able to apply rules more generally. In other words, it’s a poor test of literacy.

Part of the ‘logic’ backing the legitimacy of the test is this statement from Lord Bew’s final report on educational assessment and accountability: ‘We recognise that there are some elements of writing – spelling, grammar, punctuation, vocabulary – where there are clear ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ answers, which lend themselves to externally-marked testing. A spelling test currently forms 14 per cent of the writing test. Internationally, a number of jurisdictions conduct externally-marked tests of spelling, punctuation and grammar (sometimes termed ‘English language arts’). These are essential skills and we recommend that externally-marked tests of spelling, punctuation, grammar and vocabulary should be developed.’

As Michael Rosen points out so strongly, this is all completely untrue. Spellings vary, as does grammatical usage and punctuation (the report weirdly separates grammar from punctuation), according to context and audience.

It is quite wrong to say that punctuation can only be done one way. This is either a statement of ignorance or a lie. Publishing houses and newspapers vary over the fine points of punctuation. To take one example of many, there are no absolute rules for whether you use a comma or a semi-colon in the middle of a sentence that has what are called two parallel or main clauses - or indeed whether you can do it with a dash or a full stop!

‘He grabbed his collar, he knew it was a crazy thing to do but he did it all same.’
‘He grabbed his collar; he knew it was a crazy thing to do but he did it all the same.’
‘He grabbed his collar - he knew it was a crazy thing to do but he did it all the same.’
‘He grabbed his collar. He knew it was a crazy thing to do but he did it all the same.’

Let’s be quite clear – these are all acceptable. They are all OK ways to punctuate. There is no absolute single right or wrong way out of these four possibilities.

Grammar is not an absolute set of fixed rules – it’s a set of loose conventions for making meaning in a written format which helps text approximate to spoken language. Breaking down the mechanics of how language works is a complex task of linguistic analysis which codifies patterns into seemingly fixed rules called Grammar. But in a living language, it’s a very fluid and unstable system!

Asking children as young as ten and 11 to get involved in this type of practice, where language is stripped of its context and purpose of making meaning and deconstructed into simple rules, is the same sort of mentality that has over-emphasised synthetic phonics as a way of creating technical decoders rather than effective users and consumers of written language.

It is something we shall be returning to. Watch this space.

For serious curriculum reform look west, Mr. Gove!

Gove’s ‘tough and rigorous’ new National Curriculum, which will be dis-applied to children in Academies, Free Schools, Private Schools and SATs years in mainstream schools, is the very antithesis of rigorous in conception. It adheres to no known knowledge of child development and follows no known educational research. It’s a hotchpotch of personal prejudices which have been repeatedly ‘cleansed’ by officials in his department. 

The idea that it will somehow bring us up to international standards and help our international competitiveness is, frankly, arrant nonsense. PISA, the education division of the OECD is quite clear that it is children who can apply high level thinking, communication and problem solving skills in rapidly changing contexts that will be the movers and shakers in the modern world and contribute most to economic performance. Other than in Science, England is not producing too many of these …interestingly PISA doesn’t even think much of our private school system which it says creates little additional value when you strip out the socio-economic privilege of its participants.

The one major country which has been doing worse than England is the USA. The home of psychometric testing and CAT scores performs poorly at Grade 8 (15) in all subjects with its international competitors and there is increasing concern that the memory and drill approach to education is leaving children totally ill-prepared for college and careers. Teachers have, according to surveys, lost all faith in the effectiveness of assessments and the curricula, which vary from state to state.

This deep crisis in education has now been acknowledged by 42 states and the District of Columbia, and the federal Government. They have bought into a set of Common Core Standards. These will, initially in Maths and English, set the benchmark for student performance. What is so interesting in this attempt to establish a national curriculum is the determination – even rush – to abandon old concepts of education and to go for depth rather than breadth, analytical skills rather than memorisation of facts, and team working and collaboration instead of individualised learning and assessment.

The big issue though, recognised by the federal authorities in a way that seems to have escaped Gove, is that to transform teaching and learning and the curriculum, to create higher order thinkers you have to radically reform the assessment system. The federal Government has weighed in with $50 million to develop new assessments, and a key feature of the grant is the ‘crucial integration of instruction, curriculum and assessment.’ Coming from an English context, the sheer common-sense of this is breathtaking! 

The new assessment system will be ‘performance-based’ and will ‘require students to demonstrate higher order thinking through problem-solving, essay writing and research projects. It’s a very different architecture from the type of assessments the states give now’, according to Michael Chester, the Massachusetts Education Commissioner whose state was central to developing one of the assessment development agencies.

The International Centre for Leadership in Education in its overview of the new generation of assessments says: ‘These assessments will range far beyond the usual multiple choice and short answer questions. Instead students will have to apply their knowledge to real world situations through performance events. They will have to work in inter-disciplinary situations. They will have to use technology with facility. Some performance events will take weeks to complete… For teachers this new form of evaluation means developing a dull understanding of performance events; how to construct them and how to evaluate student work. In addition the new assessments require teachers to make substantial use of formative assessment techniques. Final results for each student will comprise a combination of performance events, in course assessments and more conventional standardised tests.

The implications of these changes, say the authors of the overview, ‘are nothing short of a complete retooling of American education’.

Commentators are unanimous in their view that the Common Core Standards and the new assessments will place a huge challenge on students and teachers alike. But what is amazing is the unanimity amongst educators and political leaders of the need for it to happen. It doesn’t take a genius to recognise that the US is now marching forward, whilst Gove is pushing us in the opposite direction, in curriculum design, instruction and assessment. Far from putting us at the top of the international education and economic tables, Gove’s changes are going to leave us floundering in the Little League. 

Boredom is vital for creativity, expert says

Children should be allowed to get bored so they have the chance to develop their creativity, an education expert has asserted. 

Dr Teresa Belton says that constant activity and stimulation could hamper the development of children’s imagination. She acknowledges that boredom may be an “uncomfortable feeling”, but claims modern society has “developed an expectation of being constantly occupied and constantly stimulated”. 

The senior researcher at the University of East Anglia’s School of Education and Lifelong Learning, Dr Belton interviewed a number of authors, artists and scientists about how boredom aided their creativity as children. Speaking of the writer Meera Syal, Dr Belton says: “Lack of things to do spurred her to talk to people she would not otherwise have engaged with and to try activities she would not, under other circumstances, have experienced, such as talking to elderly neighbours and learning to bake cakes…Boredom made her write. She kept a diary from a young age, filling it with observations, short stories, poems and diatribe. And she attributes these early beginnings to becoming a writer late in life.”

Today though, children are more likely to turn to technology when bored. “When children have nothing to do now, they immediately switch on the TV, the computer, the phone or some kind of screen.The time they spend on these things has increased.” 

But this means they miss out on opportunities to be creative, to develop and grow, Dr Belton’s research has shown. “Children need to have stand-and-stare time, time imagining and pursuing their own thinking processes or assimilating their experiences through play or just observing the world around them.” It is this sort of thing that stimulates the imagination, she continued, while the screen “tends to short circuit that process and the development of creative capacity”.

Children who fail to develop this creative capacity are more likely to encounter problems and display antisocial behaviour later in life. “Some young people who do not have the interior resources or the responses to deal with that boredom creatively then sometimes end up smashing up bus shelters or taking cars out for a joyride.” 

Dr Belton concluded: “For the sake of creativity, perhaps we need to slow down and stay offline from time to time.”

What do you think? Let us know below.

Cross curricular project plan: Mysteries of the Middle Ages

Free lesson plan - Crime and punishment in the Middle Ages

The Middle Ages is probably one of the most turbulent time periods in all of history. It began with the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, as barbarian invaders formed new kingdoms across Western Europe. 

It is often referred to as the Dark Ages, because the barbarian tribes did not foster advances in art, literature and architecture as the Romans had. Religion became one of the biggest influences, and whether you were a peasant or a nobleman, life was dictated and overruled by the church. Rights were restricted, the fates of criminals often left to God to decide. 

 

The Roman government was replaced with the feudal system – thousands of small, regional governments wherein the local lord was in charge and held all the power.

It was the age of kings, lords, wars and rebellions, of great riches and great poverty, of repression, disease and famine… and yet it is often romanticised. Dashing knights, beautiful maidens and terrifying (but always in the end, defeated) dragons and monsters dominate film and literature. For Hollywood, the Middle Ages were a time of magic and mystery, and in some ways, they are right. Many myths, legends and fairytales we tell today originated in medieval times, and most of the time, it’s nearly impossible to work out where fact and fiction collide. 

What is real history, and what is purely legend? The Middle Ages and all its mysteries, therefore, have great potential for investigation and development across the whole curriculum.

Our latest issue of Creative Teaching and Learning included the project plan, 'Mysteries of the Middle Ages'. The project focuses on a combination of fact and legend from the Medieval Times. Who really was Robin Hood, we ask. What kinds of mythical monsters did people of the Middle Ages believe to be true? How would we lay siege to a fortified medieval castle? How fair was the medieval justice system?

The full plan is available only to subscribers (now also available to purchase here!), but since we are feeling generous, we have made one lesson plan open access - 'Crime and punishment in the Middle Ages'. The instructions for the lesson are shown below, along with links to where you can download the activity sheet.

Crime and Punishment Instructions (also available to download here)

Purpose:	Examining information to discuss aptness of punishments and comparison to today’s crime and punishment
Curriculum Focus	Communication – speaking and listening, reading, writing Thinking skills - identify gaps and begin to build on existing skills, knowledge and understanding required for the task, suggest alternative processes; identifying  the learning and thinking strategy to be used
Materials	Activity sheets 7a and 7b, paper, pens
Groupings	Four or five
Procedure	Give out information sheet 7a. Read and discuss the contents with the pupils. In their groups, the pupils discuss the questions posed about law and order and then compare their answers to other groups. Next go onto the crime card activity. 1.    Cut out the crime cards. 2.    Give copies to the pupils, enough so they can all read them. 3.    In their groups, pupils discuss the appropriateness of the punishments for the crimes committed. 4.    The pupils make a judgement as to whether they consider the punishments to be right. 5.    The pupils discuss the thinking processes they have used in drawing their conclusions. Were the thinking processes the same or different in other groups?

Click here to download Activity Sheet 7a: Crime and Punishment discussion sheet, and Activity Sheet 7b: Crime Cards.

To subscribe to Creative Teaching and Learning magazine, see here.