Project-Based Learning
Scott Coykendall
Summer 2019
This is a great time to reflect on my takeaways from the CPLC because, as I grapple with the syllabi for my fall courses and wade back into the Curriculum Committee, I imagine that I need to articulate to students and colleagues why my approach must change. I’m sure others will be more eloquent than me when it comes to describing this transformation, but I’ll take a shot at describing two ways I’m shifting my practice in both teaching and governance:
- I understand better that Project Based Learning describes not just a type of assignment or even a way of organizing a course. By those simple metrics, I’ve been engaging in PBL as long as I’ve been teaching. But I’ve always been careful to limit students’ exposure to PBL to certain courses or even to portions of those courses. I wasn’t wrong to do so. As brought up in several instances in CPLC discussion boards and in our breakout sessions, PBL is a demanding experience for students and instructors alike. Students not only seek out information and skills, they participate in deciding which knowledge and skills the project calls for, then discover how to apply those knowledge and skills to the problem.Describing all of this to some friends, I compared it to a big box of Legos. I could provide my students the Lego Deathstar-With-Real-Laser-Cannon. They could follow the step-by-step tutorial and—if they were careful and persistent–possibly end up with something neat that could burn the neighbors’ house down. I think they would learn more from that experience than just how to stack and arrange blocks, but there’s no doubt that the tutorial would make many or most of the decisions for them. …Or I could pour out twelve million Legos on the floor, set my students the goal of building a galactic-scale weapon, and help them begin the long process of deciding how to organize our plan, what knowledge we would need to gather, what skills we would need to acquire or enlist. Maybe we wouldn’t get to vaporize Alderaan by finals week, but we would likely be better at breaking down problems, drawing up objectives, and designing a plan to meet them.We would also be exhausted. Worthwhile as they were, all of those decisions take time and energy and a willingness to make mistakes (and thus expend more time and energy). Even on a smaller scale than the Deathstar-With-Real-Laser-Cannon, too many such experiences could overwhelm students and faculty alike. As I’ve always known, this vision and scale of PBL is not sustainable across every class.But this summer I came to the conclusion that even if I can’t sustain big team-projects in every course, PBL is an ethos that can be applied to every part of my teaching. In many of the discussions, we agreed that PBL places the emphasis on PROCESS in ways that we have always professed to value, but often devalued in actual practice (especially through grading). I’m not sure I’m ready or able to let go of grading, but I’m thinking