Here’s what students aren’t telling you about Project Based Learning

Project based learning is dead. Yep. You read that right. Dead. On the side of the road dragged to death.

The traditional school system with its stubborn best practices killed project based learning a long time ago. I know this might be hard for you to read but before you click away from this dig deep with me because there is hope here. After all, I wouldn’t take the time to write this if there was nothing for you to take away from it.

So lets get into it? Cool.

??Cause of death: School

Sometime in the spring of 2015 the edtech ecosystem was booming. There was a ton of money in the startup ecosystem in general so it was not uncommon to see a new shiny tool pop up every 6 months. I’d just discovered how powerful adaptive learning software was as I’d accidentally helped a student learn to read just by having him use Newsela. That’s a different article but trust me when I say it was amazing and it changed my career (let me know in the comments if you want a piece on this). The change I made from this moment was that I stopped lecturing in my classroom. I outsourced that to e-learning platforms that were getting better and better by the day. I freed up my time as the teacher to get really creative. And I mean really creative.

I leaned on Sal Khan to explain to my students what the Roman aqueducts were and I was trying to have them recreate miniature versions of aqueducts going from the second floor water fountain to the first floor water fountain. We re-enacted historical battles, fought with the district to spend weeks in modern art museums, staged a protest against our wicked superintendent for not allowing us to bring salad bars into our school. So when I say we got creative, I mean really, really creative.

Quickly I became one of the most popular teachers in the building because my class was like no other. It was a unique experience that I got to construct for these learners every day. My students would walk in and say things like “Showtime!” Or “I’m here for the best thing I’ll do all day” or “what should I be ready for today?” I could tell that they loved being in my class and I LOVED having them in the room doing school this way.

This isn’t to say that everything went right all the time. We had plenty of failed projects and attempts. There were plenty of times I started a project and it just flopped. But this crazy thing happened. We laughed those off. We, as a learning community started to understand that failure was part of all of our learning process, me included.

One day a student who often got in trouble walked into my classroom and sat down. This wasn’t abnormal, he did this quite often. Because we were almost always in the middle of students working on something weird or cool, I never had to stop to check on him. “What happened this time bro?” I asked him. “I got kicked out of Ms. G’s class because I didn’t want to do that work.” As we talked about it I learned that there was a project that she gave them that he didn’t want to do. But not because he wasn’t interested in learning but because he’d already done the same project the previous year in a different teacher’s class. “In her class it’s just school. In this one its more like real life and things we actually like.”

Then it hit me. Project based learning wasn’t the silver bullet we thought it was in education. See, to this student and many others I’ve taught since projects in school became just that. They've become synonymous with school.

Once we started recycling and teachers pay teachering and standardizing projects in classrooms, we choked the life out of them. There was no joy or excitement or serendipity left in the process or the projects. There was a stale standardized school.

????You’re not listening

It's not that students don't have the words to say this. They are saying it, just not in the ways that we, as the education community, are listening to.

In this field, we love academia so much that we're happy to label anything that doesn't fit into its image as waste of time. I'll prove this to you:

• Email any professor at Harvard or Yale or Stanford or [insert shiny prestigious school here] and ask them if you've done enough research by reading 2000 tweets.
• Hit up someone from New Schools Venture Fund or GSV or Emerson or [insert Ed funder here] and ask them if a collection of 100 TikTok videos counts as user research to go solve a problem.
• Go ask any high school principal to change a school policy based on a trend you see booming on Snap or Reddit.

You know the answer. And it looks like turned up noses and sounds like voices scoffing and feels like judgemental eyes. You know that Twitter and Snap and TikTok and Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp and Youtube are places where real people communicate real emotions and live time yet have largely been rejected by this field. The problem is that this is where students are telling the world what they think about almost everything, including your classroom.

If you're here you already know that I'm not an academic. I live in these online spaces and often use them to figure out where learning should go by what real people are saying. One of the things I've recently put together is that, for the most part, students view school as something that is happening to them. Changing it isn't a possibility for most students so they accept what they cannot change. In this case, it's a broken system.

Comments like these lead me to believe that school is viewed as a necessary evil by young people, and those of us who’ve made it out of school don’t quite care enough about the next generation to go back into the belly of the beast and fix it. In the end, both young and old people seem to view fixing the broken system as someone else’s problem.

This is why you probably haven't heard that your projects feel like school and that they suck.

??The Heimlich

Since the spring of 2015 I’ve been on this long journey to revive project based learning and learning in general. From getting rejected by Teach For America in 2015 (hilarious, I know), to working on projects like For Driving Skills for life, viral teacher appreciation videos, building a school where we created some of the best projects I’d ever seen I’ve been about this life for the last decade. Fam, I’m proud to say that I’m not a deep thinker or academic who studies this type of learning. I’ve been building, tinkering and actively making this happen. I’m a practitioner.

My latest effort is called the WRKSHP. This is a platform featuring life skills challenges that disguise the skill building or learning by making it feel more like a viral TikTok challenge than a project you have to sit and pay attention to. They’re coming from suggestions of real people and real lessons from other industries. The goal for a student is that they can use this platform to learn skills, mindsets and practices that can lead them to internships or employment but ultimately about giving them control over the life they actively build.

I’ve had the great pleasure of working with Colleen Keating-Crawford who’s my Reinvention Lab teammate on this, Joanna Lovejoy who’s one of the greatest school and learning designers on planet earth that yall should be talking about and three high school students, Aaron, Abigail and Tolu. I wouldn’t dare try to build this without young people on board.

Aaron, Abigail and Tolu form this powerful coalition that I meet with weekly to review challenges that our team has built, test them out in live time and even have them build their own challenges. No part of the build of this project has been off limits to them. For example, last week we talked about monetization and the motivation of customers to pay for this. Hear me when I say this: This product would be 100x worse without them on board. They’re real, raw and don’t hold back and that’s why the engagement works!

This took work and time to develop. There are reasons this engagement works. One of the students, Aaron, I knew for a little over a year and have had the pleasure of working with in several out of school settings before. We're not strangers. Tolu and Abigail are both outspoken members of a high school speech team coached by my former high school speech coach and the teacher that changed my life, Heath Martin. We're also from the same neighborhood in Houston. I also met both of them in person to invite them to apply to be a part of this engagement. We're not really strangers either.

There isn't total and complete trust but there is a level of understanding that's leading to trust between us all. Oh and I also had to remind them constantly in the first few weeks that "this isn't school and I'm not one of your teachers."

To get the best feedback from them we had to make sure that they didn't equate this experience to school.

As I was reviewing the notes from the last meeting we had with them, I also realized that they are actually writing a new playbook for what the future of project based learning should and could look like.

These three brilliant minds are performing the Heimlich on PBL.

??The Revival of Project Based Learning

This is where the hope is. PBL is dead but we can revive it. Over the last few months I’ve gotten a LOT of feedback from this brilliant group. The context of these is different from a school context so, to set this up it helps for us to agree that learning should not be confined to the four walls of a school building. If you want to revive project based learning (and maybe even learning in general) you have to let it bleed out of the walls of the school and into the real world

Here’s seven lessons for you to chew on from these brilliant young minds:

1. Projects must be short meaning that someone can complete the task in less than 15 minutes. If you want a student to learn out of school you can’t ever have them relate that project to what happens in school. The time you ask for matters.
2. Projects must have catchy, punchy, and relevant titles. The way we package learning experiences matters. Students have so much access to beautiful and well designed media these days that your google slides presentation from 2018 just doesn’t cut it anymore.
3. Projects must spark a sense of joy for the user. Love of learning matters. Learning cannot be an experience you grit your teeth through anymore. It must be something a student can lose themselves in.
4. Projects must be something that we can observe and track. They should happen in the real world and might not need to be easily gradable. One of the challenges a play tester created was the “fist bump challenge” which was simply to fist bump a certain number of people per day. That’s easily observable but not easily ranked on a numbered scale.
5. Challenges must be appropriate for high school students. What they were getting at here is that a LOT of teachers miss with age appropriateness. Too many designers say they’re building for high school when the tool or advertisement or project is really for 5th grade. Understand the needs, wants and even design aesthetics of your audience.
6. Projects should be edgy and push a student out of their comfort zone. My buddy Graham Frey used to say it best. “School is a place where students should are pushed out of their comfort but know they are safe.”
7. Pop Culture matters. If you don’t know who won the Kendrick and Drake beef or if you don’t have a response to “what’s up brother” or if you aren’t sure why anyone cares that Jersey Joe graduated then you’re not playing on the same field as your students. No you don’t need to try to be cool but it does help to know something about what students are consuming and enjoying in their world.

I’ll be honest with you. A future of project based learning that looks like this could be a really bright future but it also won’t be the silver bullet that fixes all of education’s problems. It will be massively helpful and exciting but not the final answer. The hope that I have is that this inspires you to think differently about how you teach and why you teach. I hope it changes your practice.

We hope to be shipping some version of the WRKSHP soon that should help this list become a reality for many students and educators. Let me know if you’re excited about it in the comments! Before you do that, let me leave you with one more powerful learning.

??The bottom line here is that the real hope of any bright future of education must involve students in the builder, designer, and ownership seat. They must have a powerful say in what we build. So if you do nothing else differently after reading this, do this one thing for me. Give your students a radical amount of autonomy and control over what and how they learn.

Until the next time.

I’m out.