Using project-based learning in your classroom

We know from Ron Berger’s book An Ethic of Excellence – which I summarised in Eight steps to teaching excellence (SecEd, September 2014: http://bit.ly/ZCVf3s) – that the first step towards encouraging students to produce high-quality work is to set assessment tasks which inspire and challenge them and which are predicated on the idea that every student will succeed, not just finish the task but produce work which represents personal excellence.

We also know that the most effective assessment tasks offer students an opportunity to engage in genuine research not just research invented for the classroom.

We know, too, that a student’s finished product needs a real audience and that the role of the teacher is to help students to get their work ready for the public eye. This means there is a genuine reason to do the work well, not just because the teacher wants it that way. Not every piece of work can be of genuine importance, of course, but every piece of work can be displayed, presented, appreciated, and judged.