What did you learn while working on this project?

We just passed the quarter-mark for the school year … time flies when you're having fun.

At the conclusion of the marking period, students were asked to reflect on what they learned while working on the Tiny House project. One 8th grade boy responded: “Sometimes you don't agree with your group. You have to make a decision that you don't want to … to do what's best for the group”. Indeed! Now, it's one thing to repeat this 'truth' as a piece of 'disembodied knowledge'. It's quite another to arrive at this conclusion by reflecting on an experience you've been through first-hand. It was the collaborative environment of project-based learning that allowed this student to arrive at this conclusion. (Please note that collaboration is one of the four key 21st Century Skills!)

Moments like this accentuate the gravity of the cultural shift that is underway in education. A friend recently passed-on a Washington Post article where author Valerie Strauss challenges some of the deep-rooted assumptions of our education system. Concerning the assumptions of literacy development, she writes:

“Reading compounds this [developmental] variability with the enormous complexity of the cognitive, visual, auditory, emotional, physical, and social dimensions which must all be mature and working together in the growing child for fluent literacy to emerge. And yet we have created a multi-billion-dollar compulsory institution with its ancillary multi-billion dollar industries that all rest on the idea that children should reach this [reading] milestone at the same age.

And that if they can’t, there will be hell to pay.”

While I don't agree many all of the ideas in the article, I highly recommend that you take the time to read the whole thing, especially since it demands critical reflection on the state of education no matter what educational philosophy you ascribe to.

In the end, it may turn out that project-based learning gets caught in the traps of it's own faulty assumptions. But for today, let us celebrate the creativity of one middle school girl at Camp Curtin academy who built this bridge. Who can capture everything that she learned while working on this project!?