The Need for Project-Based Learning

If we say we want students to become critical thinking life-long learners, we need to provide projects that encourage them to engage in creative collaboration. This is the power of designing collaborative projects.

We often hear about the need for students to hit the 4 C’s in 21st-century learning:

Creativity
Critical Thinking
Collaboration
Communication

We are nearly a fifth of the way into the 21st century and yet we are still in a system where students passively consume content. However, I would argue that those four C’s aren’t “21st-century” skills. They’re timeless skills. They were relevant a century ago and they’ll be relevant 200 years from now. These are the ideas Dewey wrote about a century ago and the ideas Quintilian wrote about two thousand years ago.

I love this idea that students should be engaged in collaborative projects, where they are thinking critically, engaged in creativity, and learning how to communicate.

I recently asked teachers to list the benefits they see in collaborative projects. Here are some of the things they learn:

• Perseverance: how to keep going even when a task is difficult
• Project management: how to plan, monitor, and assess projects
• Communication: they learn how to communicate, resolve conflict, and show empathy toward others
• Maker mindset: they define themselves as problem-solvers, designers, creators, and builders
• Systems thinking: how to navigate external systems
• Ownership: they increase in their sense of agency and they develop their own voice
• Critical thinking: they have an authentic context to engage in analysis, evaluation, and the generation of new ideas
• Adaptability: they become flexible thinkers
• Inquiry: they learn how to ask great questions

This doesn’t mean you have to use PBL 100% of the time. Sometimes you still need to use direct instruction, workshops, discussions, etc. But PBL can be a valuable way to empower your students with voice and choice!