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I do an amount of project based learning particularly in SESE. I just think that one has to be very systematic and structured to get the most value from it as a methodology.
I am still struggling with maximizing the benefits of co-operative learning. I feel without a lot of initial direction from teachers, it can fail and have a detrimental effect on the participants, resulting in very little learning.
My own personal and teaching journey goes some way towards explaining my reservations. I am a child of an Irish classroom of the 60s where collaboration was not encouraged! I started teaching in the early 80s where it was seen as an enormous ‘sticking plaster’ where it would be the answer to nearly everything.
At the time the enormous creativity shown in classrooms in the UK were given to us as exemplars. It seemed to me at the time that project based learning was presented nearly as an alternative to strict objective based lesson planning.
I was on my own learning curve when I first started teaching. I had a third class. Deciding that project work was mostly about process and developing research skills I gave the children ‘free choice’ in terms of deciding on their topic with the very first project that we did.
Then each child set about researching their subject. In those days our main source of information was a twenty volume sets of the Children’s Britannica. In my first year teaching I asked one child to look up Russia, her chosen topic. Some long moments later when she hadn’t resurfaced, I went to look for her and found that she had started at the beginning, looking through Volume One Aa – Ay and was laboriously going through each book page by page. That’s when I realized I’d have to teach research skills.
To further elaborate on my reservations about the use of projects in class I wI think Allan Ahlberg‘s poem ‘Do a Project’ sums up my reservations about project work and co-operative learning
Do a project…
Do a project on dinosaurs
Do a project on sport
Do a project on the Empire State Building
The Eiffel Tower
The Blackpool Tower
The top of a bus
Ride a project on horses
Such a project on sweets
Play a project on the piano
Chop a project on trees
Down.
Write a project on paper
A plaster cast
The back of an envelope
The head of a pin
Write a project on the Great Wall of China
Hadrian’s wall
The playground wall
Mrs Wall
Do a project in pencil
In ink
In half an hour
In bed
Instead
Of someone else
In verse
Or worse
Do a project in playtime
Do a project on your hands and knees
Your head
With one arm tied behind you
Do a project wearing handcuffs
In a steel coffin
Eighty feet down
At the bottom of the Hudson River
(which ideally is frozen over)
On Houdini
Forget a project on memory
And refuse one on obedience.
There is also a story that sums the dynamic I often see where there is a group based project where not everyone is pulling their weight.
A Little Story
This is a story
About four people
Named
Everybody
Somebody
Anybody and nobody.
There was an
Important job to
Be done and
Everybody was
Sure that
Somebody would
Do it.
Anybody
Could have done
It, but nobody
Did it.
Somebody
Got angry about
That, because it
Was everybody’s
Job. Everybody
Thought that
Anybody could
Do it, but nobody
realised that
Everybody
Wouldn’t do it.
It ended up that
Everybody
blamed
Somebody when
Nobody did what
Anybody could
Have done.
So it is vital that the teacher monitored that the goals are being achieved and that the participants are maintaining an effective working relationship. Judicious assigning of roles to the team helps.