Project work is an active approach to teaching. It gives students the opportunity to explore a particular aspect of science in greater depth, in an extended and collaborative way. Project-based learning puts students at the centre of the learning process. Students learn by doing and they can become knowledge creators when they undertake project work – this is one of the aims of the NCF (2005). Project work in science also allows students to work as real scientists do.
Research suggests that students using project-based learning are likely to retain the knowledge they acquire for longer (Thomas, 2000). Other benefits are that it develops students’ information gathering and processing skills, presentation skills, confidence, and independence. In a competitive global world, these skills are very important.
This unit will introduce you to some teaching strategies that will enable you to undertake project work with your students with confidence. Managing project work well requires teachers to adopt a facilitative role. These strategies will give you practical support in being an effective facilitator.
The strategies are explained using examples from the Class X topic ‘sources of energy’, but these ideas can be used in other parts of the science curriculum.
This approach is important because it gives students the opportunity to work independently. They will have to gather, process and structure information. They will have to make decisions about what information to include, what not to include and how to present the information. These are all skills that they will need when they leave school.
Projects also give your students the opportunity to become ‘experts’ in their chosen field. Projects can be used to provide gifted students with additional assignments and enrichment activities. This will give them confidence that will benefit their learning in science. The project should be based on a topic in the science curriculum, but it could include aspects of other topics within science. It could even be a cross -curricular project that incorporates aspects of mathematics or geography, or even English. In this way, project work can help your students to make connections between topics and therefore improve their overall understanding of science and its relevance to their lives.
Pause for thought In order to realise the benefits of project work, you will need to plan carefully. What do you think you could do in order ensure that the project work is a success? |
How you set up and introduce the project work is very important. For students to be motivated and engaged, they must be interested in the topic, so you need to offer them some choice of questions or titles for them to research for their project. The nature of the school curriculum means that you will want to focus the project work on one topic, but you need to be flexible about what they choose to research within that topic. The main benefits of project work are the skills and confidence that it will help your students to develop.
You also need to ensure that they have access to information and that they are clear about the expectations, such as how long the project should be and how their work will be assessed. The rest of this unit will help you to learn how to run project work successfully.
Getting off to a good start with a project is important. This section has two activities that will enable you to do this. The first involves organising an event to stimulate interest and the second involves organising your class to discuss possible questions that they could investigate.
Very often, the beginning of a project is just like a normal lesson: the teacher hands some papers or books out and tells the students that they are going to do a project. There are much more interesting and exciting ways to start a project with your students. An entry event for a project is a good idea, because it engages your students’ interest and starts them thinking in a critical and creative way.
Starting a project doesn’t have to be very complicated or involve lots of planning. It can be as simple as holding a lively class discussion, or giving your students a thought-provoking picture to look at. It could be asking them to listen to a radio programme or an audio file that you have downloaded. (You could use your mobile phone here if it can be connected to the internet.)
Entry events that would need more planning could include:
These type of entry events require more planning and preparation time, but they can have a much greater impact on the students. This leads to better project experiences for all concerned and more learning.
This activity will help you to prepare and carry out a project launch event with your class.
Decide which of the suggested project entry events appeals to you, or think of an alternative entry event that would be equally effective. Plan how to use the entry event with your class to begin a project on sources of energy in an unusual and exciting way.
Whatever launch event you choose, remember that you are looking for something that is not what you would normally do with your class. It needs to be unusual and memorable for the students. Remember, at the end of the launch event you want your students to be full of enthusiasm for their projects.
Pause for thought
|
Projects that are framed around questions will stimulate your students’ curiosity. A good question sums up the project in one clear, concise and compelling statement. It should be linked to your planned learning outcomes. Some example questions are:
Or it can be about an abstract concept:
Activity 2 will help you develop a question for a project with your class. You could do this activity in order to start the project, or you could do it after a launch event.
This activity is for you do to with your class. If you have not used brainstorming before with your class, you will find it helpful to look at the unit on brainstorming.
Once you have a set of questions, what you do next will depend on whether you want your students to do the project in groups or on their own. They could be given the chance to select a question to investigate or think of another one, or you could ask them to vote for a question that they investigate.
To do their project well, your students will need access to some resources. Typical resources for student projects include class textbooks, school library reference books and newspapers and magazines. Perhaps the most helpful resources can be found on the Internet or on CD-ROMs. These may not be available to you in your school, so you will have to try to find access for your students in the nearest town. Alternatively, you may be able to produce some basic key fact sheets for your students. Applications such as Google Earth could support a range of different projects.
For a good project you need to plan ahead. Starting several weeks before you intend to begin the project, start to collect information from newspapers, magazines and the internet. Create a folder that you can keep adding to for a few weeks. Enlist your students’ help too. Keep labelled project boxes in your classroom and encourage your students to fill them with materials that they come across that are relevant. Collaborate, share and swap with other teachers in your school. See if you can collaborate with more well-resourced schools – they may be willing to lend you textbooks from time to time.
If you have a friend or colleague who is an expert on the topic you have chosen, you could ask them some questions and record the conversation on your mobile phone. Your students could then listen to it and use some of the information in their project.
Keep student projects from each year – these can act as invaluable resources, providing scientific information for students in subsequent years. Previous years’ projects can be great wall decorations and will show your students what they are aiming for. (Assessment criteria will be discussed later in the unit.) Read Resource 1, ‘Using local resources’, to find out more.
In order to develop their collaborative and social skills, projects are usually best done by students working in small groups (Figure 1), although they can be done in pairs or by individuals. Four students is the usual optimum number for a project team. In bigger groups, each individual student’s contribution can be very small and it is not meaningful for them; in smaller groups, there can be too much for each individual student to complete. But ultimately, you need to decide the group size based on your class size, the resources available and the nature of the project.
Mixed gender groups are generally better than same-sex groups if your students are used to working in this way. The same is true for mixed ability groups. Avoid putting students who do not cooperate in the same group. You might also want to think about where the students live. If you are expecting your students to work on the project outside school, it might be helpful to group students who live near to each other. You would want to make sure that students who have difficulties with reading or writing are grouped with students who are proficient with these skills. The best group will be one where the students’ skills complement each other and where the students support each other. You should decide the groups before the lesson and then read out the groups or pin up the group list on the classroom wall or noticeboard.
Teams work best when each student has a specific role. Roles should be based on the roles that would be needed in the real world to complete the project. You will need to give students suggestions for the roles such as leader, researcher or recorder. Alternatively, students could each work on gathering information on one aspect of the topic and then work together on analysing and presenting it.
Teacher Samsana organises her students into project teams.
I decided that Class X was going to work on the chapter on sources of energy as a project. It was ambitious because if they are all here, there are 80 students in the class. There is a good chapter in the textbook, but we are on the outskirts of a large city, so to get access to the internet, you have to go into the city to an internet café. I started collecting information in boxes in the classroom and asked my students to gather information too. I printed some information from the internet one weekend and put it in the boxes.
I organised my students into groups of four. I tried to mix up the girls and boys, and I tried to take account of where they lived and their friends. I mixed the low and higher attainers, making sure that the weakest students were in a group with a friend who could help them. It took me quite a while, and when they got going I had to swap a few students. But I did this quietly because I did not want them to think that they could all move groups! There were unequal numbers of girls and boys, so two girls ended up in groups with three other boys. There were not happy, so I ended up with a group of boys and put the two girls together. I think being flexible was important. I realised that organising groups for project work can be difficult. I will watch them carefully while they are working and try and notice who works well together.
Project work requires students to work in an independent way over an extended period. Unless they are used to it, your students will not be very good at managing their time or their work. You may find that by the end of the project, the groups in your class may not have completed their projects or have rushed some parts. Here are some ideas for helping students to manage their time so that they have a better chance of finishing on time and producing good quality work.
You need to decide how long you are going to give your students to complete the project. Your students should know this at the beginning of the project. One of the very first things you should ask your student groups to do is to produce a project plan. The plan should explain how, lesson by lesson, they intend to divide up the project work. It should also explain which team member is responsible for which part of the project.
Use the plan as a working document to record progress of the project. Have a plan wall in your classroom where all the team plans are displayed. Teams can mark off the work they have done in every lesson. Having the plans where everyone can see them can be very motivating for the students.
In every lesson, check that you know how each team is progressing. These can be brief to check their progress against their plan and to discuss problems or concerns.
Teacher Samsana continues with her project and reflects on how useful a project wall was to help her manage her large class’s learning.
I knew from past experience when I have tried to do projects before, the whole thing gets very messy and noisy, and I spend a lot of time rushing around telling students what to do next and to hurry up. I used to get headaches after project lessons. I felt that I was working harder than many of my students!
This time I used a project wall to help me manage the sources of energy project. Running the class project was still hard work, but this time I felt like I was in control. I decided to allow two weeks for the project, as this was the time we usually spend on a chapter. We used the class time and the homework time.
Having organised my students into groups of four, I asked each group to nominate a ‘manager’. At the start of each lesson, the teams went to the project wall and looked at their plan. Then they got on with whatever their plan for that lesson said they had to do. At the start of every lesson I held a quick five-minute meeting with all the team managers and found out what each group was intending to do that lesson. This gave me an overview. Based on this I decided which teams I was going to check up on in detail that lesson. Some of the more organised groups only got two or three meetings with me over the lifetime of the project. The less organised groups got more progress meetings, so I could keep them on track better.
I felt that the situation was much more under control doing it this way. I did have to give my students extra time at the end, but the quality of the projects was better than before. Every group managed to hand in a good piece of project work, so I will definitely use this idea again.
Projects are not just about written work. The project can be presented as a poster, model, play or story. If you have access to computers, it could be in the form of a presentation. If you decide to ask your students to produce posters, remember to photograph them on your mobile phone! Using alternative formats is good for students who find reading and writing more difficult. It gives all students more chances to express themselves differently. This will help their creativity. Allowing students some choice about the format they use is motivating for students.
Mr Singh informed his Class X that the format for their ‘sources of energy’ projects was a presentation.
When I have asked students to write up projects in the past, it usually goes two ways. The girls are especially bad at spending too much time fussing over the neatness of their work and the boys just rush through to finish quickly. I wanted them to concentrate on the key issues instead. So this time I asked them to produce a ten-minute presentation. I thought that if they all had to do a presentation, it would level the playing field and focus their minds!
I was right! At our regular progress meetings, I was able to monitor each group’s presentations as they developed. With a few of the less confident students we were able to rehearse their speaking parts. I was able to advise the groups about what they should include and what they should leave out. I told them that I was their critical friend, and that my job was to make their work the best it could be by challenging them on it.
The different presentations were interesting and informative, and not at all dull or repetitive. One group included a rap and another composed a poem. I did stop one group from trying to do the presentation as a Bollywood movie; instead they did a short role play. During the presentations, one minute the whole class was laughing, and the next we were deep in contemplation. I could see that each group expressed themselves very differently, even though they were all sticking to the presentation format.
I was pleased that I had decided to try this strategy. Maybe next time I will attempt some peer review of the presentations. Now that I know that my students can do imaginative presentations, I might also invite in an authentic final audience for them to showcase their work to. I don’t think it would be too hard to arrange invitations for parents, local community representatives or even other teachers.
At the end of the project, the teams’ work needs to be assessed. Rather than marking it yourself, you could try some peer review. Whatever method you decide to opt for, it is important that the students know what the success criteria are for their project from the outset. You can co-construct the success criteria at the start with the students. Doing it this way would be very democratic. This is where examples of previous projects might be useful.
Putting the success criteria on a poster and keeping it on the project wall will allow all your students to see it while they work. This will help keep them focused on the aspects of the work that they will gain credit for.
This is an activity for you to do on your own, or with another teacher.
Once you are confident about working in this way, you might try getting your class to decide on the criteria. For example, Teacher Samsana could have asked the group managers to discuss suitable criteria, or she could have shared her criteria with them and let them suggest changes. For more detail, see Resource 2, ‘Assessing progress and performance’.
The main idea behind effective project-based learning is that extended and independent study of real-world issues and problems can secure students’ interest and engagement in a way quite unlike traditional methods of instruction. When students are ‘hooked’ into a meaningful project that is based on some real-life challenge, they learn implicitly, in great depth and also develop many important other social and life skills.
As a teacher, you need to make a big shift in your normal practice to undertake effective project-based learning. You need to facilitate rather than lecture, and should undertake no pre-teaching of material so that your students can learn fully for themselves. Your project-based classrooms will look and sound like very different places. You will have to accept that you cannot possibly know everything there is to know about your project topic. The benefit for you is that you can learn something new about the project topic too!
Many learning resources can be used in teaching – not just textbooks. If you offer ways to learn that use different senses (visual, auditory, touch, smell, taste), you will appeal to the different ways that students learn. There are resources all around you that you might use in your classroom, and that could support your students’ learning. Any school can generate its own learning resources at little or no cost. By sourcing these materials locally, connections are made between the curriculum and your students’ lives.
You will find people in your immediate environment who have expertise in a wide range of topics; you will also find a range of natural resources. This can help you to create links with the local community, demonstrate its value, stimulate students to see the richness and diversity of their environment, and perhaps most importantly work towards a holistic approach to student learning – that is, learning inside and outside the school.
People work hard at making their homes as attractive as possible. It is worth thinking about the environment that you expect your students to learn in. Anything you can do to make your classroom and school an attractive place to learn will have a positive impact on your students. There is plenty that you can do to make your classroom interesting and attractive for students – for example, you can:
If you are doing work on money or quantities in mathematics, you could invite market traders or dressmakers into the classroom to come to explain how they use maths in their work. Alternatively, if you are exploring patterns and shapes in art, you could invite maindi [wedding henna] designers to the school to explain the different shapes, designs, traditions and techniques. Inviting guests works best when the link with educational aims is clear to everyone and there are shared expectations of timing.
You may also have experts within the school community (such as the cook or the caretaker) who can be shadowed or interviewed by students related to their learning; for example, to find out about quantities used in cooking, or how weather conditions impact on the school grounds and buildings.
Outside your classroom there is a whole range of resources that you can use in your lessons. You could collect (or ask your class to collect) objects such as leaves, spiders, plants, insects, rocks or wood. Bringing these resources in can lead to interesting classroom displays that can be referred to in lessons. They can provide objects for discussion or experimentation such as an activity in classification, or living or not-living objects. There are also resources such as bus timetables or advertisements that might be readily available and relevant to your local community – these can be turned into learning resources by setting tasks to identify words, compare qualities or calculate journey times.
Objects from outside can be brought into the classroom – but the outside can also be an extension of your classroom. There is usually more room to move outside and for all students to see more easily. When you take your class outside to learn, they can do activities such as:
Outside, their learning is based on realities and their own experiences, and may be more transferable to other contexts.
If your work outside involves leaving the school premises, before you go you need to obtain the school leader’s permission, plan timings, check for safety and make rules clear to the students. You and your students should be clear about what is to be learnt before you depart.
You may want to adapt existing resources to make them more appropriate to your students. These changes may be small but could make a big difference, especially if you are trying to make the learning relevant to all the students in the class. You might, for example, change place and people names if they relate to another state, or change the gender of a person in a song, or introduce a child with a disability into a story. In this way you can make the resources more inclusive and appropriate to your class and their learning.
Work with your colleagues to be resourceful: you will have a range of skills between you to generate and adapt resources. One colleague might have skills in music, another in puppet making or organising outdoor science. You can share the resources you use in your classroom with your colleagues to help you all generate a rich learning environment in all areas of your school.
Assessing students’ learning has two purposes:
Formative assessment enhances learning because in order to learn, most students must:
As a teacher, you will get the best out of your students if you attend to the four points above in every lesson. Thus assessment can be undertaken before, during and after instruction:
When you decide what the students must learn in a lesson or series of lessons, you need to share this with them. Carefully distinguish what the students are expected to learn from what you are asking them to do. Ask an open question that gives you the chance to assess whether they have really understood. For example:
Give the students a few seconds to think before they answer, or perhaps ask the students to first discuss their answers in pairs or small groups. When they tell you their answer, you will know whether they understand what it is they have to learn.
In order to help your students improve, both you and they need to know the current state of their knowledge and understanding. Once you have shared the intended learning outcomes or goals, you could do the following:
Knowing where to start will mean that you can plan lessons that are relevant and constructive for your students. It is also important that your students are able to assess how well they are learning so that both you and they know what they need to learn next. Providing opportunities for your students to take charge of their own learning will help to make them life-long learners.
When you talk to students about their current progress, make sure that they find your feedback both useful and constructive. Do this by:
You will also need to provide opportunities for students to improve their learning. This means that you may have to modify your lesson plans to close the gap between where your students are now in their learning and where you wish them to be. In order to do this you might have to:
By slowing the pace of lessons down, very often you can actually speed up learning because you give students the time and confidence to think and understand what they need to do to improve. By letting students talk about their work among themselves, and reflect on where the gaps are and how they might close them, you are providing them with ways to assess themselves.
While teaching–learning is taking place and after setting a classwork or homework task, it is important to:
The four key states of assessment are discussed below.
Collecting information or evidence
Every student learns differently, at their own pace and style, both inside and outside the school. Therefore, you need to do two things while assessing students:
Recording
In all schools across India the most common form of recording is through the use of report card, but this may not allow you to record all aspects of a student’s learning or behaviours. There are some simple ways of doing this that you may like to consider, such as:
Interpreting the evidence
Once information and evidence have been collected and recorded, it is important to interpret it in order to form an understanding of how each student is learning and progressing. This requires careful reflection and analysis. You then need to act on your findings to improve learning, maybe through feedback to students or finding new resources, rearranging the groups, or repeating a learning point.
Planning for improvement
Assessment can help you to provide meaningful learning opportunities to every student by establishing specific and differentiated learning activities, giving attention to the students who need more help and challenging the students who are more advanced.
This content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/ by-sa/ 3.0/), unless identified otherwise. The licence excludes the use of the TESS-India, OU and UKAID logos, which may only be used unadapted within the TESS-India project.
Every effort has been made to contact copyright owners. If any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity.
Video (including video stills): thanks are extended to the teacher educators, headteachers, teachers and students across India who worked with The Open University in the productions.