Future of Learning: Project-based learning gets its moment during the coronavirus

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By Tara García Mathewson

Shelby County Public Schools, a district serving about 7,000 students halfway between Louisville and Lexington, has had state approval for “nontraditional instruction” for several years. That means if a bad snowstorm hit the county, they could keep school going remotely and count the days like any others in the school calendar. Their experience with remote learning helped when schools closed because of the coronavirus.

But only for a few days. As closures stretched on for weeks and reopening seemed increasingly distant, Shelby County educators had to shift gears.

Susan Dugle is the chief academic officer in the district, and for the first two weeks of remote learning, she watched teachers across the county stretching themselves to the limit trying to replicate a normal school day remotely while also holding office hours in the evenings. The schedule was unsustainable for teachers and creating problems for students. Every kid in the district had a device, but they didn’t all have reliable, high-speed internet or adults who could help them at home when a remote teacher wasn’t quite enough.

Shelby County Public Schools trained all of its teachers in project-based learning seven years ago, and the practice had taken root in pockets all over the district. Projects have always been common in classrooms and students frequently wrap up units with bigger assignments that tie together what they learned. This model, however, embeds teaching and learning of new content in the projects themselves. They are the means, not the end. Project-based learning has been shown to increase student engagement, offer interdisciplinary learning opportunities and give students opportunities to practice collaboration and critical-thinking skills that are in high demand in the modern workplace. Dugle thought this remote learning period might be the perfect time to push the strategy and get even more teachers on board with it.

In the end, it worked.

Dugle said teachers across the district saw higher student engagement thanks to projects that captivated students’ attention and gave them the freedom to work through parts of the assignment at their own pace. Many projects focused on Covid-19 and the pandemic, but not all of them. One second-grade teacher had her students design original Pokémon cards and come up with make-believe creatures that combined features of real animals they read about on their own. Besides drawing pictures of their creatures, students had to write about their strengths and weaknesses, based on the animals they were inspired by.

Teachers who previously may not have had the courage to dive into project-based learning found out during remote instruction that it really could be academically rigorous and prompt a deep understanding of class topics.

“When we were able to see all of the products of learning that happened because of that, it really was a selling point,” Dugle said.

Now, as the district prepares for classes next fall, educators widely see project-based learning as a model to prioritize. Teachers have taken stock of how much students learned this spring and what they will need to catch up on next year, but Dugle said it won’t be feasible simply to tack on the content students missed to next year’s curriculum.

“What we’ve decided,” Dugle said, “is that project-based learning is the way to take possible missing learning and standards from a previous year and integrate it into a project the following year … and have that learning occur all at the same time.”

Send story ideas and news tips to tara@hechingerreport.org. Tweet at @TaraGarciaM. Read high-quality news about innovation and inequality in education at The Hechinger Report. And, here’s a list of the latest news and trends in the future of learning.

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The Shortlist

1. New numbers for the digital divide. Schools across the country are grappling with the very real possibility that remote instruction will be an intermittent necessity for the foreseeable future. Common Sense Media and the Boston Consulting Group released a report outlining just how many students do not have adequate internet service at home or the devices they need to participate in remote schooling. Out of the approximately 50 million public school students in the country, the report says 15 million to 16 million do not have one or the other and 9 million do not have either. Researchers estimate it will cost as much as $11 billion to close the digital divide for these students. Read more here.

2. Resources for remote instruction. Organizations continue to release resources to help teachers prepare for long-term virtual schooling. Among the latest: Digital Promise, a nonprofit focused on educational innovation, has five new microcredentials (all free) that include sessions on designing digital lessons and communicating with families. ExcelinEd, a foundation started by Jeb Bush, created a resource guide for supporting special education students through distance learning. And Great Minds, creators of Eureka Math, released a suite of resources to help teachers identify and address gaps in student understanding following this spring’s disruption. This will be useful for teachers who already use Eureka Math or who turned to Eureka Math in Sync while schools were closed.

3. Access to cybersecurity education. A cybersecurity workforce development organization, CYBER.ORG, released a benchmark study identifying the reach of cybersecurity education in K-12 schools. In a survey of a nationally representative sample of 900 K-12 teachers, principals and district leaders by the EdWeek Research Center, fewer than half of respondents said their districts or schools offer cybersecurity education. Access is even less prevalent in small and high-poverty districts. Researchers have projected that the field will have 1.8 million unfilled jobs by 2022, globally. Read the report for recommendations about how to expand and diversify access to cybersecurity education in schools.

4. Youth voices on social and emotional learning. Many schools have prioritized the social and emotional needs of students this spring as they grappled with shuttered schools and a global pandemic. New research from America’s Promise Alliance, a national partnership of nonprofits, businesses, local governments, educators and others, explores what students think of schools and after-school programs that integrate and prioritize academic, social and emotional learning. Recommendations for educators based on in-depth interviews with students include fostering supportive, relationship-rich environments that embrace students’ full identities; giving students a chance to co-create learning opportunities; adopting more holistic ways of assessing progress and success that capture social and emotional development; and finding ways for young people to provide meaningful feedback. A companion youth engagement guide offers more on that last point. And the full report is here.

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