Post #3: Project Based Learning

This week’s readings allowed me to consolidate my personal and professional beliefs as a student and instructor about Project Based Learning as a catalyst towards fostering students’ motivation, creating a liberating and meaningful learning environment, allowing collaborative work, offering enough time for the incubation of powerful ideas, and engaging students in the construction of a product or artifact.

As a student, I had this experience in the Fall of 2011 in a course called Teaching with Technology, which happens to be the same course I am teaching now. As a student I could develop a website with teaching resources to integrate cultural artifacts in classes of English as a foreign language. Besides working on something I was passionate about and that was directly related to my TESOL major, I felt throughout different tasks and activities (such as Stop Animation video, 20% Project, and so on) that I was learning not only from the teacher, but also from exploring the world for resources (printed and online) and from interacting with peers in and out of class.

Now that I am a teaching assistant, I still believe on how powerful Project Based Learning is. In my class we are working on small-scale tasks that gradually prepare undergraduate students for a continuous, iterative and much more complex project called 20% Project. Despite the fact that I only introduced the 20% Project a couple of weeks ago, students are already searching for articles and resources directly related to their ideas, asking for advice from me and soon they will be sharing their reflections on the ongoing process with peers in order to have feedback from them. Despite the early stage, I already feel students’ higher levels of motivation towards this project not only because it is of their interest, but because it allows them enough time to be creative, to generate ideas, to receive feedback and to engage in the actual hands-on task of constructing their artifact. Hopefully by the end of the semester I will be able to post some of the interesting topics they have been working on.