PROJECT - BASED LEARNING.

 It’s no longer enough just to “know stuff” or to master the fundamental skills of reading and writing. Of course, that’s still vitally important. But of equal importance is owning a set of complex skills that go beyond straight facts – skills that are necessary to succeed in today’s world – teamwork, critical thinking, communication, decision-making, etc. That’s the primary benefit of project-based learning. It combines traditional classroom knowledge with real-world expertise and skills to better prepare students for success.

Benefits of project-based learning.

• PBL promotes self-motivation and self-responsibility to learn
• PBL facilitates more enjoyable and more effective learning
• PBL encourages learning from experience, allowing students to use and organise what has been learnt to understand problems
• PBL integrates knowledge with practice
• PBL nurtures the ability to analyse problems and to identify and acquire knowledge and skills needed to deal with real-life situations
• PBL develops teamwork and communication skills
• PBL trains students to be reflective and assess their own and others’ work
• PBL cultivates independence, curiosity, and skills for self-directed, life-long learning

However we shouldn't be  unaware of the challenges of PBL. As the old military adage has it, failure to prepare is preparation to fail, so here is a list of what I consider to be the main issues you need to be aware of. 

Coming up a rich problem

This is a key issue and it is what makes PBL benefial. If the project is not well chosen then it can't make learners gain skills that you are targeting. 

Monitoring who is doing what

I mean this in two senses. First, you need to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to develop the same skills.  Second, if one is not careful, it is very easy to allow some pupils to get away with doing very little. However I think one needs to be both pragmatic and perceptive.

Perceptive

Some pupils look like they are not doing any work at all. But just because you can’t see their brain whirring doesn’t mean that nothing is going on. 

Assessing accurately

If 5 people are involved in a project, how do you assess each of them on the quality of the outcome? You could decide to simply give them all the same mark. I think that is unfair, or potentially so. I preferred to do three things in this regard:

Monitoring progress

This is related to assessment, but is not quite the same. What I am referring to is the fact that you need to ensure that each pupil is improving, which entails being challenged. 

Acess To Techology. 

While implementing Project -based Learning , we need to ensure that students have acess to technology , which sometimes is not easy because it involves money which some students may not afford. 

However PBL is the way to go.