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Project-based learning for everyone
Project-based learning for everyone
“Project Based Learning (PBL) is a teaching method in which students learn by actively engaging in real-world and personally meaningful projects.” This is the definition from the official website of PBL.
I haven’t heard that much about PBL before, so first of all I read information on their website, and I found this method potentially useful also for my own lessons.
The main idea of Project-based learning is that knowledge is acquired by students actively. They are fully involved in the process, because they need to explore and to create, not just to listen to what the teacher says.
The situation when the way of presentation of the material by the teacher impresses every student is not always real. That is why many students are inactive in the classroom and literally everything that the teacher says doesn’t seem to concern them at all and doesn’t stay in their memory - in other words, they are completely not involved in the process. After all, the class always consists of those who do more or who at least have more opportunities to solve educational tasks, and those whose academic performance leaves much to be desired.
Also, often in schools and universities we meet students who are not interested at all in the material for the reason that their level of knowledge has long been much higher than that offered by the teacher in the classroom.
PBL helps to resolve all these problems. Indeed, in the process of creating a project, students need to interact with each other - this is how they learn to build contacts in the future professional world. In addition, in such a project, in which students with different levels of knowledge participate, teachers have the opportunity to see the approximate average level of success in the classroom.
Also, as mentioned in the lectures for this section of the course, the multimodality method is extremely useful. It allows you to more actively and effectively perceive and memorize information. This method is also used during the creation of projects for PBL.
I really want to implement this approach in my German lessons, especially in those where the classes are in groups. I believe that with the right program design, this method can be extremely effective.
Reference:
Strobel, J. , & van Barneveld, A. (2009). When is PBL More Effective? A Meta-synthesis of Meta-analyses Comparing PBL to Conventional Classrooms. Interdisciplinary Journal of Problem-Based Learning, 3(1).
https://www.pblworks.org/what-is-pbl
Thank you for your elaboration on Project-Based Learning. As a teacher for a number of years, I have seen first hand the effectiveness of this approach when the activity lends itself to it. It is a great way to increase student engagement. But I do know that deliberate instruction on the rules of engagement are necessary to ensure the effectiveness of the process. But once students embrace the value of process, they accomplishments can be quiet astounding!
Thank you for your elaboration on Project-Based Learning. As a teacher for a number of years, I have seen first hand the effectiveness of this approach when the activity lends itself to it. It is a great way to increase student engagement. But I do know that deliberate instruction on the rules of engagement are necessary to ensure the effectiveness of the process. But once students embrace the value of process, they accomplishments can be quiet astounding!
Thanks for your summary of PBL. I'm interested to know how you would implement it in German second language classes. I tried to learn German myself several times but never succeeded despite having learned other languages successfully - French, Italian, Arabic, all to a fairly high degree of fluency. I think the problem was the teaching methods, and I had the same problem with Russian, which followed a very similar, old-fashioned grammar based method.
I agree that PBL shifts the focus away from what the teacher does to what students do. This is a constructivist approach to learning that has many advantages, expecially in a language classroom where there is rarely a single correct solution to a problem. By focusing on what students do, it is possible to improve engagement for some students.
I have seen Project Based Learning contrasted with Problem Based Learning. The distinction, I think, is the in Project Based Learning there is a solution that is known to the instructor and the task is to discover that or replicate it. While in Problem Based Learning, the solution is open and not necessarily pre-determined by anyone.
I guess, Problem Based Leaning might also be something that could be done in a language classroom. Language teaching is so open. There's very little that can't be done in that context.