| Notes |
Taking It National and Global:
A Value-Driven, Project-Based Learning
and Innovative Credit-Earning Model
By Elliot Washor, Co-founder and Co-director, Big Picture Learning
Noah Thoron, a student at a Big Picture Learning school in San Diego at his internship at San Diego CoastKeeper.
He designed an auto sampler that tests rivers and streams during the rainy season.
Photo: Vanessa Carr
“One of the most remarkable things about us is also one of the easiest to overlook: each time we collide with the real, we deepen our understanding of the world and become more fully a part of it. While we’re wrestling with a difficult task, we may be motivated by an anticipation of the ends of our labor, but it’s the work itself—the means— that makes us who we are.”
—Nicholas Carr
Schools must provide students with oppor- tunities to learn and work on projects that are nested in the real world of museums, businesses, organizations and commu- nities. Such projects are not prepackaged around simple problems, but reflect the dynamic complexity of those settings.
The world outside of schools provides abundant settings and contexts in which students can “collide with the real” and
apply what they know. It is through such applications that students understand
the messiness and uncertainty of making things work in the real world. Such oppor- tunities allow students to develop tacit understandings and heuristics. There are few substitutes for the learning that results from delivering a product or service that others value.
Over the years, museums have shown in a variety of ways that they are very good at getting students to deepen the learning process. When young people take day trips to museums with their families and friends, they explore their vast resources. Some
of these students linger and become an explainer of exhibits or just spend loads of time wandering through the place. There is also a sector of students who get involved in after-school programs that museums offer around exhibits and themes. All of
this allows students to interact on their own terms with the world outside of their homes, computers and schools.
Some students attend one-day museum events where they are inspired and
then do some work back at school with museum-provided kits, or go online and continue a project. But even the best work coming from museums or schools can be better and deeper. We at Big Picture believe that if both places started at the outset with the student’s interests—allowing enough
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sustained time to really go deep—then
we would have very different outcomes. Students need to develop relationships with objects and with adults who spend their lives studying and presenting their work in
a world full of problems and uncertainty. This builds the kind of social capital that lasts a lifetime. Museums and schools typically teach with way too much certainty to engage students over any length of time, or in ways that matter to them and hold deep meaning.
In our Big Picture schools, every student
is engaged with objects and adults around their mutual interests. Students leave the school building and do projects with adult mentors in their work places. Teachers credit students’ work as authentic, deep and sustained learning. Our students are at museums all over the country, from Newark and New York to San Diego, Los Angeles and Oakland. Whether they are in maker- spaces, developing exhibits in the natural history section of a museum, conducting experiments on chamber music or studying mollusks, their work looks different, deeper and better than any work that a museum or a school can do alone or in distant collabo- ration on or off line.
Schools must take down the walls that separate the learning that students do (and could do) in school, from the learning they
do (and could do) outside. The learning in both settings and contexts must be seamlessly integrated. We call such learning “leaving to learn.”
Recently Richard Elmore quipped, “It is
a great time to be learning, especially if
you are out of school.” We get his point. It
is not difficult for schools and museums
to work together to ensure that learning is connected both in school and out of school. What it takes is an innovative approach
to develop deep learning where, as Carr suggests, the means are not cut off from the ends.
At the conference, I started my talk with an image of a Möbius strip. One way to make
a Möbius strip is to start with a two-dimen- sional piece of cashier’s tape, add a half twist to it and apply glue or tape the ends. This brings the strip into the three-dimensional world. We have to do the same thing with our schools and museums. When schools and museums put the ends together, we engage students through their interests in deep and sustained ways. They are credited for work that matters to them, their school, the museum and their community. Instead of doing the same thing we have always done, we need to forge those connections to create a new ecosystem for each and every student.
Elliot Washor, Ed.D., is the co-founder
and co-director of Big Picture Learning—a nonprofit transforming education one student at a time—and the co-founder of The Met Center in Providence, Rhode Island. He is also the co-author of Leaving to Learn: How Out-Of-School Learning Increases Student Engagement and Reduces Dropout Rates.
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