PROJECT-BASED LEARNING SHARPENS STUDENTS’ SKILLS FOR MEETING 21st CENTURY CHALLENGES. BY SUSAN KERR as an adult you can be excused if you’ve never heard of, or mastered, the 21st century skill set. But if you’re a student in today’s highly competitive academic, social and career-focused environment, acquiring that set of skills may make the ultimate difference between success and failure. Having the latest tech gadgets every-ready at your fingertips—for one-handed texting and smartphone selfies—may be cool and convenient, but not sufficient. After more than a decade into this new millennium, educators are looking at how best to foster knowledge and character traits believed to be crucial for students to advance into this brave new world without stumbling. In this search for answers, schools are increasingly looking at an innovative teaching approach called Project-Based Learning. The goal: to create skills for figuring out what’s important, how to manage time, and how to find the appropriate facts to create a satisfactory end-product. By way of a brief history, the first step, now completed, was to define essential goals for today’s youth. That effort launched the 21st century skill set. Think of it as a future-forward tool kit, whose components are outlined in a broad, unofficial, almost revolutionary list of skills that range from the readily understandable—computer literacy—to the amorphous, such as creativity. We’re now at the next, more difficult phase: figuring out how to make these visions a reality. If the word “project” conjures up musty memories of dull book reports, think again. PBL is the antithesis of passive regurgitation of facts or content, and is turning the teaching world inside out. At the heart of PBL are student-driven activities, which involve creating a product, performance or event. These typically germinate from an open-ended question that relates to a real-world issue. Teachers become facilitators, not lecturers. Projects are often multi-disciplinary. BRAVE NEW 66 South Bay Accent COURTESY OF HILLBROOK SCHOOL
South Bay Accent - Feb/Mar 2016
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