“There are many decisions that teachers make when they are facilitating project work, but none is probably more important than deciding on the topic”
Judy Harris Helm, Becoming Young Thinkers, 2015
With each school year at the museum, we get to see many new topics emerge through our Early Childhood Connections program. There are often the classic topics like water, construction, and trees. This past year, we had an increase of topics around playgrounds and playground elements. Since I hadn’t seen a playground topic in action yet, I was curious to see how it would play out, and curious as to why all of the topics emerged at once. As it turns out, through the Chicago Project Plays! Playground replacement program, new playgrounds have been being built in neighborhoods around Chicago, and students were able to observe and investigate the playground and it’s construction. Classrooms ended up focusing on different elements, and even if they shared a topic, the investigations and culminations were all unique. My doubts were blown out of the water with the teachers’ hard work and the amazing projects. It even sparked a further interest in other playground projects.
Recently, I stumbled upon a video that got me thinking more about playground projects. The video is about an initiative called Project PLACE: A Project Approach to Literacy and Civic Engagement. It focuses on a study of Project Based Learning in 2nd grade classrooms. One of the classrooms did a project on their playground and improvements they wanted to see in the park. The students investigated, made posters, PowerPoints, and even presented their proposals to a city council member. This brought me back to thinking about the younger classrooms that had just completed their first playground project, and it was interesting to see the ways that an older classroom can follow a similar topic, but have a very different culmination. I was in awe at all the work the students had done. Then I learned more about the study and results, and was excited with the implications.
Education researchers Nell K. Duke and Anne-Lise Halvorsen, randomly assigned second-grade teachers amongst 48 classrooms across 20 high poverty schools to either a control group with a traditional approach or a group with the Project Based Learning (PBL) approach. All the teachers in the study taught 80 social studies lessons through the course of the school year. Researchers found using their method of Project Based Learning that the PBL group compared to the control group on assessments had a 63% gain in social studies and a 23% gain in informational reading. While I am excited with the results, I am curious to learn more about the study’s specific method of PBL, and see future studies that explore circumstances for reducing the education gap.
Want to learn more about this study? Check out the blog post and video by Anne-Lise Halvorsen:
Written by Amelia Troutman