Selecting a Topic

“One of the most important features of Phase I of project development is the process of selecting the topic to be investigated” (Judy Harris Helm & Lilian Katz, Young Investigators, 2016).

Each year at the end of our first day of training, we receive many questions about project topics. The most common is “How do I know what topic to do and if the topic is a good topic?” Since the topic can have a major impact on the success of the project, it is important to really spend time with the selection. The majority of Phase I’s focus in on the topic.

How do I know what topic to do?

To get started, one of the best ways for a teacher to find out student interests is to listen and observe students. What things do students play with, talk about or create? For younger students this can often be seen during center or free choice time. For older students with limited free choice time this may come out through conversations, writing, or drawings. Teachers can also talk with parents, or bring in books or artifacts on different topics to incorporate into literacy or other times, to see what students gravitate towards.

How do I know if the topic is a good topic?

All interests may not make good topics. Once you’ve observed several interests, you want to evaluate if they would make a good topic. Here are some ideas on how to evaluate your topic from Young Investigators the Project Approach in the Early Years by Judy Harris Helm and Lilian G. Katz:

• Do the children find the topic engaging and interesting? The more interested students are in the topic the deeper and more fruitful it will be.
• Does the topic further children’s understanding of their curriculum and does it help them meet developmentally appropriate standards? A project topic should be able to easily connect back to curriculum and development goals.
• Is this topic more concrete or abstract? With younger students the more concrete the topic the better. They need to be able to use multiple senses to explore the topic. 
• Do you have access to direct experiences, experts, and objects related to the topic? The harder it is to find experts, field sites, and authentic artifacts, the harder it will be for students to have access to all the sensory input they need. And the more work it will be for the teacher.

*A more extensive list can be found in Young Investigators: The Project Approach in the Early Years.

Think you’ve found a good topic? Test it out! Create a web with students and a list of questions to see what they already know and what they want to know about the topic. If students are not showing a lot of interest in knowing more about the topic, a new topic needs to be selected. If students are showing an interest, but don’t have much knowledge, they need more resources to develop background knowledge.

Want some more information on topics? Check out our past project topics list in project examples.

By Amelia Troutman

Playground Project Possibilities

“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:

New Study Shows Impact of PBL on Student Achievement

Written by Amelia Troutman