Interesting problems: Passion and scale in teaching

I've discovered a really interesting problem that's inherent in project-based learning: it's really difficult to reconcile work that engages every student's passions with work that leads to outcomes that are meaningful on a scale that goes beyond students and their families. 

Here's what I mean by that: if students are doing a project that connects with what is meaningful to them personally, everyone will be doing their own project. I'm a big fan of this, and kids still work collaboratively when they do this, because they critique each others' work. 

What this work lacks is scale - when everyone's doing their own thing, you can't so something like run a big science experiment. If you're doing meaningful, cutting-edge science, you need everyone working on what they're commissioned to work on. This means that you're going to be doing work that doesn't resonate with everybody - or rather, you might be able to find a piece of the project that resonates with everybody, but there will be a lot of work that people need to do that they don't find innately interesting. I don't see a way around this. Even if you are doing a large-scale science project that's student-driven, it will only work if it's driven by a few students, with everyone else getting on board to help realize their vision. 

Before I started teaching, I thought of students (to my shame) as a fairly homogenous entity. In fact, this conception is implied by the term "student engagement" (not to mention "student body"). I imagined engagement as being a bit like chants at sporting events - everybody gets pumped up and joins in for pretty much the same reasons, and it feels good to be chanting as one big group. But full-group enthusiasm is ephemeral. It doesn't get you through a six-week project. When you're talking about the project (as opposed to the project launch day), engagement is much more like trying to pass a bill through congress - every single person has their own particular interest that you need to appeal to. And the very fact that one group of people is excited about a project will be enough to make other people think "ehhh, this probably isn't my thing."

This isn't really surprising. Imagine going up to a group of 64 adults and saying "Hey, you all live in the same general vicinity, I'd like you all to work on a complex and important science experiment together, over the course of several months." It just wouldn't fly.

The extraordinary thing is the extent to which most students, most of the time, are ready to go out on a limb and give something a try, even it it's not the thing they would personally choose to do with their time. 

I'd love to hear about other teachers' takes on this!

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4 responses
Great post! Especially in that you appreciate how unsurprising the experience is, given that the real world scale involves scientific research projects drawing together a small number of team members from a national or international pool. And, furthermore, that you acknowledge how extraordinary the goodwill of young people is for them to invest as much as they do in projects which they do not own. The head-scratcher is that, despite the blinding obviousness of the whole thing, we continue to design learning like we do. Alfie Kohn's image of the 'undertow' is powerfully right. Pragmatically perhaps, given that standardised testing isn't going to disappear tomorrow morning and we have to cover given 'stuff', the best thing we can do is co-construct, adult to adult, the learning design with our groups. Then, there is community ownership of process, if not content. Which is actually a pretty decent shift as there's very little in this various world of ours that isn't actually very interesting, as long as hard-working and well-meaning 'expert' teachers don't wear themselves out trying to pre-digest it their way, to rescue learners from the core value of making sense of it.

Keep Up The Fight Alec.

— Yossarian
It took me a little while to remember who "Yossarian" is, fortunately your style is inimitable! You're so right about the goodwill of young people. It's so easy to forget how much freedom and autonomy young people are willingly forgoing just by sitting in class with you!

Incidentally, I've been making great use of your technique (as recorded by David Price) of saying, when things aren't going as you'd hoped during class, "Hey, it doesn't feel like this is working for you. What's the issue?" Kids can always say "well, we're not sure what's supposed to be happening," or "some of us just work better having a noisy conversation", or whatever.

— Alec Patton
I love your question...and often think about and struggle with similar problems in the classroom. I read something this morning that made me think of your post:

"What one can assume, without any diagnostic tests at all, is that in any one group of 30 children - no matter how much one has tried to homogenize them - there will be enormous variations in levels of understanding and in breadth and depth of knowledge already developed. Certainly we would want each child to have the occasion to work at his or her own level. The solution for the teacher, however, is not to tailor narrow exercises for individual children, but rather to offer situations in which children at various levels, whatever their intellectual structures, can come to know parts of the work in new ways...

...a criterion for a good learning situation: 'it must permit the child to establish plans to reach a distant goal, while leaving him wide freedom to follow his own routing.' If we can create situations like this, then differences among children are by definition taken into account - without our having to diagnose in advance each child's level in a dozen domains. We can also be sure that children will take their own individual notions further as they strive to make sense of any situation..."

- Eleanor Duckworth

I enjoy struggling with trying to bring this vision to the classroom.

— Bryan
I've been struggling with passing my own bill - a core module on the undergraduate degree which i've included a project component on. My revelation this year was that i didn't build an easy win into the early stages of the project. I'd wanted to have the project pattened by student initiative and autonomy, and this works for some, but each year I lose a few who just can't see the point - as you describe Alec. I think I need to have some manifest success of their collaboration built into the structure of the projects, so that at the beginning - while they are still running on their goodwill - they can feel the benefit of this way of working.

Hope that makes some kind of sense!

— @tomstafford
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