A number of Lang classes have already completed a project-based learning cycle with several other projects about to get underway. All of these projects are driven by a compelling question. Here are a few examples:
How can we develop a useful product for the Lang community?
What kind of cryptid would choose to live in New York City?
What makes a revolution successful?
How is math connected to design?
How can we use technology to help the unhoused population survive in extreme temperatures in Manhattan?
What is the experience of human immigration? And How does moving to a new place, acquiring a new language, adapting to a new culture, shape or alter one's identity?
What makes a car race exciting?
How did French Colonization affect global development?
How can we design a feed-building algorithm that will create a site we'd enjoy?
All of these questions and their associated projects foster the development of essential critical thinking skills. How can taking on the task of bringing a project to life help build these skills? Researchers and educators at the Buck Institute for Education (BIE) make the case for PBL as one of the most powerful kinds of pedagogy that helps students learn how to be critical thinkers. For this to occur, projects have to be “planned around topics that lend themselves to thoughtful consideration, and students have to be provided with tasks and supports needed to develop these skills.” Much of BIE’s evidence of critical thinking comes from the work of Roland Case and the Critical Thinking Consortium. Case points out that critical thinking is not a special kind of thinking but rather, “ordinary thinking done well, that is, reflective with attention to criteria, and has the goal of making a defensible, reasoned judgement.” Towards this end, our Lang learners are creating projects grounded in a set of criteria that draw on both relevant content and skills.
BIE provides some thoughts on what makes a project likely to promote critical thinking. First, they should be structured around a “non-Googleable Driving Question.” "Googleable Questions," of course, would be those seeking information or specific facts and events. "Drivable Questions" like “Why does the earth rotate on an axis”, “How can we design an energy efficient building,” etc. require that students do more than just look something up. Depending on the subject, they will need to “define terms, consider whether information and concepts vary according to context, weigh multiple explanations, evaluate evidence, compare alternative actions.” This is critical thinking—careful thinking done reflectively, with attention to the underlying criteria. I saw this in action today as I spent some time with our youngest learners who have been investigating our Lang community. Their project "Welcome to the Neighborhood!" has asked them to wrestle with the worthy driving question, "How can we help new friends get to know our community?" As they work through the project, they are also developing solutions that not only answer the question, but will also have a positive impact on new members of our community.
Projects that support critical thinking are not only about requiring students to think carefully and deliberately; they also “provide models and scaffolding to show how such cognitive tasks are carried out.” In well-designed projects, students will execute a number of small tasks that seek to define the competencies for successful completion of the project. Throughout the project, students have multiple opportunities to engage with relevant concepts and receive feedback on their progress.
A crucial piece for PBL to foster critical thinking skills is in the final sharing or exhibition of work that provides additional opportunities for assessment and feedback. Students need to know how they are doing and if their thinking has yielded the desired results. Through analysis of feedback provided by during the final sharing, written reflections and discussions with their teachers and their peers, they can learn to evaluate and think about their own thinking (as well as the thinking of others). It is this kind of reflection that gives PBL projects the ability to not only develop critical thinking skills, but to increase learner's understanding of their importance. It is not merely the “Project” part of the learning that makes this work important; it is the ever important meta-cognition that is central to the project that is essential. Philosopher and educator John Dewey points to this distinction when he commented in Experience & Education that:
The belief that all genuine education comes about through experience does not mean that all experiences are genuinely or equally educative.
As a result, our Lang learners are engaged in projects that by design make their experience truly “educative.”
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