Lab Atlanta
“At Lab Atlanta, a community makerspace in Atlanta run by a private school, high schoolers can take a semester-long course to invent projects that promote sustainability for their city, such as addressing air and water quality and improving public transportation” (Dintersmith, 2018, p. 24).
Principle F: Instructional Support
Gaining the ability to discover new knowledge and skills on one’s own is important, but using the discovery approach for all learning is highly inefficient (Kirschner, Sweller, & Clark, 2006; Sweller, 1994). Scaffolding accelerates learning and helps all students reach their potential. It can take the form of adjusting, coaching, or tutoring.
• Adjusting entails tailoring the complexity or difficulty of the project to the level of the student. To use a familiar, concrete example, imagine a project that entails learning to drive a car. The complexity or difficulty of the project could be adjusted by requiring a standard versus automatic transmission, requiring driving in heavy versus light traffic, requiring parallel parking or not, requiring hill starts or not, requiring rainy or icy road conditions or not, and much more.
• Coaching includes giving suggestions or hints to the student while the student is performing. For example, imagine a young student is having difficulty adding two fractions that have a common factor in the denominator, like ²⁄₉ and ⅚. Upon seeing the student struggle, the teacher (or digital assistant) could provide a hint reminding the student to look for the common factor.
• Tutoring involves teaching the student a competency, preferably just before it is needed in a project. For example, imagine a team of three students working collaboratively on a project that is being conducted virtually. At a certain point in the project, the students need to use a competency they have not yet acquired. The three students pause their work on the project and go to their individual tablets, where a digital assistant explains, demonstrates, and provides practice in the skill with immediate feedback. The program is tailored to each student’s interests and learning preferences. This also frees up the teacher to provide more personalized mentoring for every student (Murphy, Gallagher, Krumm, Mislevy, & Hafter, 2014). When each student has reached the criterion for number of correct performances in a row, the program certifies mastery and the student is cleared to continue to collaborate with teammates in the project’s virtual world. The project’s immediate needs provide powerful motivation for the students to master the needed content (learning targets). This scenario is but one of many ways that tutoring can be provided just before it is needed in a project.
Principle G: Personalized Learning
To accelerate learning and help all students reach their potential, it is essential to customize the learning experience (Hanover Research, 2015). Personalized instruction does not mean that students must learn alone. In fact, teacher guidance and collaborative project-based learning are common parts of PCBE. A good way to personalize the instruction is to help each student make good choices in all the following areas: goals, projects, scaffolding, assessments, and reflections (Watson & Watson, 2017).
• Personalize goals: All students should have their own long-term learning goals (taking years to achieve) and short-term learning goals (taking weeks or months to achieve). Their goals should be tailored to their individual needs, interests, talents, and prior learning.
• Personalize projects: Teachers can use many different projects to teach any given set of short-term goals and their learning targets, and they can select (and adjust) or design projects based on the student’s interests. Teachers can determine whether students should have teammates and who those teammates should be. They can also decide on the nature and amount of self-direction for each student.
• Personalize scaffolding: Teachers can personalize scaffolding, or instructional support (in the form of both coaching and tutoring), in two ways—the quantity provided and the nature (or features) of the help.
• Personalize assessment: Teachers can personalize assessment by customizing who assesses (teacher, self, peer, computer system, external expert) and the format for demonstrating competence.
• Personalize reflection: Reflection on a project experience is one of the most powerful and often overlooked instructional strategies (Schön, 1995). Students can reflect in different ways on both the conduct of the project and the learning that occurred.
One aspect of personalized learning is the personal learning plan. According to the Glossary of Education Reform (Great Schools Partnership, 2014):
A personal learning plan (or PLP) is developed by students—typically in collaboration with teachers, counselors, and parents—as a way to help them achieve short- and long-term learning goals, most commonly at the middle school and high school levels.
The terms individual learning plan and individual student learning plan are sometimes used as synonyms. PCBE is impossible without personal learning plans; they help teachers manage the learning process when students are learning different content at different rates (Ferguson et al., 2001; Yonezawa, McClure, & Jones, 2012). This level of personalizing is much easier with multi-year mentoring (principle R, page 91), whereby teachers know students well and don’t have to get to know a whole new group of students every year.
Principle H: Collaborative Learning
Collaboration is increasingly important in work environments. Collaborating in the school environment will help prepare students for that. It also has many advantages in the classroom setting. First, one of the best ways to learn something is to teach it. Collaborative learning gives students that opportunity. Second, it builds community and interpersonal skills. Collaboration is particularly powerful when used with multi-age grouping (principle R, page 91), wherein younger students learn from older ones, and older students of all abilities can be role models. Third, collaboration enhances motivation by meeting the need for affiliation, discussed in the introduction (page 4). Fourth, collaborative learning enhances critical thinking (Gokhale, 1995). Finally, it frees up time for the teacher to work on cultivating other aspects of the students’ learning and development, such as their social-emotional learning and metacognitive skills.
In the workplace, collaborative teams are typically highly diverse, because multiple perspectives strengthen a team’s problem-solving ability. Thus, it is helpful for students to work with others who differ greatly from themselves.
Collaboration can take the form of team-based projects or peer assistance. Most project-based learning should be team-based to promote deeper collaboration. However, students may complete some projects individually, and in those cases peer assistance should be the norm. Students who have the same teacher and therefore work in the same physical area (classroom, studio, or learning environment) turn to each other first when they need help in their learning process and view the teacher as a resource of last resort.
Detailed Guidance for Learner-Centered Instruction
We recommend that you read all the sections titled Principles in chapters 1 through 6 before reading the Detailed Guidance section in any of those chapters, because the principles are so interrelated and interdependent that it is crucial to understand the big picture before getting into specific details. Any effort to move to PCBE that focuses on one core idea without making changes in other core ideas is likely to fail.
Classroom-Level Considerations
To implement learner-centered instruction at the classroom level, you need to make decisions about projects, which should