Teachers also need a policy about revising a product or redoing a presentation. This may include debriefing (Raemer et al., 2011), self-reflection (Schön, 1995), or a plan of action for addressing project deficits.
For students who work mostly on individual projects or tasks, it makes more sense to end each project whenever the student has finished or mastered it and begin a new project whenever an old one is finished, but there should still be consequences for missed deadlines.
How will teachers help students reflect on their project and learning experiences?
It is also beneficial to have a process for students to reflect on each project. Reflection can be one of the most powerful learning experiences. Help students reflect on the things that went well and what they might do differently in future projects. Also think about ways to have students reflect on other students’ (or teams’) projects. Debriefing (Raemer et al., 2011) is one tool for encouraging reflection. This could be built into a teacher’s process for evaluating student learning and project performances.
Debriefing
During a debriefing, team members reflect upon a recent experience, discuss what went well, and identify opportunities for improvement. Five powerful questions to address during a debriefing are (Stanier, 2017):
1. What were we trying to do?
2. What happened?
3. What can we learn from this?
4. What should we do differently next time?
5. Now what?
How should the results of projects be displayed and celebrated?
Teachers should also think about how their students should display or otherwise share the results of their projects and celebrate their accomplishments. A culminating event can take the form of performances or product showcases. Various kinds of performances include presentations, demonstrations, contests, discussion panels, community events, and other events. Various kinds of products include reports, artifacts (objects), and multimedia programs. Ways to showcase products include performances and displays. Think about who should be invited to the performances or showcases, and where and for how long any products should be displayed. Also, think about each student’s portfolio (real or virtual)—what should go into it for each project? In all cases, think about ways to celebrate and honor the students’ accomplishments. Celebrations enhance motivation and create a sense of community.
Principle F: Instructional Support
Scaffolding should be used to support learning within a project. Teachers can support both student performance and learning on a project by adjusting the complexity of the project to the level of the student and coaching and tutoring the student just in time during the project.
Once a project has been chosen, how can a teacher adjust the complexity or difficulty of the project to fit the level of the student?
There are at least two ways to decrease the difficulty or complexity of a project. One is to simplify the real-world conditions under which the project takes place. Think of a project as a single version of a broad task. To use a familiar example, imagine the task is for someone with no driving experience to drive a car. A version of this project with simplified conditions could be to successfully drive a car with an automatic transmission roundtrip from your rural home to a store parking lot ten minutes away, in the middle of the day, during clear, dry weather. This entails driving with relatively low speed limits in light traffic with few intersections, no wet or icy roads, and no gear shifting, so much less learning is required to perform successfully under these conditions. The Simplifying Conditions Method (Reigeluth, 1999; Reigeluth & Rodgers, 1980), which is described in chapter 3 (Principle L: Sound Progressions in Content, page 62), can be used to adjust the complexity or difficulty of a project.
Another, less preferable, way to decrease the difficulty is to create artificial supports for performance of the task, such as having some parts already completed for the student or not requiring that a certain part of the task be performed. The problem with this kind of adjusting is that it makes the task less realistic, which can reduce both student motivation and ability to transfer the competency to real-world situations (unless it is followed with a project that has no such artificial supports).
While a student or team is working on the project, how can a teacher decide when to provide coaching and what that coaching should be like?
The teacher should look for situations where a team is having difficulty in its project and a hint or a few words of guidance might be sufficient to help the students overcome the difficulty (as opposed to tutoring being needed). But teachers should keep in mind that we naturally tend to rush in when we see a student or team struggling, and we typically want to tell the students how to do it right. Sometimes, it is better to hold off and observe for a while to see if students can overcome challenges on their own. When help is truly needed, it should be in the form of questions or hints.
When should the scaffolding go beyond coaching to actually tutoring the student?
Tutoring is needed whenever a learning target is difficult for the student to master. It is particularly important for the following.
• Skills that vary in the way they are done in different situations (because the tutoring includes practice in the full range of real-world situations, whereas the project only provides one situation), including higher-order thinking skills.
• Understandings that require the formation of complex mental models (Perkins & Unger, 1999; Wiske, 1998), such as understanding the water cycle with all its interrelated principles—evaporation and all the factors that increase or decrease it, condensation and all the factors that influence it, and transportation of the water and all the factors that influence it (rivers, ground water, reservoirs, and so forth).
• Memorizing information that is truly important (such as memorizing the names of all bones in the human body in medical school).
• Dispositions that reflect attitudes and values very different from those the student currently holds.
• Social-emotional learning, such as developing empathy.
In most cases, tutoring should be provided just in time before the content or competency is needed in a project. Waiting until it is needed greatly enhances student motivation to learn it. However, there are some cases in which a skill cannot be mastered in one sitting. Some require sustained development over weeks, months, or even years, in which case they should be practiced before, during, and after they are needed for a project. Merrill (2013) provides powerful research-based guidance for designing tutorials.
Should tutoring be used to certify mastery for each student?
In a word, yes. The products of a team project do not provide information about individual student mastery of the content (as discussed earlier), for three main reasons: (1) it is possible only one teammate mastered any given learning target, (2) it is possible the student was able to do what needed to be done in this one case but has not learned to generalize to other cases, and (3) assessing mastery with a final product would require, in the case of “not yet mastered,” that the student go back and remediate, which is demotivating and