“Ms. Murdock, nobody understands what I'm talking about. Nobody knows anything about the space station, so they just make stuff up.”
Josh has begun surveying other students about funding for NASA, only to find that most students know little about the issues involved. I throw the problem back into his lap.
“Hmmm.... You're right, that is a problem. What do you think you could do about it?”
We discuss the issue for a few minutes. After Josh discards a few of my suggestions, I say, “Well, I guess you're going to have to see what you can come up with.” He walks away, still grumbling.
Trusting Josh's developing ability to solve his own problems, I turn my attention to other students. Sarah needs help printing a graph from her wetlands survey. Adam needs a black pen to finish his poster on gun control. Jon needs help editing his thank-you letter to the lawyer he's interviewed about organized crime.
Suddenly, Josh is back, brimming with ideas: What I'm going to do is rearrange my questions. See, if I ask this one first, before I ask this one, then people'll know what I'm talking about, and if they don't know what I mean by the first one, then I'll explain it first.Plus I've changed the third and fourth questions. See, this is what I wanted to find out, but the way I said it people didn't understand it that way. So I've changed it to ask.... Josh bounds out of the room and is back a half hour later, after his second survey. Now students understand the issues! “And, you know what?” he announces. “People really don't understand what NASA does. No wonder they don't want to fund the space station!”
Josh's thoughtful problem solving has taken more than an hour. Once again, I realize that this kind of teaching and learning often simply cannot happen within the constraints of a 47-minute period.
Meanwhile, next door in the wood shop, math students are translating the blueprints they've drawn into scale models of their own dream houses. Upstairs in the writing lab, English students write memory pieces based on interviews with local senior citizens. And farther down the hall, science students are designing and building model solar race cars.
An Idea Takes Shape
This is a typical Horace's Friday for our 6th grade team at William Diamond Middle School in Lexington, Massachusetts. We named the project after the fictional English teacher Horace Smith in Horace's Compromise and Horace's School (Sizer 1985, 1992). Our goal was to offer the kind of teaching and learning that Horace (and our students!) would appreciate.
On Fridays, rather than moving from one 47-minute class to another, our students spend all four team periods with one teacher/adviser as they pursue intensive, independent learning projects. After working on these projects during extended time blocks, students exhibit their work for others. At the end of each quarter, they move on to another subject. In this way, students experience intensive, project-based work in all four major subjects during the year.
We initiated Horace's Fridays in the fall of 1992. During an interdisciplinary unit on technology, our 6th grade teaching team observed that as students worked on a complex, open-ended project over an extended time period, they were experiencing “the essence of authentic learning: engagement” (Stevenson 1991). This project also engaged students at different levels, allowed for varied learning styles, and provided enough challenge for high-achieving students while being manageable for all.
As we discussed these observations, our dialogue was continually informed by the other conversations around us—colleagues exploring different kinds of assessment, articles, and books on thinking and learning (for example, Perkins 1992), and faculty discussions of constructivist teaching (for example, Brooks and Brooks 1993). Our principal reminded us that we were not locked into the 47-minute period but could use team time as we thought best. Sparked by one of her comments about project-based learning, we discussed possibilities. Horace's Fridays was the result.
During the spring of 1993, we visited other schools, studied the literature, and prepared a grant proposal for our idea. With funding from the Lexington Education Foundation for a pilot year, we were off!
We Launch the Projects
We began the 1993–94 school year with a common philosophy, a schedule with back-to-back teaching blocks on Fridays, tentative plans for individual subject-area projects, and a letter to parents explaining the project and inviting them to an evening of coffee and conversation.
- to foster student engagement, independent learning, and thinking skills;
- to allow for different learning styles;
- to incorporate multiple intelligences (Gardner 1993); and
- to require students to make decisions about their own learning and manage time and materials effectively.
As a team, we agreed on certain skills that we would all reinforce in our regular classes to support the project work. We also provided feedback on one another's plans. The resulting projects reflected our shared philosophy, yet differed significantly.
English. The English project sought to expand students' connections with people in an earlier generation. Students read books with generational themes, wrote memory pieces about parents and other older adults, and interviewed senior citizens. (We videotaped the interviews and gave each senior citizen a copy of his or her interview with a student.)
Students also performed helpful tasks for residents of the senior center—for example, shoveling snow, raking leaves, and baking cookies for the seniors. One student even planned a 50th wedding anniversary party for her grandparents.
Math. Students completed individual math projects that consisted of planning and designing their dream houses, drawing scale blueprints, and constructing scale models of them in the wood shop.
Science. During the spring and fall quarters, students worked on group ecology projects using the wetlands adjoining our school. They then presented their reports to the town's conservation commission.
The second quarter project emphasized engineering and mechanical design. Students took apart a small appliance to investigate how it worked; they also built a small vehicle or machine from Lego components and wrote a computer program to control it.
During the third quarter, science students designed and built a model solar car.
Social studies. For the social studies project, each student thoroughly researched a current issue; wrote a letter requesting information about it; interviewed an expert; developed, conducted, and graphed the results of a survey; completed an action to “make a difference in the world,” and formally presented his or her work to the class.
- includes significant opportunities for student decision making;
- allows students to progress as far as they want to go;
- connects learning to the world outside school, whenever possible, and encourages students to use outside resources; and
- sets forth basic objectives and requirements at the beginning and then encourages students to work independently.
The emphasis in all four projects is on student work. Rather than planning the project and setting deadlines for students, teachers help students plan their own projects and set their own deadlines; rather than answering questions for students, teachers help students answer their own questions.
What Students Learned
During the year, members of our teaching team kept personal journals and maintained dialogue journals with several parents. We also held two major exhibitions of student work: an evening in February for parents and the public; and an in-school exhibition in June for students to display their work and receive comments from their peers. At the end of the year, students and parents completed a written project evaluation. We also met with the parents who had agreed to keep journals. Our evaluation revealed benefits to students in several areas.
Student engagement. The projects promoted a high level of student engagement. According to parents, students eagerly discussed their work with relatives and friends and refused to miss school on project days. As the year progressed, we observed greater student engagement in project work and in regular classes.
Independent learning. Students also became more confident at gaining access to resources—for example, the library for references, the writing lab for word processing, and the telephone for informational calls and interviews. An I-can-find-that-out attitude began to emerge in regular classes as well as in project work—which parents confirmed in students' work at home. Some noted that while their children had discussed the projects a lot, they had also grown in their ability to work independently.
Thinking skills. By the end of the year, students had become significantly less passive and more able to generate alternatives and solve their own problems. In September, students were likely to say, “I have a problem,” and wait for the teacher's solution. By June, most students would say, “I have a problem. What I want to do about it is.... What do you think?”
Time management. Almost all students developed better time management skills during the project. Several students, who in self-evaluations said that next time they would begin earlier and plan better, did just that in later work!
Other observations. Students in each project group developed a high level of collegiality, discussing one another's projects and sharing resources (“My father works for the EPA. Maybe you could interview him,” for example).
We also noticed increased appreciation of others' work. In one case, several students' avoidance of a disliked classmate changed to expressions of admiration for her work. Working with one group of students for extended time periods also created strong student/teacher relationships and made it possible for students to get to know one another well early in the year.
What Teachers Learned
- To learn about the Constitution, history students research, develop, and present moot court arguments on Supreme Court cases.
- Student writers learn about different genres of writing by choosing and reading models of them and then writing their own imitative works.
- Math students pursue independent projects (such as making and testing a pair of loaded dice).
- Science students study electronics and robotics through a joint project with Minuteman Technical High School. Student exhibitions—for peers, the entire school, and the public—are frequent occurrences.
- For students to become fully engaged, make decisions about their learning, and construct their own knowledge, the project structure should maintain a delicate balance between concrete requirements and opportunities for student choices.
- Translating a part of the regular curriculum into an independent discovery project requires careful planning. Among other things, students need to acquire background information as a natural part of their work, rather than in teacher-directed lessons.
- Using extended time periods and letting students become involved at their own rates help produce high levels of student engagement and learning.
- Having a consistent team philosophy and teaching approa-ches contributes to powerful student learning.
- The library and other resource centers are central to a project-based, student-centered approach. The implications of the shift from whole-class to individual access, as needed, are significant and require careful planning.
- Time for discussion with colleagues is essential, both for improving professional practice and for providing support during the inevitable difficulties of change.
- Teaching this way can be tremendously rewarding, for teachers as well as for students!
Two comments—one from a student, the other from a teacher—illustrate the success of Horace's Fridays and fulfill the theme of our original proposal: “Learning is about building the capacity to create that which you previously couldn't create” (Senge 1990).
“I really learned a lot!” a student exclaimed on the last day of a project, “At the beginning, I didn't believe that I could build a solar car. But I did!!”
And, early last year, a teacher observed, “I've never worked harder in my life, but I've never had this much fun, either.”
