Many years ago, my 4th grade class took part in a school-wide science fair. There were awards for best projects per grade level, best projects overall, and various other categories.
The teachers acted as judges.
A boy named Seth had what I believed to be the best project in the school. It was a brilliant look at how weather affected the performance of different sizes and configurations of rockets he’d made in his garage.
He didn’t come close to winning. You see, Seth did the project all by himself. And it showed. His tri-fold display board had all the earmarks of a nine-year-old boy—uneven scissor cuts, finger smudges, and remnants of crusted glue.
The rockets, which he displayed in front of his 2D presentation, were unpainted and appeared crude and haphazard. (They were anything but.)
The winning projects were a complete inverse. Lacking depth or creativity—and in most cases pulled right off of the internet—their 2Ds were beautifully designed.
Bright, colorful, pin-neat, and with perfect grammatical sentences. Scientific method followed to a tee.
And clearly not done by elementary age children.
Presumably, the winning students did help with their projects. But amid all the attention they got that evening—the proud smiles, applause, photos, and balloons—it was hard not to be discouraged. The whole affair was farcical.
Meanwhile, none of my students received any recognition and I knew I couldn’t tell them why.
Refuse
Allowing anyone other than students to play an active role in project-based learning is a bad idea. It’s unfair. It’s dishonest. It’s discriminatory toward students who do the work themselves.
It also leaves them jaded and questioning why they should even try or whether everything in life is similarly rigged.
As for the students whose parents or teachers do most of the work for them, they do get the glory and the plaudits. But they lose out on what really matters, which is the learning and experience of working through challenges to create something interesting and uniquely theirs.
Furthermore, they know they didn’t actually do the work, which can destroy their self-worth and leave them afraid to try anything on their own.
The first step in fixing the problem is to refuse to play along. Make the practice of allowing adults to help forbidden in your classroom. Be willing to let your projects look like they were done by children.
Guidelines
What follows is a list of guidelines that can help you protect the integrity of project-based work.
1. Take time to teach the scientific method—or applicable method depending on the subject—in detail and allow your students many opportunities to practice and master the process through repetition before considering individual projects.
2. Require that your students create every aspect of their project independently. Yes, they may ask you clarifying questions and their parents’ opinion on areas of their project. But the work is on them.
3. Be willing to disallow, require a redo, or remove points for any part of a project that was clearly done by an adult or pulled right off the internet. If you observe the work closely, and look out for it, it’s easy to tell.
4. Limit the design materials that may be used to what you can provide to your students. This not only encourages independence and ensures fairness, but it places greater emphasis on the actual science or research of a project.
5. Be honest with grading. Follow to a tee a detailed rubric that you created yourself and shared with students ahead of time. Refuse to inflate any grade. Give in on this one thing and all hope is lost.
6. If applicable for your grade level, require your students to use several methods of final presentation—written, oral, online design, 2D and 3D models, and/or video. This packs in more learning and exposes non-student work.
Honor
For project-based learning to be an effective learning tool, you must protect its integrity. You must build an impenetrable wall of stone around your students so they can work and create independently.
Because they come first.
They come before their parents and your grade-level team. They come before the pretty award certificates and silky blue ribbons. They come before your reputation, the Instagram snaps, and a “way to go” from the principal.
You’re their teacher. That means something more than mere window dressing.
You best honor your students not with a meaningless, unearned certificate destined for a box in the family attic, but with skills and abilities that continue to impact them far into the future.
PS – I was on the Teacher Rockstar podcast this week. Here is the link if you’d like to listen.
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