Walking into one of our learning spaces in a Lutheran Education Queensland school, you’ll quickly realise that it’s very different! Gone are the days of desks and chairs in a row, chalk board at the front of the room, and the dependence on snail mail to exchange ideas.
Today, our classrooms are places that offer real world experiences and collaboration with a different kind of teaching—Project-Based Learning (PBL), which is not teacher-led but instead teacher-facilitated.
PBL expands on the popular educational theory that students learn best by experiencing real world problems and working together to find solutions. It’s giving our students a chance to critically and creatively think, and develop the problem solving skills they’ll need in the real world.
Teachers are able to give students an authentic real world problem/challenge that drives the learning. So teachers will never hear ‘why do I need to know this?’ Students work together and solve a problem by applying the knowledge that they learn along the way. The project may take days, weeks, or even months as they encounter and overcome challenges, by designing and redesigning their solutions.
Our teachers attend professional development sessions where they carefully scaffold multiple subjects, which are then assessed accordingly.
Research indicates that students involved with Project-Based Learning:
- become more engaged, self-directed learners
- learn more deeply and can transfer their learning to new situations
- improve problem solving and collaboration skills.
We acknowledge that all students are unique and each have God-given talents. Project-Based Learning is a way we can engage with the uniqueness of each student, and inspire them to work together towards a creative goal.
Inspire your child to learn for life.
