This four-part blog series explores the method and impact of Project Based Learning (PBL), an approach that Sycol encourages within its educational organisations.
Post 3
In my last blog I spoke about The Golden Circle, outlined in Simon Sinek’s book Start With Why. Innovation Unit, REAL Projects and our most successful schools in the program Started With Why, which I assert is what provided the foundation for their success.
In this blog, I will move on to the “How” of both REAL Projects and specific schools.
Sinek states that the “How” has to be a verb. He notes organisations who post words like “integrity” and “passion” on their walls but don’t have anything of substance behind it. These organisations are failing to identify the action that is required to realize success. REAL Projects recognizes that the “How” has be be a specific set of actions. In order to implement REAL Projects successfully, we advocate a set of organisational conditions. For those of you who read the blog on “Why,” it will be easy to see how these conditions align with our core philosophies.
- Provide opportunities for interdisciplinary work.
- Organise the timetable to allow for extended blocks of learning time.
- Embed authentic assessment of deep learning.
- Facilitate a culture of staff learning and collaboration.
- Integrate students from across perceived ability and background (no setting).
- Provide weekly collaboration time for staff.
- Make physical spaces available to showcase student work.
- Make learning permeable to the community.
Once the organisational conditions are in place, the teachers can then focus on the “How” within their classrooms. The “How” of REAL is right in it’s name: to design rigorous, engaging, authentic learning experiences for students. Schools who Started With Why and then embraced the above conditions and classroom pedagogy within their schools have seen great success with REAL Projects.
RSA Academy: When we began work with RSA, they already had several of the organisational conditions in place. Each day is organised around 4, 90 minute blocks. In KS3, they had experimented with breaking down barriers between subject areas. They began to implement REAL Projects with their cohort of year 7’s. Now in their second year, both year 7 and year 8 students spend about half of their curriculum time in mixed ability classrooms doing REAL Projects. They’ve developed a system of assessment that aligns with the overall school plan whilst placing students in the centre. Students self reflect on their learning, both of content and of 21st century skills. The projects range from transforming the classrooms to a living museum to answer the question ‘What is the Black Country?’ to publishing an A-Z book on the school to help incoming Year 6 students with the transition.
Stanley Park High: Stanley Park High in Surrey is one of the first schools to embrace REAL Projects (known as the Excellent Futures Curriculum at Stanley Park). As with RSA Academy, a large portion of the KS3 curriculum is taught through projects. Although English, Maths, Science, PE, French and Music are all given discrete time on the timetable, aspects of these and all other subject areas are integrated into the EFC curriculum. One of the most dynamic aspects of EFC at Stanley Park is the physical space in which they have to learn. The school is divided into four mini schools to enable better relationships between staff and students. Each mini school has it’s own EFC learning space, which is a flexible classroom about the size of three typical classrooms. In this, a team of three teachers co-teach the students in a collaborative way. The school has been so successful with this approach that it was just sited as a positive feature in their recent Ofsted report.
All other blogs in this series:
Blog 1. What Makes REAL Projects Golden: Introduction
Blog 2. What Makes REAL Projects Golden: The Why
Blog 4. What Makes REAL Projects Golden: The What
Image copyright attributed to Simon Sine