What Do We Mean By Project-Based Learning?

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Defining Terms

We say it right in our mission statement: "The Salvadori Center gives these tools to teachers and students through a pedagogy grounded in what it calls 'project-based, hands-on/minds-on activities' that employ the principles of architecture, engineering, and the design process." And we've been practicting this approach for over a quarter-century.

Building a suspension bridge at the Cooper-Hewitt

So, what do we mean by the term "project-based learning" (PBL)?

The best definition we have heard comes from our friends north of border at the Ecole Whitehorse Elementary in the Yukon:

Project-based learning (PBL) is a model for classroom activity that shifts away from the classroom practices of short, isolated, teacher-centered lessons and instead emphasizes learning activities that are long-term, interdisciplinary, and student-centered. Project-based learning is centered on the learner and affords learners the opportunity for in-depth investigations of worthy topics. The learners are more autonomous as they construct personally-meaningful artifacts that are representations of their learning.

This definition contains the essential elements that go into the creation of our "hands-on/minds-on activities":

• long-term learning: Our tagline - "See It Build It Know It" - is predicated on the belief, borne out in practice, that only when people engage in an intimate physical manipulation of the environment around them (whether that be the "bricks-and-mortar" of buildings or abstract mathematical concepts) will they be able to acquire knowledge that is useful, durable, and enjoyable.
• interdisciplinary: One of the great blessings and curses of human discovery has been the segmentation of data into categories that both do and do not reflect the world as found in nature. But nature, as usual, knows better: in nature, every datum is mixed up with every other datum, each affecting the other, with that singular effect pluralizing itself throughout a universe of cascading actions and reactions. Every project-based Salvadori activity, whatever its fundamental focus, tries to lace as many subject areas together as possible in order to get students to understand and appreciate the blended realities of knowledge.
• student-centered: "Student-centered" means, to us, that all our efforts as an organization -- from teaching a student how to use a ruler to our three-day intensive professional development Institutes -- are aimed at getting learners (and that term includes both teachers and their students) to become self-activated, questing individuals with a love for learning and a desire to make the world a better place.

But What If I Don't Have Time To....

Given the intense pressures on schools these days, especially (as is the case here in the United States) under the testing regime mandated by every level of government, teachers often feel that they simply cannot devote energy and time to project-based learning for any number of reasons: 1) it takes too much time; 2) it doesn't fit the test; 3) the materials are too expensive; 4) I've always done things my own way. And so on.

Testing "sheer" on a tower of index cards.

But what we have found in honoring the anxieties and resistances of teachers is that once they understand how PBL works and how they can integrate it into their scope and sequence without too many headaches, they also realize that PBL helps them re-discover the mission that drove them to become teachers: to have students leave their classrooms moved to become their own teachers, to head out into the world with opened curious minds and possessed of skills and insights upon which they can build their characters and futures.

This is why the Salvadori Center continues to do what it does; it is why Mario Salvadori took those initials steps into a Harlem middle-school classroom in the 1977 to single-handedly improve the math and science skills of his charges.

For more information about PBL, check out these resources, and if you have any questions, do not hesitate to shoot us an email. (Note: Each link will open a new window.)

• What is Project-Based Learning (Ecole Whitehorse Elementary). You can download a PDF of the article as well.
• The Six A's of Project-Based Learning (in PDF)
• Power of Projects (Diane Curtis, in Educational Leadership, 2002) - in PDF.
• Project-Based Learning: Pursuits with a Purpose (Stephen Wolk, in Educational Leadership, 1994) - in PDF.

Our founder, Mario Salvadori, a world-renowned structural engineer, believed that the built environment held all the knowledge that a person needed to be an intelligent and active member of the community. What teachers need to make this knowledge available to their students are tools with which they can "unpack" the knowledge embedded in the built environment.

The Salvadori Center gives these tools to teachers and students through a pedagogy grounded in what it calls "project-based, hands-on/minds-on activities" that employ the principles of architecture, engineering, and the design process. Through this method, teachers and their students can unlock the math, science, art, and humanities embodied in the structures and systems that surround them.