After the energy and excitement of the first few months, fall and winter bring the annual challenge of maintaining student engagement. This precise point in the school year provides an opportunity for teachers to maintain critical student engagement through project-based learning (PBL), which allows for collaboration and student choice.
Youki Terada powerfully conveys the value of project-based learning in his Edutopia article, “New Research Makes a Strong Case for PBL,” writing that PBL “fosters a sense of purpose in young learners, pushes them to think critically, and prepares them for modern careers. them ready for modern careers that value skills such as collaboration, problem solving, and creativity.”
As all teachers know, learning never ends, so we are keenly aware that teachers are constantly coming in and out of our lives. We spend hours attending professional development workshops taught by experts, but sometimes our best teachers are in the classroom. We also all know that one of the best demonstrations of mastery of a particular skill is teaching that skill to others.
Teaching to Learn
One of the most successful strategies for increasing student engagement is the always-reliable classroom flip, in which the teacher turns the instruction over to the students. For me, a student-centered project-based learning course is a specific type of collaborative project: student lecture. For me, this strategy increased engagement, especially at the end of the semester or the end of the academic year.
My first exposure to student lectures was in college when my literature professor assigned a collaborative lecture project. My group and I had the flexibility to choose our topic and then address our peers, teaching them the lessons we had researched and prepared. Decades and decades have passed, and I still remember the experience vividly:It was a profound learning experience that still leaves an indelible mark on me today. My goal is to make this an unforgettable opportunity for my high school students.
My own method of assigning students to lecture is simple and straightforward: I either assign small groups or allow students to organize themselves into groups, usually of three to four students. They research an area of interest, create a lecture, and then teach a carefully constructed lesson to the class (and me). Here, the students become the teachers, and therefore the experts in their subjects. Students have a wide variety of interests to choose from-lectures on the analysis of time and memory in Romantic poetry, the autobiographical elements of Virginia Woolf’s prose, or the rhetorical strategies of U.S. presidents or world leaders.
The group also takes assessments and quizzes in class. They answer a wide variety of questions that test their knowledge of their chosen subject matter and often give homework assignments to their peers. Finally, each student completes a self-reflection on the learning experience. This is a great time to reveal the inner workings of team dynamics, what worked, what didn’t, who did all the work, and so on.
Most importantly, the student lectures not only teach students the basic skills of research, reading comprehension, oral presentation, and reflection, but they also provide a sense of ownership over their own learning and encourage their collective curiosity. Student lectures teach content and a variety of inter-curricular knowledge.
For teachers, it is a distinct pleasure to see a group of students lecturing to other students and to see your students become knowledgeable teachers to others. The audience doesn’t have to be just fellow students. On several occasions, I have invited English teachers, social studies teachers, principals, and other administrators to be “students” of my student lecturers.
In a student lesson on braiding the themes of John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald, an English teacher asked my students a series of challenging questions, which my student lecturers answered with confidence and composure. If we hope to instill in our students a lifelong love of learning, wouldn’t it be great to instill in them a love of teaching?
The student lectures were also surprisingly diverse. At my school, the social studies department laid out a lecture program that lasted a full year. The group identifies a problem facing our community (locally, nationally, or globally) and then researches potential solutions to that problem. The group conducts interviews, compiles research, determines a design, and prepares the lecture. Then, at the end of the year, we hold an evening seminar in which each group makes a presentation to classmates, faculty, and community members. This year-long lecture assignment provides an indelible learning experience that interweaves content knowledge with practical, real-world skills.
Student lectures provide faculty with a product that reflects student learning outcomes and allows us to interweave several important skills into a summative project. Perhaps more importantly, in addition to content-specific skills, student lectures teach practical, real-world skills such as collaboration, problem solving, conflict resolution, communication, and research that will carry our students with them into their futures.