Ahmet: Project-based learning at School 21 is put right at the heart of education.

Student: Here, put that one there on the wall.

Ahmet: Art brings knowledge, stories, facts alive, so you get engagement from students. You get students caring what they’re learning about.

Student: Much better! Let’s do it one more time!

Peter: I think one of the big messages of this school is to do things in greater depth. We are passionate here about crafting work until it is beautiful. And my rule of thumb for the products that we create here is, “Are you surprised that a student that age has done that?”

Teacher: So did you make it?

Peter: I think project-based learning is a very powerful way of getting quality work, and it makes a real impact on learning.

Oli: The model that we’ve come to in project-based learning is we’ve linked together what you might call knowledge rich subjects, history and science, with performative subjects, music, drama.

Joe: Our cross-curricular projects I usually want long. And so between 12/15 weeks. And they will have 300 minutes per week in-between the two subjects.

Joe: Your assignment is to create a three- to five-minute immersive theater performance, which is based around the French or Russian Revolution. So you are responsible in your groups for writing the script, for making the set, for directing your own performance.

Matilda: So I think the priority is we just need to run through it.

Student: We need to also get props and everything set.

Joe: Project-based learning, to me, is a backwards planning structure. You sort of go, “Right, what’s going to drive this whole project? And what are we going to produce at the end? And who’s it going to be for?” Then once you have that, we then say to them, “Here are all the mini-deadlines on the way.” They work in teams. They work individually. They have problems to solve. They have information to gather.

Matilda: I really like how we get a lot of independence in our projects. Our play is about the soldiers, how poor the conditions were for them, and so how appealing the prospect of communism was.

Student: [yelling] Get in, and fall in the right hand side! Right now!

Zaid: To fit all those key events that happened in history in a five-minute play is quite difficult.

Student: [yelling at masked soldiers]

Zaid: We were new to the fact that it was immersive theater, and the fact that the audience could not speak, but to feel that they were part of this.

Student: We’re approaching Russia where everybody will be free!

Matilda: One of the things this school values a lot is craftsmanship. So we keep on redrafting everything that we do. We’ve been receiving critique to help improve that.

Student: It’s kind of rushed. So I think they should slow it down, or space it out a little.

Ahmet: It points them to the direction of what needs to be improved, what’s not quite clear, where they need to add more knowledge.

Ahmet: Great guys, really nice comments. I would like you got go and get–

Emily: I’d argue that the arts is project-based learning. Students are constantly working towards an end product that will have authentic audience.

Emily: We are a week away from Exhibition. So what we’re going to do today is make sure that all the aspects of this project is completely prepared, edited, critiqued, and ready to go.

Emily: It’s the first time we’ve brought music and science together. The essential question of the project is “What does sound look like?”

Heather: We’ve mapped out the science that we could include in that. So students have learnt about sound, soundwaves, how it’s made.

Emily: Over the course of the project there, we team teach all 40 students together; and there’ll be other times we divide them in half.

Heather: And I can’t say the kids would have learnt the science as well as they would have done if it weren’t for the music. It’s so much more real, and it becomes a lot less theoretical.

Heather: Which of these bars are used to describe the waves getting bigger?

Aman: I think it’s quite fascinating how science can actually be used to make music. I admit, I would get bored of just reading a book about science. We learnt how you can be active and learn at the same time.

Emily: We wanted to find a way of making a physical performance. So we constructed the Boomwhackers.

Heather: So they were looking at measuring different lengths of tubes to find out how that affected pitch.

Emily: And they were color-coded, red is C, orange is D, yellow E, etcetera. They can then see the visual representation of how frequency works by the number of hertz when they hit that Boomwhacker.

Student: One, two, three, four, boom!

Emily: Just to make it a little bit more exciting, we discovered these amazing Makey Makey devices, provided students are holding the conducting part of the circuit, you can play notes through it. [notes being played] It also works through water, which we’ve color-coded.

Aman: So when you touch the water, a sound comes out from the laptop. [music notes play by touching the water] We’ve been practicing for a really long time. And I want to see how it turns out.

Matilda: We have Exhibition Night at the end of every term. It’s a night where all the projects we’ve been doing have come together and we show them to our parents, to visitors, experts in the areas we’re studying.

Student: [yelling] What are you doing? Why are you killing these innocent people? They don’t deserve to die!

Matilda: Having a real audience is really important. It definitely helps you keep motivated when you know you’re doing it for a reason.

Aman: After all of that hard work in the term, you get to like show it to the community, and be proud of your work. [whistle blows; music]

Emily: Bringing the arts into project-based learning is great, because students can express the content in a creative and physical way.

Peter: I think the students, once you’ve crafted something beautiful for the first time, then you never look back. They’re getting a sense of what excellence looks like. They’re getting all those qualities of resilience and perseverance of thinking, “Well, actually, I really have gone on a journey.” [music; applause; cheering; crowd noise]

Schools That Work

School 21