If you drop in on Amy Schmer’s sixth-grade science class at Preston Middle School in Fort Collins, Colorado, there is a good chance you’ll see 10- and 11-year old children passionately exploring topics that ordinarily are discussed by professional biologists. The students might be doing research on how to provide a new clean water source for wildlife, discussing the challenges of nonnative plants and the role livestock plays, or passionately discussing the needs of screech owls, great horned owls, and northern pygmy owls with an expert ornithologist from Estes Park. Whatever the students are doing, likely they are doing it with a level of engagement and excitement that would thrill any educator.
The educators at Preston Middle School have been partnering with David Neils, an educational activist who has spent more than 17 years guiding schools toward ensuring that students do real learning, authentic learning. David is passionate about students and refuses to accept the notion that children can go through school bored and compliant. He told me:
Something is amiss in our educational system when youth don’t have the confidence, the skill, the ability to put forth their own ideas and make something happen. You see a lot of high school students even today who are unprepared for life after high school. Their plans are shallow; they are based on whims or as basic as “I’m going into engineering because I think I can make a lot of money.” They are not connected with professionals in a way that allows them to leverage who they are. I feel that youth can start doing authentic learning soon after they can walk, and authentic work should be the hallmark of their education up through graduate school.
David and I have collaborated for more than a decade, and his deep commitment to students is so forceful that on more than one occasion we have ended up in passionate arguments. (My wife, Jenny, is quick to remind me that my stubbornness contributes significantly to the heated nature of some of my conversations with David.) Sometimes David and I disagree, but mostly he makes me think deeply about what education is for and how we can do a better job. Ultimately, David has the results to show that his passion is well directed.
David’s work has been widely recognized. He’s been mentioned by acclaimed authors such as Po Bronson and Sir Ken Robinson, and featured in articles in Fortune and US News and World Report. People celebrate David’s pioneering work in creating The International Telementor Center, which exploits the connectivity of the Internet so students can learn from experts and mentors who work around the world in organizations such as Hewlett Packard, MasterCard, Intel, Google, Merck, Wells Fargo, and the George Lucas Educational Foundation.
Telementoring for David, though, is not an end in itself; telementoring is a tool for supporting what really matters to him—authentic learning experiences for students. David once told me, “I would love to be able to manage this program and never have to look at a computer. But telementoring is the only way to efficiently and successfully connect fantastic professionals with students in a way that works with the existing structure.”
When he isn’t working directly with schools, David loves to photograph and videotape mountain lions and other predators, and he frequently spends time in the Colorado mountains near his home. One area close to his home is Sylvan Dale Guest Ranch (sylvandale.com), a 3,000-acre mountain getaway used for weddings, business meetings, and other outdoor adventures. While photographing next to the ranch, David realized that the land would be a fantastic place for students to do science projects, so he called the owners to see if they’d be interested in students visiting the property. As it turns out, Susan Jessup, the ranch owner, told David that her father always wanted young people to do real science on the ranch. “So,” David told me, “we were given access to the 3,000 acres of the ranch holdings to do authentic science work for multiple years, and in addition to the 3,000 acres, we had another 4,000 acres of leased land on a national forest available to us. We had an outdoor 7,000-acre classroom.”
After getting the go-ahead from Sylvan Dale Ranch, David met Amy Schmer from Preston Middle School. Amy visited the ranch and quickly recognized that it would be a great place for students to do science, so she asked David to speak to her sixth-grade students. “I shared the opportunity that Sylvan Dale Ranch had given us,” David told me. “I let them know what I do, that I run this mentoring program and I’m looking for opportunities for students to do authentic work. They were given the choice to do science outside in the wilderness or do the regular curriculum. Amy wanted the students themselves to agree to the project, and they immediately were on board.”
The students were given a number of options. They could focus on plants, water, or wildlife. In early September, the students decided to focus on improving wildlife habitat because that would affect both water and plants. “The decision was made by students. We didn’t tell them what to do,” David explained, and then described how their project got started:
The students had to figure out what was happening on the ranch with the species of animals that were there. They learned by conversing with mentors and other wildlife experts about the fact that there are four main areas to focus on if you are going to improve wildlife habitat: forage, water, shelter, or places to rear young. Then they looked at the target species. This is what makes this work authentic—they went after the real issues that professionals in the field care about, issues regarding predators, wild cats, bob cats, mountain lions, coyotes, mule deer, elk, and so on. They had to get an understanding from these biologists of which animals needed the most help and what areas they should focus on.
“What came out on top right away,” David said, “was the issue of water.” When the students visited the ranch, they discovered that although a big ditch flowed through the property, it could only be reached by bats, birds, and other flying animals. They saw that water was scarce for animals, and they realized that if they put in some kind of water structure it could make a big difference.
David explained to me what happened next:
Then the students had to work with their mentors to do research: What does that water structure look like? Where have professionals had success putting in water structures? A lot of that work had been done in Utah, so they communicated with their mentors and experts in other states to learn how to do this. Then they got a guzzler (a 50-gallon tank buried in the ground filled with water) donated by a company. We set up on a Saturday and asked parents and students to come out. We had sixth graders swinging pickaxes—where do you see that? Digging a hole in the ground. Pulling rocks that weighed more than 100 lbs.
We installed this guzzler in early October and set up a trail camera. On October 13, a Friday morning, the students filled it for the first time. Between Friday night and Monday morning, we had 92 bear pictures on the camera. When those pictures were shown to the students the following Tuesday, it changed everything. The level of engagement by these 10- and 11-year-old kids was off the charts. The quality of the conversations was incredible because everything had been real. Nothing had been fabricated. Now they were seeing the results of their work.
“The kids,” David said, “were hooked because it was the real deal. When you do something on your own, and you’ve done collaborative work of excellent quality, and you have a mountain lion show up in three days—that’s a big deal.” The science didn’t end there, however. As it got colder, the guzzler froze, and the students experimented with solutions. They tried putting rubber balls in the water thinking that if the sun shone on the balls, it would heat the water around the balls and the water wouldn’t freeze. However, they discovered that as soon as the temperature dropped to about 10 degrees, that didn’t work very well.
The students worked with their telementors to discover how other wildlife professionals were keeping their guzzlers from freezing. David explained the next steps:
The students learned about aerators, the voltage requirements, and power inverters. We didn’t have any power up there so then they had to figure how big a solar panel do we need, how’s it going to work with an aerator, and the right converter to convert ac to dc current. So they decided to get another guzzler tank and set it up outside the classroom so they could test their ideas outside. That took place over a month’s time and it was just fabulous work and there were fabulous discussions between students and mentors. They came up with a solution that was bulletproof. They finally got it to where that aerator was running 24/7 and keeping that guzzler from freezing.
The learning continued all year. With the help of their telementors, the students learned a lot about water, aerators, and solar energy. “They are doing work,” David said, “that we would never expect from a high school senior.” Amy also set up the chance for them to hear guest lecturers. “We had an owl expert from Estes Park come in,” David said, “and students had over 50 excellent questions for him. He told me out in the hallway after that session that he had never before had this experience with students, never had even high school students come close to this level of engagement.”
When I asked David why he does what he does, supporting projects such as the one completed by Amy Schmer’s students at Preston Middle School, he told me he loved the work mostly because students learn that they can make a difference:
I want youth to know they count for something and they can contribute. And that by contributing, that is where maximum joy is felt while you are here. It is not about amassing anything materially; it’s about making a difference for people and other important things on this planet. When you are young it is so easy to go back to that place that you already know as a toddler, and that is where maximum joy is derived. If more youth are in that place, they will have a greater impact and live much more successful lives, the best definition of success, while they are here. Plus, I’m paying my childhood mentor back. That’s why I do it.
The Oxford English Dictionary contains more than a page of definitions for the word authentic, but most commonly we use authentic to mean that something is real, or genuine—not a copy or a fake. For example, we might say that we are selling an authentic first edition of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, which is to say that since the book is authentic, it is worth a lot more than a later copy of the book. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, something that is authentic is “real, actual, genuine.”
For our purposes, then, authentic learning is student work that is “real, actual, genuine” in all the aspects experienced by students. Student work is also authentic when it addresses a real issue. Students who are fixing their teacher’s computers, for example, are clearly working on an important real-life concern. However, students who are memorizing computer terms simply to pass a test, and who will forget those terms a week after the test, are engaged in learning that is far from real.
Assignments are also authentic when they produce a real product. For example, the students in Amy Schmer’s class created genuine solutions to a real-world problem—how to improve the wildlife habitat at Sylvan Dale Ranch by getting more water to the animals that live there.
Authentic learning is also assessed based on real-world standards. The criteria for judging authentic learning arise naturally from the task—in this case, improving the habitat. Since the real world establishes criteria for excellence, the bar for quality work is often set much higher during authentic learning.
Finally, authentic learning really engages students because they consider it relevant, interesting, and important. Authentic learning is work that students want to do because they see the investment of their time as time well spent. Students completing authentic learning, to use Phil Schlecty’s definition (2011), are authentically engaged in the learning. Usually, this is only possible when students have a major voice in defining the project, identifying the driving question at the heart of the work, identifying tasks to be completed, dividing those tasks among students, identifying how to best learn from mentors, and identifying criteria (based on the true demands of the project) for excellence in the work (see Figure 9.1).
Annette Holthaus has the students working on teachers’ computers.
Video 9.1 www.corwin.com/highimpactinstruction
In his review of research on project-based learning (PBL), John W. Thomas writes that “the variety of practices under the banner of PBL makes it difficult to assess what is and is not PBL” (p. 2). William Bender (2012), for example, describes project-based learning as “using authentic, real-world projects, based on a highly motivating and engaging question, task, or problem, to teach students academic content in the context of working cooperatively to solve the problem” (p. 7). In his review of the literature, Thomas identifies five “central” criteria for PBL projects:
| Figure 9.1 | Authentic Learning Checklist |
Copyright © 2013 by Corwin. All rights reserved. Reprinted from High-Impact Instruction: A Framework for Great Teaching by Jim Knight. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin, www.corwin.com.
Download this form at www.corwin.com/highimpactinstruction
In many cases, project-based learning and “authentic learning” are one and the same. Project-based learning is authentic so long as the emphasis of the project is on “authenticity” rather than the project itself. To be authentic learning, then, PBL has to meet the criteria mentioned above; that is, it (a) addresses a real-world issue, (b) produces a real-world product that addresses the issue, (c) is assessed using real-world criteria, and (d) really engages students because they find the project interesting, meaningful, and personally relevant.
Students usually collaborate with their peers when they do project-based learning, but this is not always the case with authentic learning. Group work has many advantages, but students can do authentic learning individually or with others. For example, an individual student might conduct a campaign to convince students not to text message while driving or analyze the nutritional quality of a school’s cafeteria food and make recommendations for healthier food. What counts here is that the work counts, whether it is done individually or with others.
When students do authentic learning, David Neils told me, “I see it. I see it in their eyes. I see it in the way they talk to each other. I see it in their level of engagement. They know what they are working on is real.”
This question might sound silly, a bit like asking, “Why should we drink water when we are thirsty?” If students are 100% engaged in what they do, are pushed to meet real-world standards, and do work that makes a contribution to the community, wouldn’t it be obvious that they will benefit? Yes. However, reviewing why we might use authentic learning highlights how this kind of learning can help students develop deeper understandings, along with increased motivation, engagement, and empowerment.
Purpose. William Damon, in The Path to Purpose (2009), has written persuasively that lack of purpose can interfere with students’ ability to lead rich, happy, productive lives. Damon writes:
The most pervasive problem of the day is a sense of emptiness that has ensnared many young people in long periods of drift during a time in their lives when they should be defining their aspirations and making progress toward their fulfillment. For too many young people today, apathy and anxiety have become the dominant moods, and disengagement or even cynicism has replaced the natural hopefulness of youth. (p. xiv)
Authentic learning isn’t a guaranteed way to light a fire in every student whose dominant moods are “apathy and anxiety,” but some aspects of this learning should awaken many students to their potential. First, the very act of doing authentic learning helps students see how important it is to set a purpose and act to achieve it since during authentic learning, students should clearly understand why they are doing what they are doing. Furthermore, since authentic learning leads to real-world outcomes that demonstrate the importance of striving to resolve real issues, students see a natural connection between purpose and achievement.
More important, authentic learning at its best kindles a desire in students to learn more about fascinating and meaningful topics that they might otherwise not have known about—a crucial goal for education. By structuring learning experiences so that they are relevant and engaging by demonstrating how important it is to pursue a project with a meaningful mission, authentic learning can lead students to a deeper understanding of the power of purpose.
David Neils saw purpose as an incredibly important part of authentic learning. In conversation, he told me the following:
Students need to find the intersection between who they are, I’ll call it natural ability, and what needs to be done as identified by a leader in the field. But you have to teach the students how to find the need. We don’t let them shoot from the hip. The first thing is to have students connect with other people who share their interests. They find out what keeps the leaders and experts up at night and then discuss what they learned with their mentor. Then they decide where they are going to focus their effort addressing one of the expert’s needs. That’s a super critical component of authentic learning. Once that happens, all the other dominoes fall.
Meaningful. What makes authentic learning authentic is that students work on real projects that make a significant contribution to their community, their environment, or the world at large. Students at Preston Middle School completed many meaningful projects. One student worked with a telementor from the global health care organization Merck to study malaria, ultimately working with a team of professionals to get mosquito nets to a village in the developing world. Other students developed a public communication program to spread the word on animal health for the Fort Collins Cat Rescue organization and invented a rubber grip to make it easier for students to open lockers.
In each case, during authentic learning, students address an issue or problem that is important and meaningful for the community. By addressing such issues, students gain a sense of pride in what they accomplish.
Personally Relevant. Doing meaningful work is important, but only if it is relevant to the students. If students don’t care about a project, they won’t give it their best effort. On the other hand, when students tackle a project they care deeply about, their effort often goes far beyond what they realized they could do. By definition, work is only authentic if students truly care about what they are doing. By designing projects that students care about, teachers can lead students to do outstanding work.
The world is full of topics that can deeply engage students, including the environment, animal wildlife, nutrition and health, community development, education, and issues facing the developing world. What matters is that students work on a project that they care about. As Boss and Krauss have written in Reinventing Project-Based Learning (2007), a truly outstanding project is one that connects with students’ passions and interests:
John Seely Brown, former chief scientist at Palo Alto Research Center in California, suggests that we should imagine what “passion-based learning” would look like (La Monica, 2006). … What would spark your students’ curiosity and make them feel that what they are learning is interesting and important? How would interactions with classmates and others engage them and make them feel a part of something big? What activities, experiences, and tools would excite them? When you tap into students’ enthusiasm, you increase the likelihood that they will dive into deep inquiry and come away with essential understanding. Projects with passion help connect with the social and emotional sides of the learning experience. (pp. 52–53)
Motivation. Work that is meaningful, interesting, personally relevant, and chosen by students is likely work that students will be motivated to complete. Researchers such as Edward Deci have broadened our understanding of motivation by helping us see that we are rarely motivated by others’ goals. In Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (2009), Daniel Pink summarizes that research. He writes: “Goals that people set for themselves and that are devoted to attaining mastery are usually healthy. But goals imposed by others—sales targets, quarterly reports, standardized test scores, and so on—can sometimes have dangerous side effects” (p. 50).
Much of the education students experience in school involves goals that are imposed on them from outside. However, during authentic learning, even though the learning addresses state or common core standards, students have a large say in deciding the specific issue the project will address, how the issue will be addressed, and what will be the criteria for quality work. For many students, having an increased say in learning leads to an increase in motivation.
Engagement. When students are doing work that matters to them, that they choose, and that is important and interesting to them, they are much more likely to be engaged. In a famous Ed Leadership article, Strong, Silver, and Robinson (1995) summarized a 10-year research project during which they asked teachers and students to describe the kind of work that is “totally engaging” and the kind of work “you hate to do.” They found distinct patterns in the responses:
Engaging work, respondents said, was work that stimulated their curiosity, permitted them to express their creativity, and fostered positive relationships with others. It was also work at which they were good. As for activities they hated, both teachers and students cited work that was repetitive, that required little or no thought, and that was forced on them by others. (p. 8)
Authentic learning addresses all of these issues. Students work on projects that they choose and that excite their curiosity. In addition, authentic learning provides an opportunity for students to express themselves, and, when well facilitated, authentic learning leads students to experience success, doing work that they are proud to have done.
Learning. Earlier in this book, I distinguished between procedural knowledge, which is acquired and learned during performance of tasks, and declarative knowledge—knowledge that is expressed in books, texts, lectures, and most classroom learning. Both forms of learning are important, and in many cases declarative knowledge is a necessary prerequisite for procedural knowledge. But because procedural knowledge is what we do, this type of learning can have a deep impact.
Since authentic learning takes place in the field, so to speak, with students addressing real-world issues, much of what they learn during authentic learning is procedural knowledge. Students learn such skills as how to identify a problem, develop action plans, find expert advisers, communicate with mentors, develop communication plans, conduct research, invent new products, and so forth. Since this learning occurs during real-world experiences, students are much more likely to remember what they have learned. This is especially important since much of what students otherwise learn in school rarely becomes procedural.
Empowerment. When students do authentic learning—working on tasks that matter, applying real-world solutions that are judged by real-world standards—they have the opportunity to learn that their own actions can make a difference. Few things are more empowering than overcoming challenges and accomplishing a task that you care about and that makes a positive impact on your community.
David Neils told me about Cohen, a boy in sixth grade, who especially benefited from doing authentic learning. Cohen worked with a mentor in Beijing who helped him plan, market, and run a summer camp for kids through a partnership that he set up with Colorado State University. Then, after filling his camp in three days, Cohen decided he wanted to do more. David told me his story.
Caryl Crowell takes students outside to learn science.
Video 9.2 www.corwin.com/highimpactinstruction
Cohen found me a week after his camp sold out. He said, “Since my camp is full, I have some extra time between now and the end of the school year, so my mentor and I are working on another project.” So I said, “What are you working on now?” Cohen answered, “We’ve done our homework and we realize that kids with disabilities do so much better in school if they get exercise. We know, based on the research we have done, that these kids here at Preston could be getting a lot more exercise. I am working on a proposal with my mentor that I am going to share with my principal, and I hope that some of my ideas are adopted.” Two weeks later, he set up an hour-long meeting with the principal. After the meeting, he ran around the school trying to find me. “Mr. Neils,” he stated proudly, “my proposal was basically accepted. They have already made changes for next year so that the kids with disabilities get more exercise.” He had tears in his eyes. Now that tells you everything, right?
When teachers provide authentic learning for students, they move from being the primary sources of knowledge to being facilitators of the learning process. The goal remains the same—to ensure maximum student learning—and teachers are no less busy. However, during authentic learning, teachers have to attend to aspects of learning that are less important during more traditional forms of learning.
Perhaps the most important facilitation task that teachers perform when students do authentic learning is to make sure students make choices about every significant part of the project. To ensure that authentic learning is successful, teachers guide students through many aspects of the work, including (a) guiding students as they choose a project and identify its purpose, (b) supporting students as they find and mediate relationships with mentors and experts, (c) guiding students as they identify and divide tasks, (d) working with students to establish criteria for quality work, (e) guiding students as they identify a real audience for their work, (f) directly teaching students when they need to learn social or other skills to complete a project. Each of these areas is described in Figure 9.2.
For authentic learning to begin, the work requires a purpose. That purpose can be expressed as a question, objective, or problem. John Larmer from the Buck Institute suggests that projects begin with a driving question. “A driving question,” he writes, “clearly states the purpose of the project. It gives focus to all the tasks students do … [and the driving question ensures] … students always know, ‘Why are we doing this?’” (p. 40).
| Figure 9.2 | Successful Authentic Learning Checklist |
Copyright © 2013 by Corwin. All rights reserved. Reprinted from High-Impact Instruction: A Framework for Great Teaching by Jim Knight. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin, www.corwin.com.
Download this form at www.corwin.com/highimpactinstruction
The temptation is to simply tell students what the project will be and then push them to complete it. But such an approach dramatically decreases student motivation. If students are to truly embrace authentic learning, they need to make a choice to do the project. It is hard for anyone, adult or child, to feel excited about an experience that they have been told to do. A better strategy is for students to discuss the work and, ultimately, vote, perhaps through a secret ballot, on the topic for authentic learning.
Teachers should help students to understand exactly what they are being offered. In the best situations, this might involve, as it did for Amy Schmer’s students, taking a field trip to a ranch in the Colorado Rockies. Unfortunately, that isn’t always possible, so teachers can use other strategies, such as sharing compelling videos that present possible issues, inviting guest speakers, having guest conversations with experts via Skype or Facetime, and reading newspaper articles, websites, or other media.
For authentic learning to truly be authentic, this stage is crucial—students must be “all-in” on the project, which means they have to see it as relevant (a project that they care about), interesting (a project that captures their imagination), and meaningful (a project that they believe will make a difference and that they would like to spend time on). Students should not be satisfied until they have chosen a project that meets those criteria (see Figure 9.3).
To ensure that the work that students do is indeed authentic, teachers should constantly be on the lookout for work that will make a difference for students. They also need to work to understand their students’ interests by talking with students one-on-one, giving students interest surveys, and taking every opportunity to learn about students by interacting with them.
| Figure 9.3 | Project Criteria Checklist |
Copyright © 2013 by Corwin. All rights reserved. Reprinted from High-Impact Instruction: A Framework for Great Teaching by Jim Knight. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin, www.corwin.com.
Download this form at www.corwin.com/highimpactinstruction
The challenge at this stage of the project is to align the student work with the broader learning goals within a school, such as the Common Core State Standards. As stated in Part I, if teachers are unintentional about standards, their students will miss out on learning foundational, essential knowledge, skills, and big ideas. However, learning that covers all the standards but provokes no real learning—a far too common situation when teachers are expected to follow pacing guides—does not prepare students for success. When proposing possible topics, teachers need to think carefully about how authentic learning experiences can ensure that students learn what they are expected to learn while also ensuring that what students do is real work.
Finally, teachers need to be aware of Mintzberg and Christensen’s distinction between deliberate and emergent strategy. Good plans for learning must be deliberate, focusing and guiding student learning experiences so that students learn some of the knowledge, skills, and big ideas that teachers, curriculum guides, and standards identify as essential. But especially during authentic learning, teachers must also be ready to embrace emergent opportunities for learning. Real work is messy and nonlinear, and if students are doing real work, surprising and important opportunities for learning will present themselves almost daily. To miss those opportunities is to miss a major reason for doing authentic learning.
A critical characteristic of authentic learning is that students learn with and from other people, who share important knowledge and help them complete their project. This usually involves directly contacting experts in the field being studied (wildlife biologists in the case of Amy Schmer’s class) and mentors, who provide support and guidance as students move through the project. Experts help students understand important aspects of the issue they are tackling and help students see what kind of questions they are studying. While mentors primarily help students find information that they need, they can provide support in any aspect of learning.
Teachers facilitate this kind of learning in many ways. First, they need to find mentors who can work with students. One way is to work with organizations such as David Neils’ International Telementor Program (ITP), which brokers mentoring relationships for students. Alternatively, they can reach out to community organizations that are interested in providing mentoring support. To protect the students, all mentoring interactions must occur at school, or if they involve email, all emails must be public. ITP has built-in safeguards to ensure that all interactions are filtered, monitored, and archived. No email is exchanged. All mentoring communications occur through a secure web space at www.telementor.org. As of this date, nearly 46,000 students throughout 11 countries have been mentored through ITP.
Teachers must also guide students to identify experts they can contact and from whom they can learn. Teachers can usually lead students to identify experts, or mentors can help, or sometimes they can be found without any help. Students may need to learn about appropriate and effective written communication at this point as well. However, the teacher should intervene as little as possible. This process needs to be led by the students themselves. As David Neils told me, “All of the conversations—the inviting of experts—everything is driven by the students. And when they get to a fork in the road, the teacher lets the students decide which direction to take. This produces a lot of energy.”
Once students have committed to a project, they need to identify what tasks have to be completed and who will do them. In many cases, when students are tackling a project that they truly believe in, and they have the freedom to identify tasks and determine who will do them, they are capable of doing this on their own. In other situations, and when tasks are more complex, teachers may need to guide conversations to make sure appropriate tasks are identified and tasks are divided equitably. Teachers might also want to teach students how use organizational tools like a Gantt chart—a planning tool used in project management to sort tasks and responsibilities (see ganttchart.com for more information).
What makes this part of the process authentic is that there should be no meaningless tasks, no work done just to fill time. The work that students do should help them address a real-life problem, or they shouldn’t be doing it. There are no time-killing, mind-numbing worksheets in authentic learning.
One of the aspects of authentic learning that makes it “real” is that the work is judged by real-world criteria. One way to do this is to simply assess whether or not the students did a satisfactory job of solving a problem they were addressing. For example, the students in Amy Schmer’s class judged their work based on whether or not they were able to solve the water problem at Sylvan Dale Ranch, which, as it turns out, they did.
Other standards arise naturally from the project that has been embraced. For example, if students are doing an experiment, they should conduct real science. That is, they should address an issue that is being addressed by scientists in the field, not a simple experiment that has been repeated thousands of times at science fairs across the nation. In addition, students should apply the scientific method—identifying research questions, using random assignment, controlling for error, and applying measures that are considered valid and reliable.
Students can identify the criteria for judging their work by contacting or reading the work of experts in the field or with the help of their mentors who can guide students to find the information that they need. Teachers can also facilitate discussion of quality work by showing products of differing quality and asking students to identify the differences. During truly authentic learning, subpar work simply is not acceptable. Real problems require high-quality solutions.
Another way to make a project real is to have a real audience for what is being created. A real audience provides focus to a project. As they work at whatever their project is, students can ask themselves, “What will our audience really think of what we are doing?”
Thus, students who are engaged in community improvement projects might invite a local politician to class, and students who want to set up a business might invite a business leader to hear about their plan. Depending on the project, students could invite the school principal, the mayor, customers buying a product, a CEO, or anyone else who would be appropriate to evaluate their work. In addition, inviting someone into the classroom to offer candid feedback can be an exciting and meaningful culminating act for a project.
Teachers need to prepare the external audience somewhat to make sure that they not only provide candid and substantial feedback, but offer it in a constructive way. If an external evaluator offers only positive and superficial comments, students miss a potentially meaningful learning opportunity. However, if an external evaluator is brutally critical and overlooks students’ genuine accomplishments, it can end a project poorly and inhibit learning.
To complete any project, students need to learn important skills. For a science project, for example, students will need to learn about the scientific method and various ways of measuring outcomes. For a communication project, students may need to learn some fundamentals of marketing, the elements of persuasion, or more basic writing or design skills. And to succeed at any collaborative effort, students will need to learn important communication skills.
Teachers can teach important skills and knowledge in real-world contexts that help students remember them by directly teaching the skills and knowledge students need to learn to succeed. When students understand why they are being taught, and they see how the skills and knowledge help them succeed, they are usually much more engaged in the learning.
The lessons learned from authentic learning can be applied to other learning experiences for students. In particular, experiential learning can embody many of the components of authentic learning. I define experiential learning as any learning activity that allows students to experience the phenomenon they are exploring, acting out the behaviors, strategies, or other knowledge, skills, or big ideas being learned.
Effective experiential learning provides learners with a simulation of some or all elements of content being covered during a learning session. Thus, learners are provided with an experience that simulates reality. Experiential learning can be manifested in a variety of ways, including students role-playing, listening, or putting on a poetry reading, experiencing firsthand what it feels like to work within different economies.
Students have their own poetry reading in Miss Gray’s language arts class.
Video 9.3 www.corwin.com/highimpactinstruction
Experiential learning helps students see how well they can use new concepts they are learning, reminds learners of the concrete attributes of a particular phenomenon being studied, and allows learners to gain new insights into their thoughts, assumptions, and behaviors. What matters in experiential learning is that learners experience content in a way that simulates the real-life cognitive, emotional, and sensual elements of the content being covered.
In communication classes at Ryerson Polytechnic University, Susan FitzRandolph uses experiential learning to reinforce learning about cross-cultural communication. In her classes, after covering content on cross-cultural communication, Susan divides her class into three teams and explains that each team is now going to learn to embody a unique culture. The teams are directed to different break-out rooms, with their cultural instructions in hand, and they then quickly learn the characteristics of a culture that they will role-play when the three teams are brought together. Of course the cultures are strikingly different: in one group, personal space is 20 centimeters, in a second, personal space is 60; one group has a sacred ritual it performs, another group is atheistic; one group believes in socializing, dining, and drinking, whereas another group believes time is money and forbids some kinds of dining and drinking, and so on.
When Susan reunites the groups, she asks them to work together to make a business deal, but inevitably the teams have great difficulty dealing with their cultural differences. Often, the debriefing of this experience leads to learners gaining startling insights into their attitudes toward people from a variety of cultural backgrounds.
Chris Korinek helps students learn about economic systems by simulating those systems.
Video 9.4 www.corwin.com/highimpactinstruction
When David Neils and I were discussing his work at Preston Middle School, he told me a story that captured what students were experiencing by doing authentic learning. This story seems to crystallize the difference between authentic learning and more traditional forms of learning:
At the end of the school year, Amy’s father-in-law passed away, and she was gone for 10 days, so I helped cover her class. They had a substitute in there when I was also working with the class. At the time there were forest fires raging in Colorado. Amy felt it would be great if the students developed a little background knowledge of fire ecology, and because she was dealing with her personal situation, she thought the best place to start was an article in the textbook used in the class. So the substitute said to the students that she wanted them to get out the textbook. One of the students looked at me with this horrified look on his face and said, “What? We are not the textbook group. We do real stuff in here. Somebody needs to tell him. That’s not us!”
The best way to measure the impact of authentic learning is through measures of students’ attitudes such as those surfaced by the Tripod Survey (tripodproject.org), the Gallop Student Poll (gallupstudentpoll.com), or surveys created by teachers to study students’ attitudes about learning.
• Authentic learning is learning that involves real-world issues, products, and audiences.
• Students are deeply engaged by authentic learning because it is interesting, relevant, and meaningful.
• Done well, authentic learning helps students discover the importance of purpose and motivates, engages, and empowers them.
• Because it occurs in the real world, authentic learning helps students acquire procedural knowledge.
• Teachers who design authentic learning move from being disseminators of knowledge to being facilitators of learning.
The Buck Institute for Education is a leader in the dissemination of training and support for project-based learning (PBL). Their website (www.bie.org) is a natural first stop for learning more about project-based learning. Further, their book, PBL Starter Kit (Larmer, 2009), is a clear, easy-to-read introduction to the subject.
The International Telementor Center (www.telementor.org), developed by David Neils, who is featured in this chapter, has provided mentoring via the Internet for hundreds of authentic learning projects conducted around the world. The Telementor Center brings together professionals who can mentor students as they conduct their projects.
Suzie Boss and Jane Krauss’ Reinventing Project-Based Learning: Your Field Guide to Real-World Projects in the Digital Age (2008), published by the International Society for Technology in Education, provides excellent suggestions for how technology can be used as a central resource with PBL.
William Bender’s Project-Based Learning: Differentiating the Instruction for the 21st Century (2012) provides excellent suggestions on how PBL can be designed to bring out students’ unique strengths and respond to their different learning needs.