As we approach the end of the school year, education news coverage has turned reflective, with many articles expounding on what worked and what didn’t before predictably throwing in a dash of what could be.
One of the more unique voices I read within this familiar set-up, was a high school student from Seattle, Ronnie Estoque. A junior at Cleveland High School, Estoque is an aspiring journalist (I think he’s got a bright future), who drew me in with the headline “Why I’m unsure project-based learning prepares students for college.”
In 2010, Estoque explains, Cleveland restructured its curriculum and instruction to focus on STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) and project-based learning or PBL.
Group work and projects are the backbone of PBL and while his high school adopted this form of learning and instruction to prepare students for the workplace, Estoque worried, that it was not preparing students well enough for college.
He interviewed two Cleveland alum, who as current freshmen at the University of Washington relayed how the college experience seemed to be more about independent learning and class work.
While some have proclaimed PBL as the end-all-be-all, as a way to engage students, apply deeper learning, instill soft skills like collaboration and connect abstract subject matter to real life problems, it has its flaws, namely, that some students will coast leaving all the hard work to others.
“The one thing I hated was that they (teachers) didn’t enforce student accountability during projects,” Linda Chen, a Cleveland High grad told Estoque. “Most of the time it was me just doing all the work and someone else taking the credit.”
That wasn’t standard practice in all classrooms, however, and Estoque gave a shout out to one teacher who allowed his students to “fire” classmates who weren’t pulling their weight. But Estoque worried not enough teachers held students accountable and that this may ultimately set the less industrious ones up for failure when they got to college.
There’s a lot to unpack in Estoque’s thought-provoking piece.
To begin with, he’s right: educators should have high standards for all students. And when utilizing a learning model like PBL, schools should build in ways to ensure that all students are performing at their best and if they’re not, there is a way to get them back on track and ultimately accept responsibility for their own learning and growth.
Because that is really the outcome we desire. It’s not necessarily college-readiness because college is a pit stop on the way to a career, not a destination unto itself. And it’s not solely about career-readiness because a job, while a big part of someone’s life, is not the totality of it.
What high schools should be preparing students for is to be life-long learners, that is, to grasp every opportunity no matter how mundane and tedious, as a lesson to be absorbed and applied.
You see, I’ve got a lesson I’d like to share with Estoque and his classmates: you will never get away from people who will try to do the bare minimum. Your challenge is to learn from these experiences, so that you get the maximum out of these interactions. When you adopt that kind of mentality, you will be a success regardless of where you land and what life throws your way.