Projects and Assignments

Sometimes we wonder: what is the difference between a project and an assignment? As a school with a project-based curriculum, this is not mere rhetoric. Our recent Road Trip activity bridges the gap between the two, with an eye toward the independent Identity Projects on which the kids are about to embark. After two weeks of background study on two dozen crucial 19th-century figures (22 Americans and one each from Mexico and France), each student selected one person from the list and designed a present-day road trip that visited at least three key locations related to that person.

Construction. Students build their own projects. Projects are not simply handed down in total detail. I like the illustration above because the workers recreating Charles Ebbets' classic Manhattan photo are at a theme park. Now that's fun.

Scale. Generally speaking, a project expects more of the student than an assignment. The Road Trip had four fundamental aspects: research to identify three crucial places in the subject's life; paragraphs explaining the significance of each event and place; a visual version, like an annotated map; and a spreadsheet showing an itemized budget for the trip.

Disciplines. A project engages more than one academic discipline. Writing is English, budgets are math, history is history, visuals are art, and research crosses many disciplinary lines.

Authenticity. On the day the project was due, each student stood with his or her projects and guided visitors from the faculty and one of the 5-6 homerooms through an explanation of their trip.

Autonomy. Most projects give the student a degree of control over content. The Road Trip gives the students a great deal of latitude in selecting people, destinations, and priorities. It isn't a pure project, however--they selected from a list, rather than from the broadest frame of knowledge.

Mastery. Successful completion of this project gives the kids a handle on methods like Prezi, Google Spreadsheet and Google Maps--not because they were assigned to use these tools but because these turned out to be the best tools for the work they were doing.

Meta. The student should be able to articulate the design and rationale of the project. The open house format of the due date helped to generate this understanding.