Teacher: You’re going to take ten microliters of the DNA you just extracted and put it in the middle well.

Linda Darling-Hammond: We have evidence from many, many studies that students who engage in authentic learning and inquiry-based learning do as well as others on standardized tests and do much better on real assessments and real tasks of critical thinking and problem-solving, that are going to make a bigger difference for them in the long run, in school and in life.

Teacher: Today, we’re working on our final models, assembling the parts that you’ve cut out.

Student: And if we can’t get it straight, we can just sand it a little bit.

Student: Yeah.

Linda: There are many aspects of what goes on in a well-designed project that deepen understanding, that open up the brain for learning, and also create connections that will allow that learning to be transferred to new situations.

Teacher: Go ahead, guys.

Ground of the play structure was not safe.

Student: We could say to the person who made the park to fix the park.

Linda: They are extending what they know into an area of inquiry, which is motivating and exciting to them?

Teacher: So what does the sanitation park make you do to help citizens?

Student: Helps the environment be clean.

Teacher: There you go.

Linda: When a student is deeply engaged in a project, their brain is awake and alert, because they are engaged and they’re interested. That engaged brain operates on connections, connecting what we know to what we’re now learning. Connecting what we experience today to what we experienced yesterday.

Student: Oh yeah.

Teacher: So Mrs. Roberts, she’s going to work with all of the research teams. I’m going to come work with the presentation teams.

Student: The pesticide hasn’t been used for a while, that’s pretty important.

Linda: We know that we learn in social relationship with others much more effectively, in conversation with others, more than we learn from one-way communication.

Student: It’s going to be like solar panels on the iPhone case that charges up the phone.

Linda: Most project-based learning is collaborative. Students learn effectively how to collaborate, as well as how to look to each other for resources and ideas and information and feedback. The relationships that are going on in the project are creating oxytocin, which is a hormone that triggers brain architecture to develop.

Student: Even if there is a chance that what happened to Alaska could happen to the Arctic, it could be devastating.

Student: Regular people do not… Like, my parents and your parents do not have the means to just stop and go buy an electric car.

Linda: Project-based learning also has the opportunity for kids to enter in different places. Different pathways into the problem will allow kids to find a way to hook in from their own knowledge and experience base. It will also give multiple ways for the group to understand the problem, as they share those with each other. And so that really enables a classroom that is of necessity full of variation, to take advantage of that diversity, rather than trying to sort of avoid it, or stomp it out, as we would have to do if we were trying to do a standardized curriculum.

Teacher: We’re looking to see if the bubble is between the lines.

Students: It is.

Student: What angle do we need to put it?

Teacher: Get it in there, and then pull the trigger again. There we go.

Linda: When we learn something that we have just encountered once and memorized and spit back, about ninety percent of it disappears from our brain. It’s no longer retrievable. So a lot of school learning is not actually accessible to us as adults later on. Real and genuine knowledge is transferrable knowledge. It’s the kind of understanding that you can use again in a novel situation, and that’s the kind of knowledge that gets developed in project-based learning.

Teacher: It is important to learn how to do it and do it well. I know that you guys have got this.