Chapter 4

This chapter talks about many potential pitfalls that can take place in project design. The important one they mention is the project that is long and doesn’t have many learning outcomes. Projects like this will not engage the students and they won’t do their best work. If students lose interest in a topic it’s the teacher’s job to be flexible and come up with a different plan. Another pitfall is a project being too scripted for the students and has too many steps. This sounds like the common core math students are being exposed to it is not engaging or fun. So this leads students to not learn or remember what was taught. As if the project is too scripted students won’t have room to explore their own ideas. The outcome to the project will be predictable. That is not the idea behind project-based learning and it’s a disservice to the students. Good projects start with a higher order question that can lead students in many different directions. I like the idea that you can get project ideas from the news and contemporary issues. This will help teachers bring real-world issues into the classroom and that can usually be the difficult thing for teachers to do. Student questions is also a great starting point for projects like these because their interest in topics is very important.