by PRP Group, on 02/13/2023
My grandfather, who was born in the 1920s, once showed me the one-room schoolhouse that he attended as a child. There were rows of desks, and he said that the students would stoke the fire and work with the teacher. It was easy to see how it could be home to a comforting community feeling, but it was also clear that it was a place that schooled students for a different economy, a different era than ours.
Since then, technologies and the economy have advanced, yet many of our schools still look more or less the same, even if the fireplace has been replaced with a furnace. At Ulster Board of Cooperative Education Services (BOCES) in New York, we’ve been modernizing the classroom experience for our students through project-based learning. Rather than teaching different subjects in silos, PBL integrates them in a way that provides a much more engaging learning experience for students. We also believe that it creates a more equitable learning environment because students work to solve problems that are relevant to them using whatever prior knowledge and existing skill sets they bring to the table.