The Promise of Implementing Project-Based Learning (Steven Davis)
Steven Davis is in his tenth year teaching English to high school sophomores and seniors in a large northern California urban school district
I have reached a turning point where I can implement the day-to-day standards-based
curriculum for most of my students, preparing them for high-stakes testing, while providing highly individualized and sometimes project-based learning for some students in each of my classes. The catch is that this level of individualization does not scale easily, especially for sophomore English classes, because much responsibility for learning is on the student and some students may be uninterested in the projects you offer them. It’s one thing to differentiate instruction by scaffolding or accelerating the curriculum, it’s quite another thing to truly individualize the learning process with topics and activities that each student will find relevant.
In the past, I have had the latitude to plan for students to do their own learning but some students were
