How Does PBL Expand the Role of the Teacher?
In the conventional education model, teachers often become stagnant in their field, repeating the same information year after year. There are creative teachers who wish to engage their students authentically, but to do it, they spend unpaid hours outside of the workday trying to coordinate projects that produce meaningful engagement for students in addition to the required homework and testing. It’s exhausting, and it’s not sustainable. The curriculum is overburdened by too many standards with the ultimate gauge of their work being student performance on standardized tests. Traditional teachers are judged on the “uniform” performance of their students, and they have little to no freedom to innovate. It’s a lockstep, bureaucratic process that leads to 50% of new teachers leaving the profession in the first five years. All human beings need freedom, autonomy, and a sense of purpose, but new teachers soon find out that traditional schools offer little to no place for such growth.
At Georgetown New School we are known as advisors and are liberated to be responsive to our families. Our cohesive staff collaborates in an autonomous, self-governing setting. We collaborate on school design and evaluate and improve our practice based on the needs of our students. We are educational generalists who guide students in the development of their Personal Learning Plans, and we facilitate mastery of the project process.
We approach students holistically, instilling and earning students’ trust as their accountability partners. In our project-based model, we as advisors are able to focus on students as individuals; the student/teacher ratio is small, so advisors are not overloaded with large classes where students are bound to fall through the cracks. This allows advisors to create meaningful relationships with each individual student, which makes space to identify the unique needs of each student, whether that be helping with the research process, finding techniques to address a fear of public speaking, guiding the student towards honest self reflection, or helping build leadership skills. It could be that one of our former students at Valley New School says it best, “The collegial nature allows advisors and students to form a more genuine and honest relationship rather than maintaining the standard power dynamic, which tells students that their knowledge is less valuable than the teacher’s. They are working together toward a common goal and empowering each other.”
We model self-reflection by reading and journaling alongside our students. We demonstrate lifelong learning by maintaining a dynamic list of enrichment opportunities and share those experiences with our students. Advisors at our schools are expected to continue to learn and grow in order to model the joy of learning. We nurture supportive relationships with each other and our families, welcoming them into our learning community. Our mission is always to create and sustain a positive learning culture and seek cutting edge innovation in order for our students to follow their passion and realize their purpose.
