Teachers all have their own styles. Some like lecturing and some hand out readings, but world history teacher Lauren Stapleton is taking a new and seldom-used approach. Her project-based learning environment, which she implemented for the first time last year, has changed the way her class runs for her and her students.
Stapleton started her career with a teaching style that “felt rooted in old pedagogy.” She slowly grew into running a classroom focused on projects and group work.
“[To] new teachers, having lots of worksheets is very comfortable,” said Stapleton. “I needed something more and [my students] needed something different.”
The big picture methodology applied in her class is what she calls a “flipped classroom.” This entails more activities and projects during class time while students often dig deeper into the content outside of class.
She thinks that her current teaching philosophy is more effective and eliminates the nonessential items she used to cover in detail. This focus on more significant and important pieces of information allowed more time in class for “self-exploration” into content, which is important to Stapleton and plays a huge part in the success she’s found in the last couple of years of teaching the class.
A study by the University of Michigan and Michigan State University concluded that project based learning correlates positively with student achievement, showing that kids in project based classes had more improved scores on assessments than those that were in traditional classrooms.
“I enjoyed it… she was fun,” sophomore Everett Barbour said. “[I liked having] more group projects instead of tests.”
Sophomore Emerson Krause thinks that Stapleton’s projects “reduce student stress” and provide “a more accurate way to gauge [student] knowledge.”
However, some students said that the different style could be challenging. Sophomore Ben Esther said her flipped classroom was “frustrating at times,” but noted that the focus on projects was “less stressful and definitely helped [his] grade.”
Another key to her progress in developing her teaching techniques has been managing time appropriately. Stapleton wanted to make sure that while preserving the difficult nature of the class, she didn’t have students feeling like they had to meet “deadline after deadline after deadline” to succeed in her class. However, Stapleton has had to walk a fine line between a brutal schedule and “cruising through this and that” in order to achieve what she has been working toward.
