A “brain boost” is backed by research showing that students in academic classrooms need a moment to get up and move their whole bodies, says Will Westphal, physical education teacher at both Taft Elementary, which serves K-4 students, and Alliance Charter School, a pre-K-6 Montessori school, in Wisconsin’s Neenah Joint School District, in an article in K-12 Dive
Project-based learning involves the active participation of students learning in real-world, personally meaningful projects – a “brain boost”. It isn’t just for classroom-based subjects. Career and technical education, visual and performing arts and physical education in some schools make use of this approach.
“I would think it fits as well as it does with other content areas,” says Westphal. “In any form of education, there’s a lot of ways to get things done.”
Here are Westphal’s thoughts on using project-based learning:
- At a previous district he and a music teacher worked with 3rd and 4th graders to create “brain boost” dance videos for the whole school. They provided guidance on music to use and appropriate length of the videos; the students did most of the work by being creative, making the recordings and figuring out what they needed for the visuals.
- A song the students used for their video came across another teacher’s sound system during his kindergarten class. “All of these little kindergartners who had just seen the video stopped whatever they were doing and started doing the dance they had just learned,” says Westphal.
- “Dance or physical movement refreshes their brain,” he says. “They are better for their learning going forward. It’s not so much their brain getting a break, as getting activated again.”
“Project-based learning fits with a lot of the things I value for students,” he says. “Project-based learning and its tenets, a lot of those [qualities] fit pretty nicely with what meaningful phys ed stands for.”
One project-based learning activity at his current schools that has proved popular is asking students to create a game from scratch, using a ball of some kind, or based on “tag,” Westphal says.
“We frame it in our minds, and then it’s something we take out to the playground,” he says. “They’re making their rules as they try out the game with themselves or others — what’s working, what’s not, how do we need to adjust?”
Students next introduce the game to their friends during recess, at which point “it’s pretty functional,” Westphal says. “It makes our school environment better. They have more options of what to do and make better use of recess.”
K-12 Dive
