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Project Based Learning

Investigating and Responding

Project Based Learning is a student-centered approach that encourages children to make meaningful connections across content areas. Teachers act as facilitators, guiding students to identify a question or real-world problem. Student interest and decision-making drives the learning.

Project Based Learning Process

Each project begins with a question or problem. Using 21st century skills like collaboration, creativity, critical thinking, and problem solving. By starting with an essential question, children work together to develop a solution to the problem using evidence to support their claim. Students create a plan and begin the process of researching and solving the problem.

After reaching a conclusion or solution, students then communicate the solutions and demonstrate their knowledge by using various forms of media to create a product or presentation for a real audience.

Finally, taking time to reflect, individually and as a group, and to share feelings and experiences is an important piece to this process. Allowing students to discuss what worked well, what needs change, and to share ideas can lead to new questions and projects.

Project Based Learning allows for student choice, decision making, collaboration, and self-reflection. When children are interested in what they are doing and are able to use their areas of strength, they achieve at a higher level.

Examples

Grade 3

During the unit on Community, we work on a project inspired by the book Roxaboxen by Alice McLerran. Students research types of communities and discuss and debate what makes a community successful, including things like diversity, working together, needs versus wants. As a culminating activity, students use what they have learned to create, build, and write about their own model community. 

Grade 4

Students studying inventors chose to create inventions for the “classroom of the future.” They brainstormed ideas of classroom gadgets, furniture, and learning tools that would help them learn better and/or be more comfortable in the classroom.  

Each student chose an invention idea of personal interest and researched whether something similar already existed, how it might be created, whether it would be helpful. They designed prototypes of their new invention and wrote a descriptive advertisements to “sell” their product to others.  

The Harley School

1981 Clover Street
Rochester, NY 14618
(585) 442-1770

©2023 The Harley School

Our Upper School is filled with formal and informal opportunities for students to take on leadership roles. Whether following passions or learning new skills, student-driven opportunities take many shapes. 

  • Independent study: one trimester, full year, and multi-year projects have included automating our solar chimneys, coding handmade musical instruments, or developing a class on financial literacy for underserved high school students.
  • Serving on student council: 
  • STEM: Climate curriculum program, biomimicry program, NASA Hunch program

At Harley, our students learn how to evaluate social systems in order to identify complex problems in society through a lens of social justice. They take a hands-on approach to working for a fair, equitable society by researching, exploring and evaluating different perspectives, and offering solutions—both theoretical and practical.

Our faculty integrate social justice into our broader curriculum to assist students in gaining a foundational knowledge about what makes a democracy function. By gaining skills in ideating supportive pathways they become more exposed and experienced to how communities can undergo healing and restorative actions.

Students may create independent studies with supervising teachers throughout their Upper School experience or, during Grade 12, they can design Capstone projects—intensive collaborations with Harley faculty and off-campus mentors—involving rigorous academic study and culminating in public presentations. They are empowered to create their own curriculum, set goals, and work on time management skills in order to accomplish their objectives.

Independent Studies run the gamut from The Psychology of Sports to Furniture Design to The Neuroimaging of Alzheimer’s Disease. Capstones, meanwhile, are as diverse as the students who pursue them: Fictional Rochester, Autobiographical Art, Biomimicry Education, Organic Fuel, and Rochester Refugees. 

Indicative of Upper School curiosity and creativity, pursuits such as these distinguish our graduates in college. Through deep dives of this sort, Harley students master more than speaking, writing, and computing: they learn to communicate, advocate, collaborate, organize, listen, and empathize. 

About

Academics

Key Programming

Enrollment

Letter from the Head of School

Letter from the Editor

Features

Central Work that Matters: DEI

Harley Black Alumni Network

Climate Crisis Curriculum

Citizen Scientists

Joy Moss: Storytelling Roots

In Every Issue

Class Notes

Diane Donniger Award

By the Numbers

From the Archives

What’s (Who’s) New at Harley

Divisional Highlights

Alumni Profile: Vandebroek

Alumni Profiles: Keller

HAC Athletics

2021 Lives of Great Purpose Awards

1000 Words

Commencement 2022

Reunion 2022

In Memoriam

Retirements and Fond Farewells

Letter from the Head of School

Letter from the Editor

Features

Central Work that Matters

Affinity Group Forms

Climate Crisis Curriculum

Citizen Scientists

Joy Moss: Storytelling Roots

In Every Issue

Class Notes

Diane Donniger Award

By the Numbers

From the Archives

What’s (Who’s) New at Harley

Divisional Highlights

Alumni Profile: Vandebroek

Alumni Profiles: Keller

HAC Athletics

2021 Lives of Great Purpose Awards

1000 Words

Commencement 2022

Reunion 2022

In Memoriam

Retirements and Fond Farewells