Overview

School 21 in England infuses the arts into a project-based learning model, emphasizing personalized learning and redrafting multiple revisions in the process of iteration. This London-based public school teaches students from Reception through Year 11 (approximately pre-K to 11th grade in U.S.), and will ultimately serve through Year 13.

At the secondary level (Years 7 through 11), each Project Based Learning unit is co-taught by a core academic subject teacher and an arts teacher. School 21 believes that integrating the arts and PBL is a natural fit.

“I would argue that the arts is project-based learning,” says Emily Crowhurst, a music teacher. “In every music lesson, whether it’s a project lesson or what you might deem a typical lesson, there are project-based learning techniques going on naturally in the way that students are constantly critiquing and rehearsing what they’re creating; and they’re always working towards an end project that will have an authentic audience.”

“My PBL process is one that mirrors the art form,” adds Ahmet Ahmet, a drama teacher. “For me, project-based learning is putting on a performance.”

Every student takes one co-curricular, arts-infused PBL course per 12- to 15-week term. “When we were doing immersive theatre,” recalls Matilda, a Year 9 student, “it gave me a chance to put myself in the shoes of the people at the time and to experience history through their eyes. The history livens up the drama, and the drama livens up the history.”

Related Article:How to Infuse the Arts Into Core Curriculum (and Why It Matters)

How It’s Done

When Planning Your Project, Ask for Feedback

At School 21, teachers plan their project in the term prior to teaching it. For feedback, they put their proposal through thetuning protocol— a group critique among staff — multiple times. “The first tuning is an ideas tuning — from an early, nascent form, getting feedback on initial ideas and overall design,” says Jess Hughes, an English teacher. “Later tunings are on the detailed plan and are used to interrogate practicalities, iron out concerns, and ensure academic rigour.”

In the planning stages, her Romeo and Juliet project went through three tunings, taking a total of 80 minutes. In her post “Tuning Protocol: A Framework for Personalized Professional Development,” she explains how to set up your tuning protocol norms and the six steps of the protocol itself. You can also follow School 21’sProject Planning Structure guide(PDF) to plan your project from the first to last tuning.

Use a PBL Project Planning Checklist

Joe Pardoe, a history teacher, and Ahmet, a drama teacher, were paired to create an arts-infused PBL project. Together, they planned how they could teach about both immersive theater and the French and Russian Revolutions. Below is School 21’sPBL project planning checklistdetailing these teachers’ plans.

1. Essential Question:What question or problem will drive the project?How do we use immersive theater — where the audience becomes part of the play — to tell a story within the French or Russian Revolution?

2. Authentic Audience and Exhibition of Beautiful Work:What is the vision? Who is it for? Why are they learning it?Students will perform their play to a public audience, including the local history association, immersive theater actors and producers, and 200 other community members.

3. End product:What is being created?The end products will be a three- to five-minute immersive theater performance and an essay.

4. Significant content:Is curriculum content properly covered?Students will focus on weaknesses within the leadership, emerging ideas during that time, and an issue — economic, political, or social — that led to the revolution. They’ll also have to incorporate specific drama techniques, and focus on a particular event, like the storming of the Bastille.

5. Rigorous assessment (including the opportunities for 1:1s with all students):How will you ensure the children have learned and made progress?Students will be assessed with non-graded multiple choice tests at the beginning of most lessons, one-on-one and small group conversations each lesson, weekly essay workshops and play critiques by their peers, and their final performance. Students will also be assessed by theater professionals and a historian who will watch their play and spend about 15 to 20 minutes with them in a question-and-answer session.

6. Timelines and transparency:Has the flow of the project been considered? How will you share this with students?The immersive play and essay will be broken down into smaller deliverables with weekly critiques and deadlines. On day one, students will get adesign briefoutlining their final product, their authentic audience, the content they need to cover, and their deadlines throughout the process.

7. Student choice:What aspects of the project will allow students to express themselves creatively?Students will choose which revolution they will focus on — either the French or Russian Revolution. They’ll also choose who they’ll group with for their play, how their play unfolds (and what they need to learn to create an accurate and strong script and performance), and the focus of their essay — as long as it’s related to either revolution.

8. Grounding text:What will students read in order to develop their understanding?Over the holidays, students will watch a documentary, read at least part of a textbook, and read a scene from a play. They’ll have their textbook to work with throughout the course of the term, and they’ll also watch speeches, documentaries, and listen to immersive theater experts speak in class.

Give Your Students a Design Brief

Students meet three times a week for 100-minute class periods. On day one, both teachers launch the project with adesign brief— outlining what the final product will be, what they need to include in it, all of the deadlines from start to finish, and who their audience will be at exhibit night.

“From day one, we say, ‘This is your end product. It is going to happen — the exhibition — on this date and time.’ We give our students the complete brief so they know from day one what they should be doing,” explains Pardoe. This allows students to take ownership and direction over their own learning, and plan how to meet deadlines at their own pace.

Choose Your Teaching Style

How the content and class are taught varies with the teaching style of those collaborating. Some teachers choose to co-teach every class, while others split the students in two groups, teach the subjects separately, and bring everyone back together for key co-taught classes. In either case, teachers integrate elements of their own discipline with their co-teacher’s, with their students’ end products ultimately reflecting both content areas.

Crowhurst and Heather Birtwistle (music and science) split their class into two and rotate them. During one week, students will go twice to music and once to science. The following week, they’ll have two science classes and one music class. Throughout the term, they also

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have periods where all students come together to receive the design brief, for whole-class critiques or rehearsals, and during flexible sessions where students work on their products and ask for specific support. This combined class is creating multiple end products: dance music tracks, a Cymatics music video (showing the physicality of sound), and short videos explaining the learning behind their products.

“We’ve got certain lessons that are fixed,” says Birtwistle. “In science, they absolutely need to know the laws of reflection. So we’d go to the science lab and we would have a standard science lesson, and next time, we’d have a standard lesson about refraction, but then the next lesson would be a more flexible period spending time creating their dance track, editing their music video, or filming themselves explaining their learning.”

Meanwhile, Pardoe and Ahmet co-teach each history and drama class. “For me, a true fusion is two practitioners with a large group, doing it together. That’s my style,” says Ahmet. “Students might write an essay for 20 minutes, have a critique session, write some of their script, and then the last ten minutes they’ll do a run-through. It’s one big project, rather than separate lessons.”

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