Making Meaning Through Projects

When you think about school projects, what comes to your mind?  For many people, projects are associated with arts and crafts, usually the kind that require lots and lots of parent help.  These projects can be fun (for some people), but they aren’t necessarily very meaningful.  

So, what makes a project meaningful for students, particularly when those students are neurodiverse?

Multiple Modalities

Different students learn in different ways, and this is especially true for neurodiverse students.  That’s why meaningful projects are multi-modal.  We don’t just read something and then move on.  At Helix, our projects integrate reading, building, making, experimenting, and whenever possible, real-world experiences.  

To learn about the rise of the railroads, students mapped the trans-continental railroad, completed an engineering project to understand train wheel design, read books about trains, and then visited a historic railroad to experience a train-ride in person!  These multiple modalities allow us to engage all of our students in ways that work for each of them, and give students the chance to make connections between different activities.

Student Choice

The very best projects give students a sense of agency.  At Helix, project proposals are designed around student interests, and students vote to choose which projects we undertake.  Students also get to make choices along the way.  As we learned about wheels and axles, students designed their own wheeled carts, using materials in many different ways to create many very different designs. As we wrap up our unit, students can choose from various materials to design their own "vehicle of the future."

Open-Ended Questions

The best projects start with great questions.  We aren’t just asking ourselves “When were trains invented?”  Instead, we ask ourselves “How have innovations in transportation changed the world?”  These open-ended questions drive our discussions and tie our learning together.  They also connect our projects to the real-world.  Reciting the completion date of the trans-continental railroad may never be useful to our students, but they will no doubt have to navigate the disruptions caused to society by new technologies.  Asking open-ended questions allows us to use our projects as a framework for understanding things that are happening in the real world.  

Helix students find our projects meaningful because they get to make choices about their learning, they get to learn in different ways, and they explore open-ended, real-world questions.