School-Style vs. Project Learning

When I first started learning to use the video editor Adobe Premiere Pro, I bought Adobe's "Classroom in a Book" to learn the program.

The book came with files to practice with. Each chapter showed different functions of the program. I would follow the instructions step by step to complete the practice project and theoretically learn the concepts.

By chapter 6, I was bored to tears.

To this day, I think I started five "Classroom in a Book" books for various Adobe products. I finished zero of them.

But then, during the summer of 2020 in the heat of the pandemic, I decided to do a video challenge. Couldn't do much, so may as well keep things interesting. I decided to create 30 videos in 30 days.

The goal of each day was to try to improve by just 1%.

I couldn't use a book for this. Instead, I would think about what I wanted the result to look like for the day's video. Then, I would look up YouTube tutorials to learn just what I needed for that day's project.

It was grueling, but I completed the 30 days.

And I learned more about Adobe Premiere Pro than I would have ever learned from Classroom in a Book. Or an actual classroom, for that matter.

The experience has made me think more and more about school-style learning versus learning through projects.

School has been pretty much the same for decades.

1. Learn a bunch of facts.
2. Spit it out on a test.
3. Never use 97% of the information that was "learned" again.
4. Rinse and repeat.

But learning through projects achieves so much more. By gaining knowledge to achieve a meaningful outcome, students learn:

1. Why the subject matters.
2. How it applies to the real world.
3. How it can be useful to them in the future.

Not to mention, students retain more by learning through doing.

So, if you're not sure if your kids are learning something in school, give them a project to do with it. Come back and let us know what happens.