Three departments — science, history and modern languages — will replace one traditional teaching unit with a term-long project this year, in a pilot of project-based learning approved by the staff council before the summer.
Instead of a sequence of lessons ending in a test, students in the pilot units will spend the term producing something: a documented experiment series in science, a researched local-history exhibition in history, and a translated and subtitled short film in languages. Assessment is spread across milestones rather than concentrated in a final exam.
“The question we’re testing is not whether projects are more fun — they are — but whether the knowledge holds up,” said science department head Dr. Elias Brandt. “Each pilot unit has a parallel class taught traditionally, and both groups sit the same assessment at the end of the year.”
What students in the pilot say
It’s harder than a normal unit, honestly. You can’t cram a project the night before. But I could explain our experiment to anyone right now, and I couldn’t say that about last year’s units.
Ana Sokolova, junior, science pilot
Some students are more cautious. Several told MU Student News they worry group projects reward organisation more than understanding, and that one unmotivated group member can drag a grade. Brandt said milestone assessments are individual precisely for that reason.
Evaluation in spring
The staff council will compare assessment results between pilot and parallel classes in spring, alongside student and teacher surveys. Expansion to more departments depends on that review. “If the pilot classes learn as much and remember more, the case makes itself,” Brandt said.
What it demands of teachers
Less discussed is what the pilot asks of staff. Each pilot unit required roughly double the preparation time of a traditional one, Brandt acknowledged, mostly in designing milestones that can be assessed individually and consistently. The three departments shared planning sessions through the summer, and their materials — rubrics, milestone templates, project briefs — are stored in a common folder that any department joining a future expansion would inherit. “If this scales, it scales because the second cohort of teachers doesn’t start from zero,” Brandt said.
