Project-based learning is a structure that transforms teaching from "teachers telling" to "students doing." More specifically, project-based learning can be defined as:

• Engaging learning experiences that involve students in complex, real world projects through which they develop and apply skills and knowledge.
• A strategy that recognizes that significant learning taps students' inherent drive to learn, capability to do important work, and need to be taken seriously.
• Learning in which curricular outcomes can be identified up-front, but in which the outcomes of the student's learning process are neither predetermined nor fully predictable.
• Learning that requires students to draw from many information disciplines in order to solve problems.
• Experiences through which students learn to manage and allocate resources such as time and materials.

The two projects described below are actual examples of interdisciplinary projects that were successfully used in a classroom.

A class of elementary students was very interested in pets. Students began by writing down their ideas, reviewing them and refining them. Each student wrote and illustrated a story about pets; these were revised, proofread and published in a class book. Beginning activities included making pet folders for storing work, reading pet ads, measuring and weighing pet supplies, making a pet dictionary and making bar graphs of their favorite pets. The students wrote about pets in their daily journal, and asked open-ended questions.

Parents and community members began to visit the classroom, bringing pets. Students took notes, drew sketches, measured, and examined the pets. As the project continued, students began making suggestions for turning the classroom into a pet store. The class discussed this idea and came up with very creative suggestions. Each child decided upon one animal that they wanted to study and made notes in their journal about their plans and supplies they would need, then they were grouped with others who wanted to study the same pet. All of the groups made some type of artistic rendition of their animals, then wrote books about them, or created a game, some even made a movie.

Throughout the project students continued to write in their journals, interview people about pets, and ask questions of one another.

The final culmination of the project was the "Grand Opening" of their pet store attended by 73 people who circulated the "store" looking at the animals, books, pamphlets, artifacts, graphs, notes, sketches, paintings, diagrams, posters, and graphs, while the video of the entire project was playing on the TV in the front of the room.

Water Pollution Project

This project was a collaborative effort between high school students in Brazil and 3rd through 6th grade students in San Jose, California. The students studied the ecological concerns related to water pollution in order to bring about a cultural and political understanding between the Brazilian and American students involved in this project.

The following is the scenario given to the students at the start of the project: