 Okay, so tell me when you're ready. We're good now. We're good? It's going? Yeah. Okay. All right. Hi. I'm Janie Beer-Laton, and I am the Professional Development Coordinator for the Western Massachusetts Writing Project. And I'm here today with Grace Dubin, who is our Western Massachusetts Writing Project intern. And she also is a senior here at UMass. And the reason that she's here for this interview this afternoon is because she went to a school that was designed around project-based learning. So I thought it might be wonderful for teachers who are thinking about project-based learning in their classrooms to hear about it from a student's point of view. And so the school that I went to is Francis W. Parker Charter, essential school. It's quite the name. It's out in Devons, Massachusetts, and the school is completely and entirely project-based learning. And it's really cool. With project-based, it's more about developing the skills to do something over the entire course of the semester. So that's why the projects are based off of these skills. It doesn't matter so much the topic that they're covering, because you can cover a wide variety of topics and still orient them towards how is this impacting your listening, how is this impacting how you read and how you write and how you're presenting information and gathering information. So I actually have examples coming on top of it. So this is my division one portfolio. And so basically a portfolio is your culminating demonstration of like, hey, these are all the projects that I've done in the past two years. But for this particular project, I did, we had to pick something that we could be activists about, right? So I wanted to do shark finning because my sister was always super into sharks and shark finning and had a bunch of shirts and was really about it. So I was like, I don't want to be like her. So yeah, basically we started off picking a topic that was activist driven. And so I initially, we were doing a research project on it. So this is, it might be backwards, but this is my activism research. And you can see it's pretty, you know, why is this in your portfolio? What is this for? When you get to the upper levels, it's less structured than this. And that's about, you know, developing the knowledge base of, you know, what does this look like? How can I kind of become familiar with it? And so there's a list of, these are potential topics you could pick from that are pretty general, right? So like women's rights, animals, world issues. And so you pick one and you just kind of roll with it. So you list things, you know, you go over what primary sources are. You just pretty much approach research from a very, very first level, level, I guess. And then you work with the teachers, you know, you go over how do you develop research questions, right? How do you look for research? We did a lot of, let's go to the library as a class and like look at these tools, look at these resources. What makes this a primary source? What doesn't make this a primary source? Yeah. And then so for that project, we just developed our own research questions. And then, you know, researched them. By the end of it, you had, you had to create a bibliography as well, which was all still new for a seventh grader, but it worked out pretty well. And so then from there, we did oral, just kidding, we did artistic expression. And so what this means is, you know, some format of artistic expression, right? So you could do like a painting, you could do a song, a dance. I chose poetry. So that basically meant that I created a haiku, a sonnet, and like visual poetry to kind of talk about the research that I had accumulated for shark fitting, right? So we did that. And then for the last project, I had an oral presentation about the poetry that I had written based off of the research that I had done. So they all accumulated off of you, off of each other. So I know that because of project-based learning, I was able to be a much more independent worker and thinker in general throughout, you know, whatever life may throw at me. There's always a good way of, I've been taught to kind of take a step back, review the situation that I'm in and approach it from there. Project-based learning are able to take the skills that they've learned and apply them to real life, you know? They're able to say, hey, I want to have a larger purpose. I want to give back to this. I want to take the things that I've learned and apply them to a variety of contexts. Well, it felt that the teachers, it seemed as though the teachers were assessing more of your process and your progress more than just the actual product at the end. So we were really heavy into reflection and revision. So basically, anytime you wanted to revise anything ever, you could, doesn't matter if it was five times deep and the teacher was so sick of looking at it, they still want you to be able to say, like, hey, I'm content with this piece, I'm happy with this piece. And similarly, because of that reflection, reflection was emphasized throughout all grade levels, right? So even as a senior, with that big senior project, you'd still have to do layers upon layers of reflection, like what am I learning? How can I improve? How can I grow? Those were especially emphasized in the gateway projects and like year end projects and presentations a lot of the time. And with each accompanied piece of work, you also needed to have a level of revision or, sorry, reflection written about it. And I think that that really helped teachers kind of understand, you know, like this is how far my student has come. This is what their understanding is. This is how they're functioning in this format, which I think was a really crucial part of every student's success. And one unit where we specifically looked at vernal pools, because there was a big vernal pool on the hill outside of our school. And so, you know, a couple of days a week, we traverse up there and get the whole gang together. And, you know, you'd like take notes, field notes about all the things that you saw. And then you'd go back and do research on, you know, why is this animal here? What does the vernal pool mean? Like what is the impact of the transition between, oh, it's there, it's gone. How are these animals impacted? And in that class, we actually found out that there was a kind of salamander there that, you know, was borderline endangered and had a lot of trouble getting from vernal pool to, you know, another source of water or another environment where they, you know, thrive. So as a community, you know, we went out a couple of nights while they were traversing – this is the second time he's been word traverse – like moving to a different area. And, you know, we had all the flashlights and you're stopping cars that they could get by really trying to develop – you know, it worked to develop community outside of the school for a greater good. I think up until a few years ago, you had to have a community feedback where, you know, one person built and created their own greenhouse and grew food for school lunches and for the community outside of our school. Other people, you know, you donate to – they would go volunteer loaves and fishes or, you know, go volunteer at various organizations in our community, which was really cool.