Considering the experience of project work carried out so far, express your personal considerations. Resort to your experience as well as your colleagues’ contributions and teacher’s input External Link in the SSIS workshops to generate a document about project work that may support project work implementation. Wiki is an interesting tool for shared reflection and project work. You can also attach images and linksExternal Link you consider significant to enrich critical debate.:

Project work: What is important nowadays for our students is to know in advance the route they are going to take and the way they will be able to go along that route. Project works become a good way to make students take part in the plan they are going to be the protagonists of. The project work is an approach which implies a perfect cooperation between teachers and students. In this way, the teacher becomes a source of information, a resource of innovation, an invisible guide which will mould autonomuos students. It is the teacher that before preparing a project, must be the first observer of the surrounding reality, the first to analyse and value the atmosphere, needs and secrets in his/her own class. Only then, on the basis of the problems/or/necessities he/she has detected, the teacher will be able to propose a project and negotiate its content and steps together with his/her own students. He will be the invisible manager who will make of his students the true protagonists of the situation they are going to solve/create. At this point, the students know the route and start feeling less frightened and as a consequence more confident. In a way, the teacher is the first subject of the learning-by-doing process, because through his/her observation of the class, he/she learns how to cope with the situation. This is a good example the students must be aware of: the teacher is no more the one who imposes his/her own ideas and methods, but he/she becomes the one who teaches after learning from his/her own class/students’ situation. It is the first important step towards a fruitful cooperation between learners and teachers. The gap becomes imperceptible to the students: their teacher seems to be one of them,! And there is the trick! The teacher is apparently one of them, but in reality his/her own responsibility is higher than ever, because it is now that the invisible puppeteer shows his/her best professional competence: guiding wisely without being perceived. That means making the students as autonomous as possible: they are guided but they are not aware of that, so they feel all the work has been truly done by themselves and that makes them become more confident in their own personal abilities. This is the greatness of the new method of teaching and learning and in this sense project works help a lot, because every single step must be carefully built not only by one person ( the teacher), but through the collaboration of every student in the class. The way a good project is built generates a lot of advantages: as we all know, first of all it should start from a true problem and as a consequence the tasks should be authentic so the students can connect them to their own reality; that makes them more motivated because they feel school is no more an isolated spot but it is part of the real world they live in every day. In addition, the right management of the class ( group work for example) promotes autonomous learning through cooperation with the others. This modality of comparing the different ideas in the group makes the students develop their ability to consider one problem from different points of view without any prejudice and so it helps them to add new ideas comparing them with the old ones. It is not just a walk through the wood but it becomes a targeted walk in order to know how the wood is made. That is a different way of learning and approaching reality, a way to discover reality so to find possible solutions to problems. The student becomes in this way an active participant in the process of learning and not only a pot to be filled with others’ ideas. As far as I am concerned, I have never had the chance to take part in projects but during our courses I have learnt to perceive their potential and appreciate the wide range of motivating innovations they are carriers of. What I hope is to find in the future active colleagues ready to share the “ burden” of such an experience, ready to shake the mould off and sportingly undertake the most complicated way to catch our difficult but, though boasters, very fragile students who desperately need wise guides which make them feel protagonists, always!