Center for Project-Based Learning Launches Faculty Fellowship Program

“If someone tells a student that they are not smart, that they are not capable of working on an important part of a project, what do you do as faculty? How should you help the whole group understand the importance of giving peers opportunities to do certain work?” she says. “I know faculty want to make things better for students, but often they are not sure how to approach sensitive topics like this in a helpful way.”

The focus of Vedogbeton’s fellowship project stems from her ongoing research into the experiences of Black students at WPI. The situations she plans to address in the toolkit, though, will be relevant for students from all walks of life, including women, LGBTQ students, BIPOC students, and even introverts who feel unable to express themselves in a team setting.

“I’m going to look at multiple populations that have issues on campus, because we know that biases affect everyone,” she says.

Addressing Team-Based Challenges

Likewise, at some point during their college years, everyone writes. And Davis has noticed that almost everyone struggles with writing—and revising—group assignments. That’s why during this fellowship he plans to create a set of sequential exercises that target common writing problems and navigate students through the process of revising their team members’ writing, starting with big-picture narrative changes and ending with detailed line editing.

“It will include a simple, but targeted, checklist of things that students can do both in their own writing and when putting things together as a team,” says Davis. “My goal is to have the group writing and revising process be more valuable so that by the time students submit the final assignment, it is one step farther along and we as faculty can elevate our own comments and give more helpful feedback.”

Davis is cautious of not reinventing the wheel, noting that many helpful writing guides already exist. Writing and revising as a team provides some unique challenges, though, and those are the details on which Davis plans to focus. “The real art is going to be balancing simplicity and complexity in a way that will actually be useful for students working as a group,” he says.

The very concept of working as a group is at the core of Levey’s fellowship project. When students returned to campus after more than a year and half of remote learning and isolation during COVID, Levey noticed that many hadn’t encountered open-ended projects requiring them to work together.

“When I asked them to do things in a team, they didn’t know how to divide and conquer and then mesh their individual interdependent parts. After COVID, some students thought ‘teamwork’ meant sitting around the table and doing all the work together. In other teams each member designed part of the system but then the team struggled to integrate these into the whole. In both scenarios students felt overwhelmed because I had given them enough work for each person to do a piece and put those pieces together,” says Levey. “I realized that I needed to teach them how to divide an assignment into distinct tasks, decide who does what, and then put it together and check each other’s work.”

During this fellowship Levey plans to document the ways she has guided students through bumps in the road while they work on open-ended team projects. “I’d like to develop a generalized toolkit for other faculty who want to design or redesign a capstone-level course. I’ll create modules that they can pick and choose from so they don’t have to do an entire course design from scratch,” she says.

And just as diversity, equity, and inclusion will be central in both Bakermans’ and Vedogbeton’s projects, so, too, will Levey spell out guidelines that are relevant to and effective for a range of students.

Inviting More People to the Table

In fact, diversity writ large is what Wobbe is most excited about as this fellowship program becomes a reality.

“We’re expanding our pool of people and resources and deepening our collective knowledge,” she says, noting that in addition to each fellow producing a resource that the CPBL can share with future clients, each will also serve over the summer as a coach during either the Institute on Project-Based Learning or the Collaborative for Project-Based Learning.

While faculty members at WPI and beyond will inevitably learn and grow as a result, Wobbe points out that students—and the global community—are the ultimate beneficiaries.

“The world of higher ed is moving toward more experiential learning for students, and project-based learning is an effective model for that. Not only can it be a real lever for equity in college learning, but it also engages students in work with communities and has evident impacts beyond the university,” says Wobbe.

As a result of this new fellowship program, then, ever more people—in academia and beyond—will be nourished by WPI’s special sauce.