Learning by Doing

Across The Tatnall School campus, a fluid style of instruction is encouraging students of all ages to work collaboratively and think about themselves and the world around them in more nuanced ways.

It’s called project-based learning, and it centers, as the name implies, on a project assigned to a class, multiple classes, or even multiple grades. The nature of the projects can vary, but they all share some important characteristics. First, they require students to use a medley of skills, often some combination of reading, writing, math, science, research, and sometimes technology and engineering.

“Disciplines are traditionally taught in silos,” says Heather Brooks, the Early Childhood/Lower School Innovation and STEM Coordinator and Lower School Media Specialist and Computer Science teacher. “This is an opportunity to teach them together and have the students apply what they learn so that they can see how the different disciplines are connected, which more closely mirrors real-life problem-solving.”

Second, the projects tend to be relatively open-ended. Students are given a task or a question. How they interpret or approach it is up to them. Not even the teachers overseeing these projects necessarily know where they’re going to end up. Making them even more unpredictable, students are often asked to work together. It’s natural to assume that in such an arrangement, students would lean on their strengths. And in many instances, they do. But the four teachers interviewed for this article also shared numerous examples of students coming out of their shell when they discovered a new ability or talent while simply trying something out of their comfort zone.

“I am always surprised at who turns out to be an excellent coder or robot builder,” Brooks says. “I see a lot of kids who maybe don’t excel at the conventional subjects, but they’re great at spatial relations. And they end up building robots like it’s second nature to them.”

Rick Neidig, who teaches a class in the Upper School called Foundations of Technical Theater and is the technical director of the Laird Performing Arts Center, says a tool rack serves as a happy reminder of the student who crafted it. He came into his own working on a set for a Tatnall production.

“He was a quiet kid. He was there, people knew of him, but you didn’t really see people interact with him,” Neidig says. “But then he took off [on this project] and, suddenly, by the end of the term, everybody was like, “Man, Jason’s great.”

“Whenever students have agency, I find my engagement in class rises because they’re able to make a choice and decide what they’re interested in,” says Adam Gross, the World Language Department Chair and a Middle and Upper School Latin teacher. “With project-based learning, they’re still going to learn all the key concepts I want them to learn, but they’re going to do it in a way that allows them to explore their own interest.”

They also experience the three core Tatnall School values curiosity, perseverance, and citizenship –which are built into every project-based lesson.

“Asking questions, especially if they’re openended, it engages the students in a way that makes them want to explore and be more curious about the project or the world around them, in general,” says Linda Champagne, who was a member of the committee that established the values last summer.

Within this article, Brooks, Neidig, Gross, and Champagne share their recent experiences with project-based learning and discuss how their students have benefitted from it.

Constructing a whole other world in a term Neidig, half-jokingly, says that project-based learning was on display in his workshop well before it was formally introduced to the Tatnall School curricula. His students construct the sets for the school’s productions in the first two terms. In the third, they design and build all sorts of things around the school that have been requested by other teachers. In recent years, they erected a bird blind, a compost shed, and a greenhouse.

“I start them off as if they’d never seen a tool,” Neidig says. “It’s literally ‘this is a hammer’ and ‘this is a screwdriver.’ We progress through all the tools and saws in the first week. At the end of the week, there’s a test on tool use and safety. And then we start building.”

For this year’s first term, that meant crafting six different facades and a 16-foot turntable for the musical “Little Shop of Horrors.” In all, about 60 Upper School students had a hand in the effort.

“These kids, they built all of it,” Neidig says. “I’m there showing them how to do it, but the students build everything.”

Along the way, they also learn that the show must go on, no matter what.

“When they get into a situation where they’re saying, ‘There’s too much to do. We’re not going to be able to make it,’ I say, ‘Well, let’s figure out how we can make it.’

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I push them to come up with their own solutions. I tell them, ‘Look, you know the tools. How would you build this?’” Neidig says. “That’s how perseverance happens in our class, just making sure you complete things by a timetable and push through the few times that we have to push through.”

In addition to the real-life deadline, Neidig says another distinguishing quality of his class is the way students support other students. On the eve of “Little Shop of Horrors,” he walked his set designers out to centerstage and asked them to admire their work. Then he told them to consider who they made it for.

From the craftspeople behind the sets to the technical people offstage to the performers in the spotlight, everyone in a Tatnall production is a student and, Neidig says, they’re all in it together.

Reimagining Halloween from different perspectives

When, last year, organizers of the FIRST LEGO League announced they wouldn’t be holding an in-person competition, Brooks pivoted to another interactive learning opportunity, The Haunted Funhouse. It was embraced so enthusiastically by students, she kept it going this year, even with the LEGO League’s return.

For Halloween, Lower School students converted the Family Room into a multimedia haunted house, of sorts.

“Every grade had a hand in creating some part of it, but they didn’t see the whole thing until it was completed,” Brooks says. “Some classes wrote poetry and some made creepy feel boxes.”

The fifth graders were responsible for the bulk of the work. They began brainstorming shortly after the start of school in September. They decorated the space with art, designed motorized haunted toys with LEGO bricks and gears, and programmed spooky games on the computers.

Once it was all done, the Lower School students were invited to experience the funhouse with their families. A space where they gather every weekday morning had been transformed into an unrecognizable maze of (slightly) scary rooms and even tunnels, all of it evidence of lessons learned.

Meanwhile, the fifth graders were also beginning to work on their LEGO League projects. The league is a global robotics program that helps students “grow their critical thinking, coding, and design skills through hands-on STEM learning and robotics.” For Tatnall’s fifth graders, it culminates in a friendly regional competition where student teams build and program a LEGO robot that navigates the missions of a game.

“One of the things we do here at Tatnall that I think is different from any other school in Delaware is that LEGO League is a class,” says Brooks, who oversees the program at Tatnall. “It’s built into our STEM block. It’s not an afterschool club. Nor is it something that only kids who think they’re into robots do. So, you’ll see kids who wouldn’t typically sign up for this lots of kids.”

Unearthing new dimensions of a lost language

Breathing new life into Latin for young students is a daunting task. But Gross came up with an idea last year that had the potential to do just that for Tatnall’s Middle School students. He dug trenches on campus then filled them with donated odds and ends leftover materials from the Operations Department, ceramic sculptures (some broken, some whole) from the Art Department. He even built his own features, such as partial walls. Then he buried it all and waited for this year’s sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade Latin classes to start their new archaeology unit.

That day came with the arrival of October. Every day that month, the Middle School Latin students headed outside and carefully excavated Gross’s trenches. When someone discovered an edge or an entire fragment,

Gross says everyone eagerly volunteered ideas as to what it may be.

“They were all in, wondering about what they had found and what they were going to find as they kept digging,” he says.

At the start, few of the students knew how to use the tools they were provided, and none had any experience with excavating an archaeology site, a meticulous process that requires patience and precision.

“We had a whole class in each trench, and they had to work together to figure out, ‘OK, how do we want to excavate this?’ ‘Where do we want to target today?’” Gross says. “They couldn’t just dig a pit on one side. They had to dig tiers. And they had to talk to each other constantly about how they were going to work together to do that.

“So, there were a lot of great moments where students would say, ‘We need to move areas and try something new.’ Or, ‘Use this tool. It’s going to work well for what you’re excavating,” he says. “There was a lot of give and take. And everybody did their part for the group to achieve success.”

The students finished excavating during the first week of November. During the second term, each student will have the chance to analyze a recovered “artifact” and develop a theory as to what it may be. Gross has created a Google site that will ultimately become a kind of virtual museum, where images of the artifacts will be displayed alongside their analyses.

In creating, learning comes to life

Each April, the Early Childhood students participate in the National Association for the Education of Young Children’s Week of the Young Child. The overarching theme varies a little from year to year, but the concept essentially remains the same: to engage students in “handson, collaborative activities encouraging movement and healthy lifestyles through music, food, and art.”

Instructors are free to come up with their own activities that fall within those parameters. At The Tatnall School, each day of the week is given a different sub-theme: Musical Monday, Tasty Tuesday, Work-Together Wednesday, Artsy Thursday, and Family Friday.

On a recent Musical Monday, Linda Champagne, the Assistant Early Childhood Head and Developmental Gym and Music teacher, invited children to form a percussion ensemble and play a piece of music. They’ve also selected different instruments and told a story through music.

“So they’re involved in creating and making the project come to life,” Champagne says.

For Tasty Tuesday, the students have learned where the ingredients of a taco originate from and what the contents of a taco are. They’ve also made their own fruit kabobs.

On Work-Together Wednesday, students were paired up and instructed to collaborate on a massive drawing. Large sheets of white paper were laid out on the floor. Then one student laid on a skateboard on their belly, clutching crayons or markers, while their partner held their ankles and steered them around the room.

On Artsy Thursday, they’ve created their own little museum, crafting the pieces that comprise it and arranging the displays.

Parents are invited to help their child share a favorite story on Family Friday. Champagne and her fellow teachers also use the opportunity to highlight the diversity of families, asking them to share their different traditions.

Champagne says the satisfaction and joy she derives from project-based learning and, specifically, the Week of the Young Child comes from never knowing, exactly, where an activity is going to lead. “You put something out there,” she says, “but they create it, they own it.”

For that reason, each lesson concludes with a period of reflection, so that both teachers and students can better understand how they arrived where they did and discuss what they learned in the process.

4. Students plan, design, and bring to life their sets for every performing arts production.

5. Caleb Starks ’25 and Jude Maycole ’25 work together on their robotics structure.

6. Tatnall Lower School students collaborate on a science lab exploring magnets and motors.

7. Early Childhood students create largescale structures in their Wonderlab space.