Project Learning That Works | A Conversation with John Taylor

I pop in on classes and the teacher's silent. It's lovely. There's an atmosphere of inquiry, of learning, maybe little conversations happening as they provide some mentor support. But it's not what happens so often that, you know, the lesson happens where the majority of talk time is the teacher's talk. So it really does break the mold on that. Hey, everyone. I'm Shane Leaning.

Welcome to Education Leaders, the chart-topping leadership podcast for school leaders just like you. As an organizational coach, I've helped thousands of leaders worldwide lead with greater confidence, make better decisions, and create winning teams. And on this show, we explore the strategies that are going to help you achieve your goals and transform your leadership. This episode is supported by the International Curriculum Association. Stay tuned to learn more.

Now, my guest this week is John Taylor. He is director of learning, teaching, and innovation at Cranley School. But really importantly for this chat, he is one of the principal architects of the extended project qualification. You may have heard of it, usually called the EPQ.

He has been on a 20 plus year journey developing this globally recognized qualification. And this conversation really highlights the power of project qualifications just like this. I'm not going to waste any more time. Let's jump straight in.

The EPQ, the Extended Project Qualification, is in the UK and it's available as well internationally. It's a qualification for learners, typically 16, 17, 18-year-olds, although it's not age restricted. And typically, they will take it alongside their other qualifications as an enrichment or enhancement. And in particular, it emphasizes autonomy.

It emphasizes learner choice. So it came about, it's about 20 years ago now in the UK, when we were nationally thinking about our qualifications framework. And I and a group of other educators had got involved in developing quite a small program, a pilot program, exploring science, ethics, philosophy. We're going back to sort of late 1990s, early 2000s.

So you'll remember, Shane, the time of Golly the sheep. What worries about cloning, genetics, was it all taking us? And you know, the whole set of really interesting questions in the science literacy, science citizenship field. So we were really keen to get these into the classroom.

So we built a course and ran it with a bunch of pilot schools. The course, as soon as you develop a course like that, you have to think about pedagogy, you have to think about assessment. And what we were really keen to do was first and foremost to have a course where the pedagogy was really open, where there was a chance for students to explore questions, debate, discuss, research, inquire. A real antidote to the, if I can sort of paraphrase the dominant mode of learning, it's just test preparation. You know, what do I need to know

for the tests? We really wanted to get away from that. So we wanted a course where you could just explore and inquire and discuss and debate and argue about these important questions. So that was the pedagogical element. And then, of course, the question arose about

how you're going to accredit it, how you're going to assess it. And this was a national qualification. So we assumed we'd have to have an exam. But we were told both by the government and the exam board that we were working with, actually, have you thought of assessing this to a project. And that was a really important moment in the whole journey. Because the key

thing, of course, is that once you get away from an exam, you're giving ownership back to the learners. They choose the questions. If they've got really excited about the implications of stem cells for medicine, rather than having to say, okay, now you've got to do an exam and answer some other questions, that can become the focus of their research. So that was really the starting point. And then there was a wider development in the UK looking at the whole curriculum structure.

And the government decided that they wanted all students to have the opportunity to do extended project work. And so this tiny little embryonic qualification that a group of us had got going was sort of caught up into this major national innovative program. And we widened it and we've widened it. So it's gone across different multimodal assessment opportunities, different pathways, you can now do presentations, performances, design, computer programming, AI, you name it.

And we've widened it across the age range as well. So it goes all the way down now to the key stage three stage, as well as post 16. So it's quite a journey, really quite fun. You must be incredibly proud and the teams that you've worked with on this, I wonder, you know, was there a moment where you just was like, Oh, crikey, this is getting a bit bigger than I realised. Yeah, it's been an interesting journey, because for quite a few years, we were,

I wouldn't say we were completely anonymous. I mean, we had a bit of press coverage and a bit of media interest, you know, anything new like this catches the headlines. But we were not in the spotlight to start with. And that actually was quite a good thing, because it meant that very quietly, we were able to work with teachers, get them trained up, get them confident. It's a

very different mode of learning to what they might be used to, you know, having to have inquiry in the classroom, teaching research skills, training in mentorship techniques. So it helped a lot that we weren't in the spotlight. And what's happened, I guess, is that we've quietly just grown, I guess around about 10 years ago, we started to notice that this was capturing more attention. And one of the key moments was when universities started to respond. I mean, they'd always been very positive towards EPQ, because they could see

that we had effectively developed, if you like, a university mode of learning adapted to the school aged student. And so they were going to be, you know, very warmly disposed towards that, because the pedagogy of inquiry is very much what students expected to use when they get to higher education. But from about just 10, 12 years ago, they started to respond by flexing university offers for entrance. So UCAS offers in the UK system is quite common now for students to be given a discount on their university offer grades, if they're doing well with an EPQ.

And that's the university's way of saying, look, we really value that. And obviously, that's a big driver then. So the qualification has grown. I mean, it was at one stage, the fastest growing qualification in the UK. We started, I guess, in about 2009,

about 1000 students, I think the numbers now nationally and across all the boards that are involved will be around about 50,000. And it's gone global as well with entries from international schools around the world. So yeah, it's a quiet start. And then in a beneficial way, it hasn't attracted too much publicity early on, we could just get on with it. But it's great

that it has now got that recognition. That's awesome. And what you say about when universities recognise it, I can see how it would start to snowball because that attractive effect. I mean, I work mainly with international schools who are obviously, you know, really working hard to get their students into university set any advantage that can be given like that becomes very attractive. So from what I'm hearing, that's the end point for a lot of schools. Is that right?

Exactly. So I guess there's a couple of things in that, Shane, I mean, one part of it is to do with the the skills, the the higher order thinking, the critical thinking, because of course, a project can go in any direction, we don't stipulate content, we give complete freedom of choice. And I've seen projects on more or less anything you can name, I've seen a project on it. But that means that the strength of the qualification lies then in the skills framework, which underpins it. And so we very deliberately teach these higher order skills, the project

management, the inquiry skills, the critical thinking, the presentation, where appropriate, the group work skills as well. And obviously, that skill set is valuable, both as a preparation for university study, and then on into employment. So the skills is one key foundation. But the other part is the learners own sense of themselves. And I think this is where the many hundreds now and

thousands of teachers who've been involved in mentoring EPQ students would concur that what you see is this incredible journey, where the learner realizes that they can actually take charge of the learning journey for themselves, and really become the expert in the room. And that's incredibly transformational and powerful for them in terms of their self identity as a learner, they literally by the end of the course, know more about what they've researched and anyone else their mentor included. And once the penny drops, and we asked them all to present their work at the end. And it's often that presentation which shows how expert they've become the confidence that comes with that. And the confidence in knowing this is transferable,

I've picked up this skill set. Now I know how to tackle a, you know, really meaningful, deep seated question with an extensive research base needed, I can take that skill set into the next challenge I'm going to face. And so there's been multiple research studies showing that learners who access this qualification and others, I mean, obviously, in the IB world, we have the extended essay, other coursework qualifications, use project based learning as part of vocational approach. But the research evidence shows quite clearly, that learners who do well in these contexts are better equipped for the next stage, they tend to go on to more successful outcomes in higher education. And there is also evidence that it improves their performance

simultaneously in their other qualification areas. And strikingly as well, this can be true, even for ones who don't necessarily access the higher end of the mark range, because something happens as they begin to realise how this type of learning works. And even if it's not, let's say, the first go isn't their best go, and they're not necessarily successful with their initial project, the internalisation of how you work in this way, and the learning that comes from that, it's very powerful. And that's something that they will take even if they don't necessarily get the grade they might have hoped to originally for. That's really exciting to hear from me.

I'm wondering, Jon, project based learning, for some, is a bit of a dirty word. I hadn't realised this for a long time, because I've been in the international school sector most of my career, where project based learning seems to be the general stance, or inquiry based learning, because of the IB and things like that. But I know, especially in the UK, let's say, there's kind of been this big movement that has kind of criticised project based learning. Have you been involved in any of those discussions? Because you just talked about the research base, which to

some might come across surprising. Yeah, that's a really good question, Shane. You're absolutely right. The term project and project based learning PBL, you know, it's a loaded term, and it carries baggage. And so I'm sometimes quite careful about what terminology I use,

and I'm introducing this. So for example, others have proposed alternative framing, such as research based learning, just to capture the idea that this is rigorous, you know, this is this is not just okay, you know, the kind of fun we had in the primary school when we were looking at the Egyptians or the Vikings, and we went away and made a model pyramid, lovely learning experience. But I can understand if you took that as your paradigm for learning, then it's going to be challenging to square that with the rigor that's needed if we're looking at the higher order skills. So I think sometimes it helps to articulate really carefully the language using language that shows exactly what we value in this. But the other point that for me has been important

is that I've always seen this as work within the qualification system. And again, this, you know, not everyone who supports PBL will agree with me on this. But I've always felt that if you're going to get the rigor and the depth and bluntly the end user stakeholder buy in, then you have to work within the system. So it was, you know, it was proposed to us, as I said at the start, that the qualification that we set up the philosophy of science program we set up should be an assessed qualification with a project outcome. That was actually put to us

as the right way to capture this within the system. And this view was not universal. I mean, you could take the opposing view that we should just give students these rich learning experiences and let them get to where they want. But I've always felt that if you're going to access the skills involved to be really successful with this kind of learning, there needs to be teaching, there needs to be accreditation and assessment, because that way you can then be really intentional and rigorous about the skills and about the levels of achievement.

Now, there are challenges associated with that, you know, because then it can turn into a race to get the top grade if you're not careful. But I think happily for the EPQ anyway, we've ended up effectively in a middle stakes status position. So EPQ, as I've mentioned, has got points. It's used in university entry decisions. But at the end of the day,

I would be the first to admit it's not the be-all and end-all. Most university offers still go through A levels or other qualifications like IB. The EPQ is an extra and an additional element. And that's worked really well for the program because it's meant it's taken seriously, but it's not so pressured that creativity gets squeezed out.

And I have to be honest, that was more by luck than judgment. If you'd asked me this 20 years ago, I'd have said, oh, you know, let's make it the central thing. That could have been bad for the qualification and for this mode of learning, if I'm honest. So I think we got lucky.

That is absolutely fascinating insight, because the fact that it is not that everything, it's a balanced approach, means that it can sit with its value, but also that you can take value from other parts of the curriculum, other qualifications, or other methods of demonstrating student learning. And I would be very interested to have seen in an alternate reality how it could have played out. And maybe there would have been other challenges that would have come about as part of that. This episode is supported by the International Curriculum Association. Now I've been

working with the ICA for quite a few years, but they've been around for 30 years and they've been around championing quality, unlocking potential and improving learning in international schools right around the world. I really, really love that at their core is a model for improving learning. And this model is focused on the learning experience and they have tons of great curriculum materials, PD resources, and even an accreditation pathway for schools just like yours. So if you're interested and I really do recommend you check them out, head over to internationalcurriculum.com.

One particular challenge that might come with EPQs is teachers delivering it. I mean, you've been through a journey, you've been through a journey when you first started. Is this a transition teachers who are actually teaching and supporting students with these open-ended projects? That sounds like quite a tricky thing to do.

It is. And I do think of it as a riding the bike type problem. There's a few wobbles, but it's all about confidence. And once you worked out how it works, you're off.

And I've seen this so many times over the years, I've been involved with the qualification. It's a very logical and intuitive model of learning. You start with your question, you progress through to explore, to research, then you frame your own response. And then you present the journey. I mean, in essence, it's incredibly simple.

And so the job of a trainer in this case is to really help teachers realize that they can do this, that they really can function as a mentor to assist on that journey. And the biggest challenge of all, of course, and I felt this myself in the early years, is what do you do when you're not a specialist? I'm a physics teacher, I'm not a biology specialist, and yet I'm talking about stem cells with students. How am I gonna know I'm going in the right direction? Or even more extreme, what happens when they say they want to go

on stage and start performing? I'm not a trained drama or performance specialist. And so what we say to teachers is, look, it's not your job to have the answers, it's your job just to ask the right questions and to internalize the logic of an inquiry journey, how to help them to go and access technical resources if they need access to them and gently hint that they may need to go and talk to the drama teacher about how to apply makeup or to set up the stage and the lights correctly. So time and time again, what I found is that once teachers grasp that basic points, that they are there as mentors, as you know, as the guide at the side, then that frees them up and gives them enormous confidence. And the way I do it is we have

literally hundreds of students each year here at Cranley in the UK where I teach, and we have significant numbers as well in our international schools working in this way. And the model I've used is just to provide really extensive resourcing, primarily directed towards the learner so that they've got access to guidance at all stages of the journey. But obviously all of those resources are also available for the mentors. So if they're coming in new, they're just one step ahead on their journey perhaps.

But learning as they go, it's enormously reassuring to a mentor if they're coming into this for the first time to know that they can actually access good quality resources that will help where they feel perhaps that their own knowledge might be a bit incomplete, at least to start with. And I imagine once you get into it, it also becomes quite an exciting thing that you look forward to those lessons, right? Because it's different. Yeah, it's exactly so. It's a very refreshing change. I quite enjoy the fact

that I pop in on classes. And the teacher's silent. It's lovely. There's an atmosphere of inquiry, of learning, maybe little conversations happening as they provide some mentor support.

But it's not what happens so often that the lesson happens where the majority of talk time is the teacher's talk. So it really does break the mold on that. Can I ask then, because one thing I've heard is it can be quite useful for students working in a second language, which many of the listeners of this podcast are in schools around the world, often schools that are delivered in English, but many of their students are actually English's additional language speakers, multilingual learners. Is it useful for second language speakers?

Yeah, I think it is. And I think the key to this is what you've raised there, Shane, is one instance of a wider feature, if you like, of this mode of learning, which is how do you allow for differentiation? If we think about the complex needs and various starting points of learners, how do we allow for genuine differentiation? And the answer is, of course, that it's in the learner choice, because they can access a question or a challenge, practical goal that they're trying to work towards. They can access something that will be adapted

both to their starting point in terms of their background knowledge, but also to any particular conditions and limitations they may feel if they are having to work in a second language. So to make that more concrete, one of the options within the project qualification is not to do a big essay, but to create something, an artifact or a performance, something which is designed with an end user in mind or with an audience in mind. And what happens if your students go down that pathway, there is a certain amount of documentation that's needed, a certain amount of written support, but it's smaller, significantly smaller for students who are pursuing creative outcomes. So, you know, suppose I was advising a learner working in a second language, then an obvious thing to do would be to say, well, have you considered working, let's say, towards some artwork or an artifact outcome? Obviously, you're still going

to have to work in, it is an English language qualification, there will need to be assessment evidence produced in that language. But, you know, there's much smaller volume of it. And there are different ways as well that you can document your thinking processes, you know, sketchbooks, notebooks, audio notes, little V-logs, lots of options are there, as long as you're capturing the journey, as well as what you've produced at the end. But if writing 6,000 or so words is going to be a big, big challenge, then go for something where writing is less, and there's more scope for creative exploration in a different mode.

These different modalities that you can present in, I'm now just thinking, that sounds like an absolute nightmare to assess and to ensure equity between the different modes that people do. Like, where is it that an EPQ gets assessed on? You've mentioned the journey, like, how are we able to make judgments on things that are so different? There's a good question. So, well, the first point is implicit in what you just said,

that we aren't just assessing on outcomes, but we are also assessing on processes. And in fact, we are strongly assessing on processes. And that's another feature of the qualification, that you might work towards, I don't know, stage production, and it may not go that well on the night. But when you look into the different sets of assessment criteria that underpin the qualification, the weight of the assessment is actually on the journey. And so how you get to your end point, it really does count.

Then how does that get assessed? Well, at the highest level, there's a fourfold structure within the qualification. There are different ways in which this gets expressed in different versions, but at the highest level, all learners have to manage their own time, they have to manage the project process, thinking about their overall goals and objectives, thinking about the resources that they're going to use. They have to make use of appropriate resources, gathering information, if it's practical and creative, really looking at the creative genre, immersing themselves in what practitioners do. This can be creative

research as well as documentary research. A learner might do some initial sketches inspired by another artist, partly as a way of exploring creatively themselves, but also as part of research and learning how this type of genre works. So there's a planning phase, there's a research phase, and then there's a developmental phase, which is all about the learner's own response to that research process. The key to the developmental phase is we encourage learners to go beyond simple presentation of data or research, but to actually get involved at the higher level of critical thinking, argument analysis, or creative exploration of alternative possibilities. Obviously then, there's a connection between

what they've done at the start of the journey when they've set their original objectives. It's going to work much better for a learner if their initial question or challenge has got an open-ended element to it to allow for these different pathways that they can explore. In the assessment models, that is rewarded as a key element in the development part. Finally, all learners have to review their project, evaluate their own performance, there's some criteria for that. A part of that evaluation, as I've mentioned, is a presentation. Again,

there are some criteria for essentially how well they can narrate their project, both what they've achieved and the journey they've been on. Different modes of presentation are possible, but there has to be some communication to an audience at the end of the process. That makes a lot of sense. It's multifaceted. I wonder then, given we've got you on this

podcast, I have to ask you on your thoughts on the future because everyone's talking about the future of education at the minute. There are many reasons why we talk about the future, whether it be politics and the involvement or whether it be technology and artificial intelligence. Everyone's thinking about where is education going. Your mind must be buzzing with thoughts on where project-based learning goes in the future. Yes, indeed. It's a big topic

at the moment. There's lots of thought and work going on in this space. I think it's exciting, but it's also challenging. It's genuinely challenging. I mean, the excitement is implicit

in what we just said that over the last few years, we've learned a lot about how this potentially quite radical pedagogy can be implemented at scale successfully as part of the normal learning journey of tens of thousands of learners every year. That's the exciting bit. For all the reasons we've discussed, we know the value of that. The challenge is that we're only three, four years downstream from a worldwide pandemic.

I'm sure the participants on your podcast will come every week with a story about another challenge that schools are facing, whether that's to do with teacher workloads, student mental health, managing the challenge of social media, et cetera, et cetera. It's a complex space. It's a crowded space. I've actually coined a new word recently, so I'll give it its first airing. Minnovation.

I love it. Okay. Minnovation is a solution for us to go for, and I think it's linked to what we're saying about EPQ. What do I mean by minnovation? We want to be radical and innovative, but we

haven't got the bandwidth for big, system-wide, uproot everything and start again, type overhauls. We need to move forward. How do you do it? The answer is to take incremental steps.

Bluntly, you might think, oh, well, you're not really being innovative, but I don't think that's true, you see, because I think looking back on the little project course that a bunch of us started 25 or so years back, that was minivative at the time. It was literally a handful of schools and a few hundred students, and now it's gone global. I think small things can grow in the right conditions, and you just have to take one step at a time. The great thing about being minivative in this sense is that it deals with the bandwidth problem and the workload problem and the burnout type challenges, because if, let's say, a national government tomorrow says, okay, let everyone stop the exams, stop the exams, let's just all do projects.

I would say, hang on a minute, I'm an advocate of this type of learning. I'd be going, hold on, are you sure? It's a big change. Whereas if they were to say, look, there's things like EPQ, it's not just EPQ, there's the other types of project-based learning exist, why don't we do more of that? Why don't we just provide a bit of time in the week to encourage schools and

colleges to provide this to more of their learners? I would say, that's great, let's do that. Beyond that, we could then think about, okay, can we spread it to other year groups? Can we do more to make it linked between schools and employers or extra agencies that come into schools with provision of extra specialist support working with particular groups?

That's a really fertile space for this type of learning, and I've seen some fantastic projects in recent years where this type of learning has flourished in that setting. Okay, so minivation, just take a step, take another step, and bit by bit, before you know it, school will look quite different to maybe in 10, 15 years time. But no one will ever have noticed that we've done it, you see. In a way, that will be the best change of all because it would be organic, and it will be rooted, and it will be grounded. If you go for the system-wide

revolution, the problem is, A, you cause a lot of churn, and B, you're just open to someone else turning around and churning back in the other direction. For my money, that's the party. And the developments to EPQ, as I said, is because I hope that pathways will now converge on this as an example of that methodology, so that whatever happens with the curriculum conversation, and it's certainly very live at the moment in the UK, things like EPQ that already exist, that are already in place, that are proven, that are tried and tested, but are susceptible to expansion and growth, I hope that they're going to get more support. Not necessarily everyone must do it type of way, just in a, oh look, this is valuable, we could do more of this with the right kind of settings that could work really well.

This conversation has been just one of my absolute favorites. I love the power of minivation, those incremental innovations rather than system-wide overhaul. There were so many different takeaways from this episode, but I think a few things that come to mind for me, for school leaders, is to think about how do you give students more ownership over their learning journey? How can you look for small steps towards project-based learning, rather than wholesale quick changes? And when you're doing that, how are you thinking about supporting teacher

development in mentorship and inquiry skills? Because these are super important. Overall, I felt this conversation really demonstrated that project-based learning can be rigorous, can be scalable, and there's good evidence that these kind of approaches can really prepare students well for university and beyond. You can find out more about the EPQ and John's work using the links in the show notes. Education Leaders is hosted by me, Shane Leaning,

thanks to the show editor, Pete McGill, and the original music by Guillerme Silver. And thank you so, so much for tuning in today. If we don't speak before, as ever, I'll see you here next week. If you want to learn more about the brilliant work from the International Curriculum Association, head to internationalcurriculum.com.