Rohan Woods School-PROJECT:Success Age 2-Grade 6

Discover a new approach to elementary Education --Discover the PROJECT APPROACH! Before incorporating the Project Approach into our curriculum, Rohan Woods faculty and staff visited and studied at Duke School in Durham, North Carolina – a leader in Project Learning. A few years ago, Rohan Woods implemented Project into our classrooms with an approach utilizing the best practices. Rohan Woods School uses Project in class to provide in-depth investigations that challenge students to apply skills, knowledge, and strategies from different content areas as they do authentic research, analyze data, think deeply about problems and draw conclusions. As projects evolve, students build on their unique interests and talents and become experts in a particular area of the project topic. Through project work students not only learn new concepts and content, they develop the competencies essential for future learning: the ability to formulate essential questions, conduct research both independently and collaboratively, evaluate and synthesize results, present those results to others, and reflect on the strengths of their work and the ways they can improve. Project provides a platform for engaging students with challenging academics that put the emphasis on student involvement. This approach also encourages leadership skill development in teamwork, planning and presentation. Project Approach Model Rohan Woods School bases its project work on the Project Approach model developed by Lilian Katz and Sylvia Chard. Katz and Chard define a project as an in-depth investigation of a real-world topic worthy of the children’s attention and effort (Chard, 1998). The Project Approach projects follow four distinct stages: PROJECT APPROACH STAGE 1: PRELIMINARY PLANNING STAGE 2: BEGINNING A PROJECT STAGE 3: DEVELOPING A PROJECT STAGE 4: CONCLUDING A PROJECT