Project Design in Education

Innovator: Şahin İdin, https://www.linkedin.com/in/associate-professor-sahin-idil-83b59656 

Organisation: TED UNIVERSITY, Ankara

Setting of the practice: face to face

Description of the practice:

This practise is carried out in a course titled “Project Design in Education” with pre-service teachers attending the school of education, who are studying in mathematics teaching, classroom teaching, psychological advice and guidance and pre-school teaching at TED University, Ankara, Türkiye. Within the scope of the course, which lasts for 14 weeks, students study in a learning environment where they are very active and the teacher’s role is as an open-ended guide. Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to ability to create a project idea in their groups. Once, students are asked to identify a problem situation that they might encounter in daily life related to education and finally to produce a solution with a project to design this problem. The project idea might be produced based on international projects such as Erasmus Plus (KA1, KA2, KA3 etc.). In line with this the total duration of the project should be at least one year and at most three years. During this process, the majority of participants face some difficulties such as defining the problem, determining the budget of their project proposal. It is a great difficulty for students who have received theoretical education throughout their education life, to present a problem situation and to propose a solution to the problem situation they have created. Gaining the necessary information about project production to the students is carried out in the first eight weeks of the course through argumentation, research-questioning and project-based learning approaches. Students are asked to divide in groups that can consist of three people. Students create their own questions based on the project idea and then start to investigate it by using scientific process skills. While creating the project proposals students benefit from some methods and techniques such as gamification, brain storming, empathy map, 5E model, creative drama. They apply 21st century skills to be able to use those mentioned methods. Here, the innovative situation is trying to ensure that the teacher frees the students in the classroom environment (using peer learning and collaborative working techniques) and asks the teacher when they have any questions, and the teacher tries to find answers to the questions of guiding the students as an open-ended guide. Students are given five weeks to prepare their problem situations and accordingly their projects in the classroom environment during the course. After they prepare their projects, students present their projects on the project proposal form. In the project proposal form, there are several sections such as problem status and sub-problems, method, budget, condensation activities, expected outputs, sustainability, and the questions created under these sections should be answered. After 12 weeks of training, students send their projects to the teacher, and after receiving the necessary feedback, they finalize their projects. Finally, the groups present their projects to the whole class and give their final form by answering the questions posed by the audience students and discussing their deficiencies, if any, in the classroom.