Home Inspiration and news Five steps to a class or school project

Five steps to a class or school project

Tips

13 February 2023

Imagine you want to work out a project with your class on food waste. Or one of the pupils complains about litter in the playground and you decide to tackle the problem with the school. How do you get started? Our project designer helps you to be action-oriented, to explore a sustainability issue with your pupils and come up with actions. Five steps to more impact? Yes, you can!

To step 1

Why action-oriented work?

When faced with major societal challenges, pupils can sometimes feel powerless, as they have little or no influence on what happens in the political and social spheres. As a teacher or school, you can use action-oriented work to ensure that pupils get a grip on the (small) world around them. So that they realise: I have impact.

Note: action-oriented work is more than being able to perform action. The pupil's freedom of choice and thought process are the starting points. So, as a teacher, you do not propose a challenge or possible actions yourself.

Step 1 - Hook

Encourage your pupils to get started on the theme. For example, are you working around litter in the playground? Give your pupils some tablets, all go to the playground and let the pupils take pictures of the litter. Then discuss the photos in class. This way, you encourage your pupils to think about the sustainability issue and their involvement grows .

Step 2 - Research

Explore the different facets of the sustainability issue: context, causes, consequences and possible perspectives. You can use our work formats for this. Have the pupils acquired these general insights? Then examine which elements of the exploratory research attract the pupils' attention, and why. This will give you a good idea of your pupils' frame of reference: their values, norms, feelings and interests. Next, try to formulate a collective and achievable sustainability challenge with the class. For example, "How could we ensure that our playground stays clean?"

Step 3 - Ideas for action

Using brainstorming techniques and self-selected criteria , pupils come up with ideas for actions to tackle the sustainability challenge. The more ideas pupils come up with, the more interesting elements they can put together. And the higher quality the final idea will also be.

After brainstorming, pupils choose an idea to develop and implement. The visual thinking tool 'In the Rose' can help you do this. The pupils investigate whether their action corresponds to their frame of reference. And whether the action would have the intended effect.
Important: learners can also decide not to take action (yet). That choice is also valuable if the pupils have reflected on it.

Step 4 - Action

Pupils prepare and perform their action. As a teacher, you can take a mainly supportive role in this.

Step 5 - Reflection

In the final step, pupils reflect on the effectiveness of their action, how they collaborated with each other and what they learned during the process. They also reflect on their action competence: am I confident in my own ability to bring about change in society?

Published on 13 February 2023

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