At Portfolio School, we utilize Project-Based Learning to fully immerse and engage our students in their learning. One of the most beneficial processes we use is the collaborative fusion of cross-disciplinary projects that span core academic disciplines, thematic unit work, and fundamental special skills such as computational thinking, art, and making.

The Cross Disciplinary Approach

This collaborative process allows our educators to engage their students with intentionally difficult and larger-than-life concepts since these concepts will be broken down into tangible, bite-size pieces that the learner is able to individually digest and process. With these pieces in place, the learner is then able to create meaningful connections between the disciplines, and apply critical thinking skills to curate a complex and intricate solution or answer to the unit’s essential questions. 

Overall, the cross-disciplinary approach of our Origins unit allowed students to not only learn about various subjects but also apply that knowledge in a meaningful and engaging way. It is through this type of immersive, project-based learning that we at Portfolio School aim to cultivate a love of learning and prepare our students for success in the real world.

One such example would be the work done throughout our second unit in the 2021-2022 school year: Origins. Throughout this unit, our learners were tasked with reflecting on the following essential questions: ”How can we use what we learn about the past to make connections to things we use every day?” “How can we use that knowledge to create and innovate?”

The final deliverable that the learners were responsible for was a fully functioning app that showcased a country of their choosing. In order to present the apps for our unit exhibition, the students built and curated a replica of the earth, in which they planted their country's flag with a QR code link on the back, navigating the viewer directly to the app. While the app was our final project for the unit, each and every teacher and subject had an influence on both its content and creation.

Foundational Knowledge through Core Academics

An important aspect of our unit work is framing. This is Lead Classroom teacher and Head of Pedagogy, Katie Cheek, dressed in character, reading origin myths out loud to the group.

To cultivate their apps, the Portfolio students needed to lean on the knowledge they had built from each of the academic disciplines. They read mythology and informational texts that were relevant to their country of choice. From this investigation, they were responsible for writing a research paper that centered around specific priority content, including culture, climate, and innovations. Older students were also responsible for crafting a myth of their own, utilizing creative writing skills and mentor texts to create a piece that not only flowed stylistically with their Origin country but met the rigorous requirements and standards of this specific type of literature. 

One student read a myth from his culture to the group. This was a personal book the learner brought in from home to share with his peers.

Math was instrumental in helping learners contextualize the enormous scale on which the unit was based, and Montessori manipulatives such as the bead frame, allowed learners to visualize the population in a tangible and approachable way. The math discipline also translated into a physical project connection for our learners, as they used scale to help them correctly craft the sizes of each continent on our globe display.

Involving the Experts and Artists

In order to accurately portray the countries, students utilized a projector on the globe structure once the globe had settled. 

The Globe display was handcrafted by the students over several sessions, with careful and intentional use of papier mache, drawing out each country carefully and methodically, through to lessons on color mixing to curate the oceanic and earth tones, to finally adding the finishing touches with textures and foliage.

Students collaborate on the main base coat of the globe.

And what good is creating the earth if you don’t understand what it is made of? The learners dug into this, quite literally, as they explored geography, geology, and fossils through hands-on scientific experiments and model-making. This even included the fabrication of coins through the smelting process in Making and Design.

The creation of molds in preparation for the smelted materials.

With all of this foundational knowledge and skill-building under their belts, the Portfolio students were ready to design, code, and launch an app based on their counties. We began the design process by learning about the wireframing process, aka the “first draft” of a software application. 

The Final Project

During the research process, our learners were taught how to properly find and identify trusted online resources. Using this methodology, they downloaded images to create a vision board used to generate a color palette that evoked a similar aesthetic to the country they had chosen to represent. They cultivated this palette in the form of hexadecimal codes that were utilized in the software applications used to generate the graphic design (Canva) and code (AppLab). 

Following an inviting engagement and reflection session on design and app aesthetics, the learners took to Canva using research, aesthetic inspiration, and hexadecimal codes to craft splash screens, menu screens, buttons, and background screens to be used as the primary media library for their apps. After assembling all of these original resources, the learners crafted their applications using a mix of the coding language (block-based and text-based) and Javascript on AppLab. 

The results were beautifully coded and presented pieces of writing, glimpses of science, history, and math, all indexed on a dazzling, artistic recreation of the very earth they had spent the last few months deeply immersed in studying. This cross-disciplinary methodology led to not only a deeper understanding of the unit’s content but also a multi-modal approach that allowed the learners to explore a plethora of mediums, contexts, and framing that encouraged exploration, experimentation, and risk-taking within both their core academic and specialty lessons.