Project-Based Learning

Students with their projects

What is Project-Based Learning?

At HDCH, educators and students strive to create memorable and meaningful learning experiences. These experiences are imaginative, innovative, and rooted in our essential Biblical identity. They become memorable as they involve real work, problems, and people. 

We engage in "Deeper Learning" - learning that combines thinking, multiple skills and subjects, collaboration, and experiences that go beyond the classroom walls through partnerships with organizations, experts, and community members.

Christian Deeper Learning is defined as "People of God's Story engaged in real work that forms self and shapes the world." (Beerens et al., 2017). HDCH students and teachers have been actively engaging in real work through Project Based Learning, a teaching method that uses a project as the central context for learning while making partnerships and community connections.

Students creating little library

Project-Based Learning Process

The process starts with a driving question and has students (People of God's Story) engage in a real-world problem or task (real work). All of the learning, lessons, and assignments (forms self) continue to focus on the project to answer the driving question.

Once the project is completed, students present and celebrate their learning in a variety of ways: sharing with community partners, presenting findings, hosting an event or tournament, creating a product, opening a gallery, doing a performance, etc (shapes the world). 

While working on projects, students are diving deeply into the subject matter,  and are also developing character, refining the HDCH Habits of a Graduate (Compassion, Creativity, Resilience, Competence, and Reflection), and seeing their place in God's story. 

Project-Based Learning allows students to refine and use their new knowledge and skills as they practice living out our mission statement - "Cultivating character through learning for a life of service to God."