Cathedral Catholic Academy will change its method of teaching in the next school year to “project-based learning,” an innovative approach to education which the school describes as “student-centered,” “hands on,” “experiential” and “beyond traditional textbooks and worksheets.”
Located on Nuuanu Avenue, the kindergarten through eighth grade parish school for the Cathedral of Our Lady of Peace made the announcement in an April 4 news release.
By engaging in classroom projects, students will be challenged with “in-depth, open-ended questions designed to promote inquiry-based problem solving and critical thinking skills,” the release said.
Principal Michael Paekukui said that project-based learning has been catching on on the Mainland, but that its use in Hawaii has so far been limited to a few public charter schools. Cathedral will be the first Catholic project-based school in Hawaii, he said.
Paekukui said the decision to move in this direction came after discussions with the Cathedral school board and superintendent of Catholic schools Michael Rockers.
The principal said the project will be “aligned to common core standards.” He said that instruction in math, language, science, social studies, the arts, “even religion” will be incorporated within the projects.
He said that while school projects are not new to teaching, new elements in project-based learning include a digital component, a daily assessment of the student’s progress, and self-pacing by the student.
Students will be involved in choosing their projects. Teachers will instruct the students in specific skills that apply to the projects, which generally last 4-8 weeks.
Parents will be invited to contribute to the projects by providing “real-world applications based on their professional experiences.”
Rockers said the project-based initiative is “very exciting” and “simple to initiate.”
It will involve a “lot of individualized computer-based instruction,” he said.
He said that digital links and videos are a “much richer source of information” than traditional textbooks.
Paekukui said he hopes the new educational method will attract enough students to reverse the school’s declining enrollment.
The principal said the school, which now has 107 students, has been losing about 20 students a year over the past couple of years. If the trend continues, he said, Cathedral would only have 80 students next year. However, 93 have already signed for the upcoming semester, which is a “pretty good spot” to be in this early, he said.
Tuition for Cathedral Catholic Academy is $7,050 a year.
The new program will require fewer teachers, Paekukui said. The school now has nine teachers and an aide. That number will drop to “five or six” if enrollment is at 100 next year, the principal said, or perhaps to four teachers if the school has only 80 students.
Paekukui also said the teacher’s role will change completely and that he has considered calling them “facilitators of learning.”
Besides fewer teachers, the school provided a list of other things that would “likely change” with the introduction of project-based learning. They include:
- More hands-on learning
- More learning trips
- More collaborative work with students of various ages and other schools
- Professional collaborations with parents and community organizations
- Multi-grade classrooms (K-1, 2-3, 4-5, 6-7, 7-8) to better facilitate learning
- Daily on-line student assessments available to parents
- No textbooks (except religion and Wordly Wise, a vocabulary program)
For more information, visit the school’s website at: http://teacherweb.com/HI/CathedralCatholicAcademy/HomePage.
