Project Week Provides Real-Life Application of Lessons Learned in the Classroom

Project Week replaces traditional assessments and affords faculty the opportunity to implement lessons not possible within the confines of a one-hour class. Over the course of the week, classes meet just once during a single two-and-a-half-hour block, with students typically attending up to two classes per day.

Faculty use the extended class time to conduct in-person, collaborative projects — such as tapping campus’s maple trees or a hands-on lesson in cybersecurity held at the nearby Dartmouth College Engineering and Computer Science Center. All students are required to participate in the projects and must submit brief reflections following their completion.

“Project Week is a wonderful time on campus,” Academic Dean Tasheana Dukuly Sanchez-Moran said. “The excitement on campus helped enhance the creativity and engagement of our students, who fully embraced the opportunity to further their learning through these projects. From ninth-grade English students debating whether artificial intelligence can threaten or complement what it means to be human, to senior psychology students using their knowledge to create and present their own wellness centers, our students were thinking critically and engaging with the world around them.”

Throughout the week, students left the classroom and applied a trimester’s worth of lessons to thought-provoking projects. For students in Tessa Cassidy’s Latin I & II classes, this meant preparing a traditional Roman dinner — including a 2,000-year-old pizza recipe — in the newly renovated Howe-Dewdney residence hall, while tying in translated passages of mythology. In Elysia Burroughs’s AP Environmental Studies class, students conducted an agricultural land use case study by examining a local plot of land and developing unique plans for a productive agricultural business.

Another popular avenue for faculty are class trips that wouldn’t be feasible during a typical one-hour block. Nearby Dartmouth College hosted numerous KUA students throughout the week, with classes like Intro to Ceramics, AP U.S. History, and African American Studies, all making the short trip to the Hanover, N.H., campus. In fact, the entire ninth-grade class kicked off Project Week with a trip to Dartmouth’s Hood Museum to put a real-life spin on lessons of museology and provenance of art and objects.