The Project Approach is a way of teaching young children through in-depth investigations of real topics worth learning about, usually lasting several weeks, in which children ask their own questions, do fieldwork, consult experts and represent what they learn. It was set out most influentially by Lilian Katz and Sylvia Chard in Engaging Children’s Minds: The Project Approach (1989), building on a much older tradition that runs from John Dewey and William Heard Kilpatrick to the British infant schools of the 1960s. A project typically moves through three phases: beginning, investigation and conclusion.
Project-based learning is now a phrase used widely, often loosely. This article is for teachers and pedagogical leads who want the history and the structure clearly: where the idea came from, what makes a project different from a theme or a unit, how the three phases work with preschool children, and how to judge whether a topic is worth a project at all.
A short history of projects in education
Project work in early childhood has deep roots. The milestones below are the ones most often referred to in professional literature.
- Late nineteenth century — John Dewey opens his Laboratory School at the University of Chicago in 1896, where children learn through practical occupations such as cooking, weaving and carpentry, connected to questions about how people live.
- 1918 — William Heard Kilpatrick, a colleague of Dewey at Teachers College, Columbia University, publishes an essay titled The Project Method, describing learning organised around purposeful activities chosen and carried out by students.
- 1960s–1970s — Many British infant schools adopt an integrated day, with topic work and children moving between activities; visiting educators from North America study these classrooms closely.
- 1989 — Lilian Katz and Sylvia Chard publish Engaging Children’s Minds: The Project Approach, giving the approach a clear structure for early childhood and primary teachers; later editions follow.
- 1990s onward — Interest in Reggio Emilia, where long projects are central, strengthens the place of projects in early-years practice internationally, and the term emergent curriculum becomes common.
The lineage matters because it explains what the approach is for. Dewey and Kilpatrick saw purposeful activity as the core of education, not an enrichment. Katz and Chard did not suggest that projects should be the whole curriculum; they described projects as one important part of it, alongside systematic instruction and spontaneous play. That balance is often forgotten when schools claim to be fully project-based.
Lilian Katz and the life of the mind
Lilian Katz, a professor at the University of Illinois and a long-standing figure in early-childhood education, argued that early education often concentrates on academic skills and on activities that keep children busy, while neglecting what she called the intellectual dispositions: the tendency to make sense of experience, to analyse, hypothesise, predict and seek explanations. She distinguished between academic goals, such as learning letters and numbers, and intellectual goals, such as reasoning and making sense of things.
Projects, in her view, are one of the best ways to strengthen these intellectual dispositions, because they ask children to investigate something real over time and to use their minds in the process. Katz was also concerned with dispositions more broadly, warning that drilling skills too early could damage the disposition to use them. A child who learns to read but comes to dislike reading has gained a skill and lost something more important.
This concern connects closely with current research on children’s motivation and executive function. It also explains why the Project Approach puts so much weight on topic choice: a topic must engage children’s minds, not just occupy their hands.
Projects, themes and units: what is the difference?
Teachers often use these terms interchangeably. They describe different ways of organising learning, and the difference shows up in who asks the questions and how long the work lasts.
| Theme | Unit | Project | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who chooses | Teacher, often in advance for the year | Teacher or curriculum designers | Teacher and children together, often from children’s interests |
| Organising idea | A broad topic, e.g. animals | A planned sequence of lessons with set objectives | Questions children want to investigate |
| Duration | Usually a week or two | Fixed by the plan | As long as interest and inquiry continue, often weeks |
| Children’s role | Participate in planned activities | Complete lessons | Ask questions, do fieldwork, represent findings |
| End point | Calendar moves on | Assessment of objectives | Sharing findings, often with an audience |
Themes and units are not bad. A school needs some planned structure and systematic teaching, and a theme can be a good starting point from which a project grows. The distinction is useful because it helps teams be honest about what they are doing. Calling a two-day craft sequence a project does not make it one.
Phase one: beginning a project
A project begins when a topic is identified, either from a shared experience, such as a visit to a market, or from a strong interest children show, or from a teacher’s proposal that children take up enthusiastically. Katz and Chard suggest that teachers first draw a topic web themselves, mapping what they know about the topic and the possible directions an investigation could take, so they can judge whether it is rich enough.
With children, the beginning phase is about finding out what they already know and what they want to know. Children share their experiences and current understanding, through conversation, drawings and play. Teachers record this, often as a web or a list of questions in children’s words, which becomes the starting point for the investigation. A group investigating the neighbourhood market might ask where the fish come from, why some vegetables are kept in water, how the sellers know the price, and how the goods get to the market so early.
This phase is also where children represent their initial ideas, for example by drawing what they think the inside of the market looks like. These first drawings become valuable later, when children can compare them with what they draw after their investigation.
Phase two: investigation and fieldwork
The middle phase is the heart of the project. Children investigate their questions through direct experience: fieldwork visits, observations, interviews with experts, examination of real objects, and their own experiments. In the market project, children might visit the market with a few prepared questions, observe how fish are kept, sketch the stalls, interview a seller with help from a teacher, and bring back objects such as a bamboo basket or a scale to examine closely.
Back in the classroom, children represent what they have learned in many forms: detailed observational drawings, models, role-play areas built to recreate the market, charts of findings made together with the teacher, and stories or books dictated to adults. Representation is not a decorative step; it is how children consolidate understanding and discover gaps in it, which often leads to new questions and a second visit.
Adults play an active role throughout. They help children plan fieldwork, prepare questions, arrange for experts, provide materials, and record children’s words. They also introduce skills when they are needed, such as counting items sold, writing a list of questions or measuring a stall, which makes academic skills purposeful rather than abstract.
Phase three: concluding and sharing
A project ends when children’s interest has been satisfied and their questions largely answered, or when interest fades. Ending well matters. In the concluding phase, children review what they have learned, compare their current understanding with their initial ideas, and share their findings with others, such as another class, their families or the experts who helped them.
Sharing might take the form of a guided tour of the role-play market, a display of drawings and models with children explaining them, a book made by the class, or a short presentation. The audience gives children a reason to organise and articulate their learning, and family members often gain a new appreciation of how much their children have understood.
Teachers also reflect, looking back over documentation to consider what children learned, which questions were most productive, and what they would do differently. This reflection improves future projects and helps teams build a shared repertoire of topics that work well with their children and their community.
Choosing a topic worth investigating
Close to children’s experience. The best topics relate to things children can see, touch and investigate directly, such as the market, the bus, the school kitchen, trees in the courtyard or the construction site down the street. Distant topics, such as dinosaurs or outer space, can spark interest but offer little fieldwork.
Rich enough to sustain inquiry. A good topic has many dimensions to explore: people, objects, processes and places. A teacher’s topic web shows quickly whether there is enough to investigate for several weeks.
Opportunities to use skills. Topics that invite counting, measuring, drawing, writing lists, building and talking let children apply developing skills for real purposes.
Available resources and experts. Projects thrive when children can visit sites, handle real objects and talk with people who work there. Teams should check access before committing to a topic.
Cultural relevance. In Vietnam, topics such as the wet market, rice, motorbikes, street food, Mid-Autumn lanterns or the preparations for Tet connect with children’s lives and families. They also bring the home language and family knowledge into the classroom naturally.
Common mistakes when teams start doing projects
The first mistake is choosing topics that offer nothing to investigate first-hand. A project on the ocean in a city far from the sea, or on dinosaurs, quickly turns into looking at pictures and making crafts. Such topics can be wonderful for stories and play, but they rarely sustain the fieldwork and close observation that make a project different from a theme.
The second is the teacher answering every question. When children ask where the fish come from, the temptation is to explain. In a project, the better response is to ask how they might find out, and then to help them go and see, ask someone or test an idea. Answers discovered this way are remembered and understood far better.
The third is treating the final display as the goal. Teams sometimes spend the last week producing a polished exhibition, with adults doing much of the work. The sharing phase should show children’s real understanding, including drawings that are imperfect and theories that changed. Families are usually more moved by a child explaining how her idea changed than by a perfect model.
The fourth is running every group through the same project at the same time. Projects work best with groups whose interest is genuine; parallel groups may pursue different topics, and teachers learn from comparing them.
Projects in a blended curriculum
Project-based learning is one of the four approaches the Global Nexus framework draws on, alongside Reggio Emilia, Montessori and STEAM, inside the Vietnamese national programme. In practice, projects provide the connective structure where the other approaches meet: Reggio-inspired documentation records the investigation, STEAM shapes the experiments, and Montessori-style practical life skills appear in the work of cooking, building and caring for materials.
Projects also suit bilingual classrooms. Fieldwork in the local community happens mostly in Vietnamese, while classroom representation and discussion can draw on both languages. Children encounter new vocabulary in context and have real reasons to use it.
As Katz and Chard pointed out, projects work best as part of a balanced curriculum rather than the whole of it. Children still need daily routines, spontaneous play, stories and some systematic teaching. A project is the place where these elements come together around a real question, and that is why it is worth the time it takes.
Câu hỏi thường gặp
How long should a preschool project last?
There is no fixed length. Projects with three-year-olds may last a week or two, while older preschoolers can sustain investigations for many weeks if the topic is rich and fieldwork is possible. The project should end when children’s questions have been explored or their interest has faded, not when a calendar says so.
Can children under three do projects?
Very young children can engage in short investigations of things in their immediate world, such as water, a pet or a garden. These are usually simpler and more physical than projects with older children, with fewer questions and more repeated exploration. Teachers document and extend toddlers’ interests in the same spirit.
Who chooses the project topic?
Topics can come from children’s interests, from shared experiences or from teachers. What matters is that children become genuinely engaged and help shape the questions. Teachers judge whether a topic is rich enough, often by drawing a topic web before committing, and may steer toward topics with good fieldwork possibilities.
How do teachers assess learning in a project?
Through documentation: children’s initial and later drawings, their questions, their words recorded by teachers, photographs of fieldwork and models. Comparing early and late representations shows how understanding has grown. Assessment is descriptive and shared with families, without scores or comparisons between children.
Is the Project Approach the same as Reggio Emilia?
They are related but distinct. Reggio Emilia is a broader educational philosophy in which long projects are central, along with documentation, the atelier and a particular image of the child. The Project Approach, as described by Katz and Chard, is a specific structure for in-depth investigations that can be used within many curricula.
What if children lose interest halfway through a project?
Teachers first consider whether a new experience, such as a fieldwork visit or a visiting expert, might rekindle the investigation. If interest has truly faded, it is better to conclude the project with a short sharing of what was learned than to keep it going artificially. Not every topic will sustain inquiry, and that is useful information for future planning.