Rising Up:
“Freeing the learning experience” at Pittsburgh Perry High School: Engaging students through project-based learning

2024 | Written by Faith Schantz, Report Editor

The van drew up to Pittsburgh Perry High School, and Justin Mazzei and Jerel Webster, of MCG Youth, unloaded a Raku kiln, propane tanks, and other supplies into the school’s parking lot. The Northside nonprofit is known for its free, after-school arts programming for teens, but Mazzei, executive director of MCG Youth, and Webster, Community Outreach & Engagement teaching artist, were not there for an art class. Instead, they were joined by teacher Maria Orton and her Chemistry students, who began loading clay tiles into the kiln.

As smoke rose into the air and the temperature in the kiln headed toward 2,000 degrees, students in classrooms overlooking the lot crowded to the windows. The Chemistry students, though, weren’t there just to watch. The firing would test glazes they had created: calculating percentages, weighing powdered colorants using a triple-beam balance scale, and adding them to a base glaze to make their own solutions.

Mazzei describes what students experienced after they transferred the tiles from the kiln into containers that held sawdust. They saw “in real time what’s happening inside this atmosphere. This sawdust is igniting…It is smothering and starving this clay and this glaze for oxygen,” a process that brightens and brings out the colors in the glazes. Ultimately, they would compare the tiles fired by the ancient Japanese method of Raku to the same glazes on tiles fired in an electric kiln at MCG. And “even though they used the exact same mixtures,” Orton says, based on the different atmospheres created in the kilns “they saw huge differences in how those glazes came out.”

She used to hand her students cards with text about chemical change, physical change, elements, mixtures, and compounds—a way of teaching that she now calls “very boring.” By contrast, through the glazing project, students actually witnessed the results of chemical and physical change. They learned about elements, mixtures, and compounds by working with real materials. “Giving them something hands-on, and being relevant to what we’re working on, made it a lot more engaging,” Orton says. Compared to reading about those concepts, “it made more sense because they had a reason for using that information.”

Perry’s partnership with MCG, which has involved projects in English, Forensic Science, Biology, Computer Literacy, Cosmetology, and arts classes as well as Chemistry, is one of many connections the school has made with Northside organizations. The effort to “reimagine” the school started with a community process led by One Northside, an initiative of The Buhl Foundation. Participants, including students, parents, teachers, and other community members, asked for better ways to engage students and to make the content of their lessons more relevant to their lives. Ideas coalesced around STEAM—Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math—which has natural interest for students, and project-based learning (PBL). A+ Schools got involved to help the school secure resources and to turn ideas into a plan.

Rather than looking across the country or even across the city, the plan involved linking Perry to assets that are right in the neighborhood, to connect students with their community and to build a reciprocal sense of pride. And it just so happens that many of Pittsburgh’s cultural institutions with national reputations—such as The Daniel G. and Carole L. Kamin Science Center (formerly the Carnegie Science Center), The Andy Warhol Museum, Moonshot Museum, and MCG—are located on the Northside.

The school building, in Perry North, is one of the district’s architectural grande dames. Along with STEAM and Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (JROTC) magnet programs, Perry offers Cosmetology and Health Careers Technology Career and Technical Education (CTE) programs. As English teacher and A+ Schools board member Jason Boll describes the students and staff, “We get an excellent group of young people that represent just about every neighborhood on the Northside of Pittsburgh, and we are doing our best to serve them in ways that they deserve.”

Among the school’s challenges has been an unprecedented number of principals. When Molly O’Malley-Argueta took over in 2022, she was the seventh person to serve as principal within the past ten years. Despite the instability, Perry staff and A+ Schools staff had continued to plan, coordinate with partners, and pilot activities, with the support of grants from The Buhl Foundation and Highmark Healthcare . O’Malley-Argueta recognized their prior work. With “such a high turnover of leadership, the last thing I wanted to do was come in and just turn everything upside down,” she says. “So we really looked at what was here, what was started, and how can we dig deeper, refine, and move forward with what the teachers in turn really thought was the way to go.” While she wishes the pace could be faster, compared to more traditional instruction, “connecting our curriculum to community-based partners to create relevant and real-life experiences for students has engaged students at a higher level.”

Boll, who went on special assignment this past school year to devote part of his time to working with teachers to develop projects, says those experiences are the goal, rather than turning Perry into a PBL school. Some of the partners—such as Schools That Can, Urban Impact, and Partner4Work—support students by connecting them to internships and more broadly helping them think through their futures. The projects, however, are the heart of the work to reimagine teaching and learning. In a school with one of the district’s highest rates of chronic absenteeism—the percentage of students missing more than 10% of school days for any reason—projects are also giving students a reason to come through the door.

What is project-based learning?

So what does it mean to learn by working on a project, and what does that look like at Perry?

PBL involves more than a creative homework assignment or a culminating activity. Rather, the project is the means through which students learn. The teacher may present background content at the beginning, and continue to provide information as needed. Once the project gets underway, however, the teacher facilitates while students direct much of their own learning, making decisions and refining their questions along the way. To answer those questions, they may consult adult experts. Often students work as partners or in small groups; they may divide up tasks and develop their own expertise. Typically, they present their results to an external audience, which may be family members, community members, or students from another class.

Some guidelines have emerged for the work at Perry. First, projects must address learning goals. Boll says educators joke about the project “that took three weeks, and we made these rainsticks, and at the end, kids are like, ‘Wait—what’s a rainstick?’” At Perry, he says, “We want to stay away from that in the worst possible way.”

Second, he makes a distinction between fire and sparks. Some activities produce metaphorical sparks that may smolder for awhile before catching students’ full interest. In those cases, “We’re using those sparks to maintain some stamina to complete the learning that’s designed in the project,” he says. Others are inherently exciting, such as a glassblowing demonstration by Pittsburgh Glass Center staff or the Raku firing. The challenge then is to “use the excitement to create meaningful experiences that last more than just one day.” Both forms of engagement are extremely important, he says.

The arts as a “way in”

Most of the projects MCG staff members have collaborated on at Perry have not taken place in an art class. Instead, the arts have offered an entry to other forms of content, what Mazzei refers to as a “buried perspective” that teaching artists help students uncover. And, he acknowledges, “It doesn’t hurt that we have fire.” Students may be attracted to the hands-on nature of art making, or the chance to be mentored by a working artist. “Seeing a laser cut something,” he says, “touching some clay, getting your hands dirty, taking some photographs, seeing artists reference that people are doing this and communicating in a profound way through the creative arts—it is a great place to start.”

Orton has seen the opportunity to do something creative move some students toward the science content she wants them to learn. “Students who are artistically inclined, but they’re not into the math and not into the science, just knowing that they get to use their skills in a project allows you to engage them and let them be the leader when normally they’re just sitting at the back like, yeah, I’m here. I showed up. That should be good enough.”

For some projects, students have used the arts to communicate their learning, including an assignment about the Innocence Project for a Forensic Science class that involved filmed interviews. Others have used one art form to provide a perspective on another. One such project was a “photo essay” in Boll’s 9th grade English class, for which students related the concept of framing a shot with a camera to the idea of framing a written narrative through a particular storyteller’s lens.

Boll assigned texts with a strong emphasis on place, including “The Rockpile,” by James Baldwin, “American History,” by Judith Ortiz Cofer, and “A Quilt of a Country,” by Anna Quindlen. After students had discussed them, Webster, who is a photographer as well as a painter, musician, and tailor, came to the class with a set of oversized photographs and cardstock frames. He talked to students about “how to frame your shot and how much information you want to give the viewer,” he says. To help them think it through, he asked students to move the frames around the images to see how that changed the narrative. Then he, Boll, and the class left the building with cameras and their phones.

They were looking for beauty, Boll says, and they found it in the neighborhood around the school. “Instead of complaining about the spaces that they inhabit, they were saying…that tree that I pass every day or those brake lights on a car and the flickering streetlight above it—there’s beauty there.” Students responded, even those who had previously been disengaged. “I saw kids that rarely do anything that were staying behind the group to capture certain photos or to get something that they wanted to have that was unique.” Finally, they took pictures in their own neighborhoods and created an “argumentative essay in photos.” Again, Boll saw students “come to life” as they viewed their classmates’ photos and listened to them describe what they wanted the images to say.

His goals for the project went beyond the ability to use images to make an argument. He wanted students to understand there are always more stories, different stories, that exist outside of the frame. When they moved the cardstock frames around on photos they had taken and worked with Webster to analyze what changed, Boll hopes they learned that “what we choose to allow into our purview and what we choose to take out of what we’re seeing, that makes all the difference in a story,” including stories the news media tell.

Student to student

Mahlae Pollard, of Perry North, was a junior at Perry last year. Previously, as a homeschooled student, she had found her way to MCG, where she took design classes, making everything from “a silly little hat” to a costume she spent months working on. When she saw the Raku firing in the parking lot, “I snuck outside to see what it was because I saw Justin there,” she says, but “unfortunately” she didn’t have the chance to participate in any MCG projects at school.

Mahlae has undertaken projects in her women’s studies, religious studies, and performance studies classes, and in her 20th Century African American Literature class, which is a “College in High School” course overseen by the Justice Scholars Institute (see the story here), and taught by Boll. Some teachers tell students exactly how to carry out a project, she says. But for an African American Literature project that involved creating a timeline of the Civil Rights movement, she says, Boll “gave us a rubric [that said] talk a little bit about this, have a few pictures of this. And that was really all he gave us.” Her group chose to make a poster. “I did all the art for it,” she says, while others did the research.

She remembers that project better than others. “I don’t mind doing things on my own,” she says. “It’s nice to sit back and relax, listen to music while I get work done, but I did enjoy the collaboration aspect of the project I did in Mr. Boll’s class….It helped me to make a lot of friends that I still talk to…. So I think that’s why it stuck with me more.”

Webster has observed the effect students have on one another when they’re creating art in the classroom. He worked with art teacher Jennie Canning on a project called “Iced Out,” for which students made acrylic pendants and keychains with designs that expressed their identities, similar to what hip-hop artists wear. Students learned basic functions in Adobe Illustrator to create their designs, and cut them out using a laser cutter. Some of the young men were reluctant to participate at first, Webster says. But once they saw the process and an example, “It was kind of like popcorn.” One student would finish a piece, and another would say, “‘Oh, that’s how it’s going to turn out. I do want to make something,’” he says.

“It’s my own thing”

Silas Sawyer, of Manchester, was a 9th grader at Perry last year. He began attending ceramics classes and open studios at MCG after working on projects with MCG staff at school, including the photo essay. He also recalls a stamp-making project in an art class with an instructor from The Warhol.

Silas would rather learn through a project than listen to a teacher talk. “Obviously, projects require some teaching beforehand,” he says. “But I definitely prefer them over just always sitting and taking notes, because it’s more of a ‘Here’s information. Now go do something with that,’ as opposed to [ending with] the information being given. It frees the learning experience.”

With that freedom, he welcomes the responsibility for making choices and decisions along the way. For the photo essay project, those included the topic, whether to print photos or show digital versions, how to edit them, and what the accompanying text would be. Beyond the requirement to produce a certain number of photos with descriptions, “literally you could do whatever you wanted,” he says.

Both Silas and Mahlae say that the sense of ownership—for their own learning and the product—is a major part of the appeal of working on a project. “I like being able to put effort into my work and see the outcome,” Mahlae says, and “being able to show the class what I did” at the end. Silas looks forward to the school day when he’s engaged in a project because “it’s my own thing, and it’s not just being told what to do…. It’s something that I’m working on and constantly putting effort into and building up to this end goal. And you want to get there and you want to keep putting effort into it,” he says.

What does it take?

For teachers and partners, pulling all this off has involved behind-the-scenes planning, flexibility in the moment, and respect for the knowledge, resources, and values brought to the work by each side.

Five days of planning together in the summer, instituted by O’Malley-Argueta based on previous planning supported by A+ Schools, have been critical. “From my years of experience, if you don’t have that, it doesn’t happen,” Mazzei says. Teachers aren’t obligated to attend, but if they do they are paid for their time.

From their side, MCG staff use a set of curriculum planning documents they have developed over the years. The documents prompt questions such as: What are the expectations? What are the curriculum tie-ins? What is the celebration component? Who is taking which role? What is the plan for students who are “not feeling it” that day? MCG staff rely on teachers’ deeper knowledge of students, and keep in mind that they’re “stepping into a place that’s not our home” when they come into the school, Mazzei says.

Webster notes that “gauging the students’ skill level and not necessarily knowing how much time it would take to complete a project” can be problematic. But they make it work by “staying flexible and pivoting when we can.” Orton describes the process similarly. Both sides must be “open to change, and when something goes wrong, being able to [say], ‘It’s not perfect, but this is what we can do to still get something out of it,’” she says.

One of the resources partners bring is “amazing energy. Justin is enthralling. I don’t think anyone’s able to just sit there and not engage when he’s in the room,” Orton says. Partners also bring stuff—lots of stuff. MCG alone has transported a laser cutter, laptops, cameras, sewing machines, hundreds of clay tiles, buckets of glaze, propane tanks, and the Raku kiln to the school. “They give us an elevator key so we don’t have to lug everything up the steps,” Webster says. Knowing that students otherwise wouldn’t have access to most of those resources makes it worthwhile.

Orton used to conduct experiments with liquid nitrogen with her students, but until the school partnered with the Science Center, she hadn’t had recent access to a source. With Michaela Williams, education and operations manager, she designed an experiment that would demonstrate the particulate nature of matter using liquid nitrogen Williams brought to the school. Students were able to fit large party balloons into a small cooler because the liquid nitrogen inside changed the air particles’ energy. “When you first take the balloons back out, you can actually see the solid inside the balloon, but because the kids were the ones who blew up the balloons, they knew that it was [originally] a gas,” she says. “It’s a lot of fun,” and the conceptual knowledge “is important to the entire year of Chemistry.”

In addition to collaborating with partners, staff have also made changes within the school to accommodate PBL. One of the most important is “block scheduling.” Instead of a 42-minute class that meets every day, some classes have double periods and meet every other day. Teachers voted through their union to change the schedule prior to O’Malley-Argueta’s arrival. They also asked for help figuring out how best to use the extra time, she says. For the past two years, that has been the focus of professional learning.

PBL has nudged some teachers out of their traditional-instruction comfort zone in other ways. “I’ve never been a principal that would say to a teacher, ‘You should be on page two by Friday,’” O’Malley-Argueta says. Some teachers, however, are more comfortable following a set curriculum, in part because it gives them more control. “It wouldn’t matter what high school you’re in. They feel like the less control they have in the classroom, the more out of control kids will be… And I think that’s the harder lift for teachers—when we’re talking about collaboration and students working with one another and moving around.” Lecturing is appropriate for some forms of content, she says. But research shows “whoever’s doing the talking is doing the learning.” If all a teacher does is “ask questions all day long, and I’m just checking for understanding, are we really digging deeper, and are kids able to analyze and synthesize what we want them [to learn]? I don’t think that’s just a shift for Perry. I think it’s a shift in all high schools.”

From his work with other teachers, Boll knows that some feel pressure to teach content that is tested on the Keystone Exams, which doesn’t necessarily map neatly onto the learning from a project. The exams are based on the state standards, which—along with the district’s curriculum—offer guidelines for teachers. Boll has no quarrel with the content. The goal is not “let’s throw this out and build something else,” he says, but rather, “How do we bring this to life?” Still, that’s easier in some content areas than in others. A teacher who knows students will be tested on graphing nonlinear equations may want to teach it via a social justice unit on housing prices and gentrification, he says. But with the exam in mind, the teacher may think, “Frankly, the best thing is just a lot of practice on graphing nonlinear equations.”

He believes a middle ground can emerge if we focus on what students actually need to know and be able to do to succeed after graduation. Most people would agree that we want them to possess critical thinking skills and be able to look critically at the world around them. PBL helps students develop those skills, he says, because the process encourages ongoing reflection and questioning. Why did I make that choice? Should I add this? Why did we get this result? He points out that asking “Why did the glaze react that way?” is not “a wildly different question” than one about the causes of the wars in Gaza or Ukraine. Both involve “the pressures and the context and the components” that produce phenomena or underlie an event. With projects, all students can engage in these questions.

Citizens of the Northside

The projects are nested within a larger goal of building out reliable pathways for students to follow beyond graduation, in STEAM or other fields. Looking ahead, O’Malley-Argueta hopes to see more growth in Keystone scores, in part because that’s how parents and others judge the school. “But what’s more important to me is I want students, when they’re leaving here, to be productive citizens. I want them to be able to have opportunities and choices,” she says.

To that end, school staff have added field trips to Northside organizations such as the Science Center, MCG, The Warhol, and Moonshot Museum. Along with gaining exposure to artists and scientists in professional settings, O’Malley-Argueta wants students to know “You can learn anywhere.” Orton, who has taken adult classes at MCG, urges students to take advantage of the opportunities that abound, including at Artists Image Resource (AIR), whose staff conducted a silkscreen project in one of her classes. “AIR’s right on the Northside,” she told students. “You can go down there for free. You can take the classes at MCG for free. They even feed you.” By the end of last year, at least ten Perry students had begun taking classes or visiting the open studios at MCG after learning about them at school.

Silas, who lived in Texas until 8th grade, hopes to attend the University of Pittsburgh and conduct research at Allegheny Observatory, also located on the Northside. He calls 9th grade “an extremely influential year” for him because of Schools That Can and MCG. Schools That Can “drilled in…the importance of the future and how the time to start thinking about it is now.” And getting involved with MCG helped to anchor him in the Northside community, he says.

As Perry moves into another school year, enrollment has grown. The rate of chronic absenteeism is still high, but internal data show increased attendance on days when partners visit and students are working on hands-on projects. Along with engaging students, Orton has used projects to engage more parents, both with project-related events at the school and simply by sending messages about what happened in the classroom that day. In terms of teacher buy-in, O’Malley-Argueta thinks the school is approaching a tipping point. This past summer, 25 teachers signed up for summer planning, compared to five the previous year.

Boll notes that change in education is incremental. His hopes for this year are for “the teachers who did one project-based learning unit maybe trying to do two, and the teachers who did zero maybe trying to do one, and the teachers who did five maybe helping their peers.”

Webster, who jumped into the work at Perry soon after he was hired, and had collaborated on seven projects by the end of last year, goes further. He says, “This should really be in all the schools.”

Project-based learning benefits

Research shows that PBL can:

• Increase attendance, including in schools with high populations of students who are economically disadvantaged

• Increase engagement and students’ sense of agency, leading to higher achievement

• Produce more learning gains compared to traditional instruction

• Help students learn to think critically, evaluate and revise their work, and collaborate with others to reach a shared goal

See Perry’s data here.

Read a previous story about reimagining Perry, and our story on arts integration here.

If you are a teacher interested in connecting with a community organization, contact Tiffini Gorman at tgorman@aplusschools.org to hear about partners from the Pittsburgh Learning Collaborative who can work with your students.