Online Resources

Harvard Graduate School of Ed Debuts Free Online Library of Student Work

• By Joshua Bolkan
• 05/19/15

The Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) has introduced the Center for Student Work, an online collection of exemplary student projects.

A collaborative project between HGSE and K-12 education nonprofit Expeditionary Learning (EL), the free resource includes videos, writing samples and other work designed to provide teachers foundations to create their own projects. The searchable collection includes projects in English language arts, health and wellness, math, performing arts, science and technology, social studies, visual arts and world languages.

"Students need to know what they are aiming for, and what it looks like when they get there," said Ron Berger, chief academic officer at EL, in a prepared statement. "By giving teachers and their students a vision of what is possible, the Center for Student Work can help raise the bar in American education."

Along with the launch of the center, HGSE and EL are bringing together leaders from schools of education, school leaders and policy makers "to address what standards look like when met with integrity, depth and imagination; and how deeper, richer dialogues about state standards can occur, particularly what they mean and look like in actual student work," according to a news release.

"We decided several years ago to study rich examples of complex student projects — often arts-infused, aesthetically rich, interdisciplinary, community-connected, long-term studies of important ideas, concepts, and skill sets — to see if they could help us 'illuminate' specific standards — making those standards 'visible,'" said Steve Seidel, director of HGSE's Arts in Education Program, in a prepared statement. "We thought if we could actually show what standards look like, there could be different kinds of conversations about them among teachers, with students and in schools of education."