Ask students what they want to accomplish someday, and the answers can be surprisingly specific. One student wants to learn how to rebuild an engine. Another wants to write and record a song. Someone else wants to start a small business, learn another language, create a video game, improve at a sport, or understand what it would take to work with animals. Then the bell rings. For the next six hours, most of those interests have very little to do with what happens in school.

Schools spend a great deal of time asking students to learn what adults have determined is important. There are good reasons for that. Students need literacy, mathematics, scientific knowledge, historical understanding, an appreciation of the arts, and many other forms of knowledge and skill. A competency-based system certainly does not abandon those expectations. But another question is worth asking: When do learners get to pursue something that matters primarily because it matters to them?

Element Xb of the Marzano Academies CBE Instructional Model addresses that question through personal projects. The folio describes these as long-term projects designed and controlled largely by the student around a topic or goal that is personally meaningful. Students pursue an interest while developing the metacognitive and life skills necessary to move an idea toward accomplishment (Marzano, 2021).

Personal projects have held an important place in Dr. Marzano's work for a long time. He wrote specifically about using personal projects to develop self-efficacy in 2012. The process later appeared in Motivating and Inspiring Students, Teaching in an elementary competency-based and secondary competency-based school. That repeated attention is important. Personal projects are not an enrichment activity sitting at the edge of the Academies model. They provide learners with a place to practice many of the things the model is trying to develop but largely under-implemented.

Why: Agency Needs Something Real to Act Upon

We talk often about student agency. We want learners to set goals, make decisions, overcome obstacles, seek help, adjust plans, and reflect on whether their actions are producing the desired result. Those skills are difficult to develop when the teacher continues to own the goal and the process to reach it. A student can certainly practice agency while learning content selected by the school. But something changes when the student can say, “This is something I want to accomplish.”

Marzano (2012) argued that self-efficacy skills can be difficult to teach inside the artificial context of traditional academic work. Personal aspirations create a different setting. The learner has something personally meaningful at stake and must begin figuring out how to make it happen. That is where the project becomes much more than “choice.”

Suppose a student wants to build a small greenhouse. The interesting part is not simply allowing the student to choose greenhouses instead of some teacher-selected topic. The real learning begins when the student realizes the original idea is more complicated than expected. What materials will be needed? What will they cost? Who knows something about construction? Why did the first design fail? How much time will this take? What needs to change? The teacher does not step in to add constraints. Instead, the students discover them and decide how to move around them. Now the student has a reason to plan, seek accuracy, take incremental steps, find support, and reconsider an approach that is not working. Those are metacognitive skills. More importantly, the learner is using them in pursuit of a goal they actually care about.

Research on autonomy support helps explain why that matters. Mammadov and Schroeder's (2023) meta-analysis of 153 studies found positive relationships between autonomy support and outcomes that included motivation, engagement, self-regulated learning, and students' beliefs about themselves. Personal projects are not simply an exercise in autonomy, but they create an unusually rich opportunity for students to experience appropriate control over a meaningful part of their learning.

Dr. Marzano cautions against intentionally connecting every personal project to proficiency scales or placing too many teacher-created limits around the work. The teacher's primary responsibility is to help students develop the skills necessary to manage the project, not slowly take ownership of the project away from them.  If a student wants to learn how to make sushi and the teacher turns it into a mandatory research paper on Japanese history with a prescribed presentation format, whose project is it now?

How: Give the Interest a Process

Personal does not mean unstructured. In fact, the Xb folio provides a fairly robust process because students need enough structure to turn an interest into action. The project moves through seven phases. That process is where much of the learning occurs.

Dr. Marzano recommends that teachers consider pursuing personal projects alongside students. When the teacher works toward a real goal, students see that adults encounter obstacles that make them change plans and adjust their path to the goal. Success rarely follows the tidy pathway we imagined at the beginning. The teacher becomes a model of the process rather than the owner of everyone else's process.

Research on project-based approaches provides some additional support, although personal projects in the Academies model are not synonymous with project-based learning. A 2024 meta-analysis found that problem-, project-, and case-based approaches had a positive overall effect on student motivation compared with more teacher-directed approaches (Wijnia et al., 2024). Work changes when students see purpose in it and can meaningfully control how they proceed.

What: A School Where Students Pursue Something of Their Own

When Element Xb is working, the evidence should not simply be a hallway filled with attractive final products. The personal project process and who owns it matters more. Students should be able to describe the goal they are pursuing and why it matters to them. They should know what they are currently working on, and as an obstacle monster arises on their path to their goal, they should increasingly be able to explain how they are responding to it. The folio also expects students to identify the metacognitive or life skills they are developing through the project.

At the school level, the commitment is even greater. Personal projects do not fit neatly into traditional subject-area schedules, and it is recommended to intentionally create time for them. That might happen through advisory, homeroom, a dedicated project period, or another structure the school designs.  This may be one reason personal projects appear not only in the instructional model but also as a School-Level Indicator for a Marzano Academy. A single teacher can create an excellent personal-project experience. A school has to decide whether every learner should have access to one.

Within the Marzano Academies approach, we would argue that there should be some part of a learner's experience in school where the question is not, what does my teacher want me to accomplish? Instead, we ask the learner, “What do you want to accomplish, and how can we help you learn to get there?” I think that gets to the reason Bob has kept personal projects so close to the work over the years. A personalized, competency-based education should certainly help learners acquire important academic knowledge. But if we want students to leave us believing they can shape their own lives, at some point they need practice doing exactly that.

Continue Your Learning

Elements Xa and Xc are two components of the Marzano Academies Competency-Based Instructional Model. To continue building your understanding of effective, evidence-based, competency-based instructional practices and the full Marzano Academies instructional model, become a member of the Learning Lab. For only $10 per month, Members can access Dr. Marzano’s research Folios, professional learning resources, and practical tools designed to help teachers make competency-based practices work in real classrooms. The Learning Hub also includes Badging Experiences that allow teachers to identify a meaningful professional growth goal, strengthen their classroom routines, and document their growing expertise. Teachers should own their professional learning, and the Learning Hub is built to support that work. You can also sign up for Virtual Office Hours or engage in a CBE Coaching Series with Marzano Academies Faculty to deepen your team’s approach to a personalized, competency-based classroom. Please reach out with any questions.

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References

Mammadov, S., & Schroeder, K. (2023). A meta-analytic review of the relationships between autonomy support and positive learning outcomes. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 75, 102235. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cedpsych.2023.102235

Marzano, R. J. (2012). Teaching self-efficacy with personal projects. Educational Leadership, 69(8), 86–87.

Marzano, R. J. (2021). Element Xb: Using long-term projects in a competency-based classroom. Marzano Academies.

Marzano, R. J., & Abbott, S. D. (2022). Teaching in a competency-based elementary school: The Marzano Academies model. Marzano Resources.

Marzano, R. J., Aschoff, A. S., & Avila, A. (2022). Teaching in a competency-based secondary school: The Marzano Academies model. Marzano Resources.

Marzano, R. J., Scott, D., Boogren, T. H., & Newcomb, M. L. (2017). Motivating and inspiring students: Strategies to awaken the learner. Marzano Resources.

Wijnia, L., Noordzij, G., Arends, L. R., Rikers, R. M. J. P., & Loyens, S. M. M. (2024). The effects of problem-based, project-based, and case-based learning on students' motivation: A meta-analysis. Educational Psychology Review, 36, 29.