Beyond the Textbook: Why Project-Based Learning is the Key to Raising Capable, Good Humans

Are you tired of being a broken record? 

Whether you homeschool, private school, or public school—we all want the same thing: to raise good humans. Humans who can think for themselves, solve problems, and actually care about the world around them.

 I just sat down with two of the most inspiring women, Danika Dunn and Kelly Clearkin, and they blew my mind with Project-Based Learning (PBL).

Forget the dry textbooks and the "stay in your seat" mentality. Danika (who is literally UPenn certified in this!) and Kelly are showing us how to turn our homes into launchpads for real-world humans. 🌍❤️

Why I’m obsessed:

• It’s not just a "craft"—it’s how kids learn to solve actual problems.
• The "Secret" Sauce: It prepares them to be thinkers, collaborators, and just... good people.
• The Support: They’ve got all the resources at Bramblewood Mamas to help you actually do this without losing your sanity.

If you want your kids to love learning again (and if you want to stop being a "lecturer"), you HAVE to listen to this episode.

Podcast: Bramblewood Mamas: the project-based homeschool

Course: Project-based Homeschooling Basics

Socials: @bramblewood_mamas, @projectbasedhomeschoolmom

Love what you’re hearing? 🌿 If these deep dives are helping you navigate your kids' health, I’d love your help! Between soccer practice and science labs, your support keeps this show going.

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Want to be a guest? 🎙️ Whether you’re a Wellness Expert or a Mom with a story to tell, I want to hear from you.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to Keep Em Healthy with Jamie, your go-to classroom for integrative kids' health and wellness. I'm Jamie, a biology professor, an integrative health coach, and most importantly, a mom who's been through it all. When the conventional medical system couldn't provide the answers my own child needed, I took my background in anatomy, physiology, and nutrition and went looking for a better way. Join me as I chat with experts and physicians to help you decode your child's biology and psychology from childhood through young adulthood. If you're ready to stop guessing and start understanding, you're in the right place. Let's keep them healthy together. If you ever felt that your homeschool co-op is kind of just school at home and you want to change it up, this episode is for you. We are joined by two women today who are not just teaching this method, but they're living it. So first we have uh Danica Dunn. Danica has been homeschooling her five children for a decade. And in 2020, she realized that the traditional co-op method wasn't working for her. So she started at UPenn's project-based learn project-based learning certification program and founded Bramblewood Learning Community. Also joining her is Kelly Clerkin, a nurse, a mother of two, and a master connector. Five years ago, Kelly stepped into Bramblewood and never looked back. And today she serves as a project-based mentor for students of all ages, trains new educators, and even runs a local forest playgroup and homeschool conference to keep the community thriving. Danica and Kelly, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_02 1:53

Hi, thanks for having us.

SPEAKER_01 1:54

Thanks, Jamie. We're so excited to be here. All right, let's kick things off because I'm interested. I want to see what you guys are doing out there. So let's start with like defining. In the education world, we often hear of doing a project, in quotes, versus project-based learning. Can you explain the difference to our listeners?

SPEAKER_00 2:11

Yeah, so project-based learning really uses the project as the driving, the drive for the learning. So you're looking at everything your child's going to learn through the lens of that project. You're incorporating maybe math and science and history and all of these different disciplines into one project versus maybe if you're doing unit studies or some other style of learning, you might be doing projects along the way that are under like an umbrella topic, but with again project-based learning, you're using that project to drive all the learning.

SPEAKER_01 2:41

Okay. So it's not just like, okay, this is a math project. So go count all the rocks outside and add them up and tell me the number. This is like you're gonna be talking about using English and math and whatever nature study science and whatever it is in that one project. So can you give me an example of a project that uses the project-based learning technique that could really shed light of exactly what you're mentioning? Yeah, there's, I mean, we've done a lot of them.

SPEAKER_02 3:09

One of them might be um a weather project. We we had this driving question of what, how do we prepare for and teach people about natural disasters? And so that was kind of the driving question behind this whole unit study. So, so you can, if you have the goal of learning, teaching your kids about weather, about earth science and things like that, you can do it by by saying, we're gonna learn about earth science and we're gonna learn how to, you know, how what makes a tornado and all these things. And then maybe at the end you would do some culminating project. But at that point, the kids have already done the learning. It's kind of like, oh, this is fun, but it still feels kind of meaningless. Whereas if you start off saying, we are going to educate other kids about how to prepare for natural disasters, we're gonna help our community by educating them. What do we need to know in order to do that? Then you're starting with this real meaningful work that they're engaging in. Every part of that learning is meaningful. You still have to learn what makes a tornado, how air currents and the air work and all of the different tools and measurements, but you're also learning how to use the tools, how to run a weather station, how to give a broadcast forecast for your community, all these things you're learning and skills along the way that are real and meaningful. And so the kids don't lose that engagement. They're actually engaged and every piece is meaningful. So in the end, you have that same learning, but you also have stacked it with all of these extra skills.

SPEAKER_01 4:36

Okay. I love that. I love that because it's like it's it's actually goal-oriented being like, uh we need to help this community of people get ready for what's coming. And so it has a little bit of that passion and urgency to really motivate them to get all the information that they need to learn about the topic and the subject and then to use it and apply it, which is really cool. So, okay, so if we want to avoid this school trap of the traditional way, right? What are some red flags homeschoolers should look like when they are moving away from that more organic model? Is there certain things that you we should be looking for?

SPEAKER_02 5:08

I think when, I mean, this was the whole reason that I started Bramblewood initially, was because I was going to these these co-ops that we loved. We loved our community, we loved the friends we were making, but it was still my kids sitting in a classroom where the teacher was teaching at them, basically, which is not what we're looking for. And when a when a child, I mean, if you think about it for yourself, if you are learning something, think about the last time you actually were super engaged and thirsty for that knowledge, and you you couldn't get the information fast enough because you wanted to know. When kids don't care and they don't want to know, you almost can't teach them anything. When they want to know, it almost doesn't matter what way you're teaching them. And when they do care, you could be, you could hand them a textbook and they would actually retain the knowledge because they are thirsty for that knowledge. So our whole job as educators and parents and mentors is to get their minds prepped for learning. It's to get them in that space where they're hungry and they're seeking that knowledge. So these things like this real world authentic project where ideally there's somebody in the community who's relying on you for this, or there's maybe an outcome. Maybe you're gonna read um a book you're gonna write to kids at the library, something it can be small, but when there's other people that you're doing this for, it gives that push and opens their minds so that they are so ready to learn everything. And then you're just giving them what they're asking for. They're asking you to learn these things and you're just saying, Well, I wonder how we're gonna do that. Let's figure it out.

SPEAKER_00 6:34

They're asking you then to teach them grammar, to help them with their handwriting, to improve their work. Um, and and they care about the product so much more because people are seeing it. So it's just it's awesome when your kids are coming to you saying, Hey, I need to know this. You need I need you to come teach me or find me resources. So it's really great seeing the drive in them for wanting to learn.

SPEAKER_01 6:54

Absolutely. And it basically is giving them a well, it's a service aspect of learning and saying that I'm doing this intentionally for an outcome that will not only teach me things, but it serves the community. And rather than just getting a grade, you know, like how do we motivate children to learn and figure out these skills and whatnot when at the end it's like, did I get an A, B, C, or D? But that's not really what's happening. You guys are being like, okay, I'm doing this and because I'm gonna present this out and I'm gonna teach people and I'm gonna save the world, or like what are the kids are motivated about, you know? And so I love that. I think that is really great. And I even, as you're saying that, the whole reason I learned the things that I learned for this podcast is because I'm going to present it to my listeners and help them. And that is so motivating and it just fuels so much energy. Oh, I really love this. Okay, so let's talk about like the being more of a mentor to your child or the group versus a teacher.

SPEAKER_00 7:48

Yeah. So this is something that we've been teaching our mentors at Bramblewood Learning Community. We've also been running workshops for parents in our community so that they can implement it in their own co-ops or just in their homeschool or home lives in general. And really, it's this idea of Socratic teaching. It's asking, asking your child questions, getting them to think for themselves and not always feeding them the information. You can't always force them to want to learn something. But if you're asking them questions, um, I was just thinking about like even as we're doing something like math homework or something like that in our like if we follow a curriculum for math, but we're doing that and I'm asking my child questions along the way instead of feeding him the answers all the time. So yeah, just using questioning your kids as a guide, like guiding your child along the process of learning.

SPEAKER_02 8:37

So I, in my former life, I was a dietitian and I remember learning about motivational interviewing. When you're when you have a client and they are having a really hard time making behavioral changes, even though they the knowledge isn't the problem at that point. They know what they're supposed to do. They know that what they're eating and their behaviors are hurting them, but they're still struggling to make behavior change. There's ways that therapists and dietitians, all these people can use questions to bring about this behavior change. And the key really is getting them to do the thinking, getting them to arrive at these conclusions more or less through their own critical thinking and their own thought process. So that's really the principles behind being a mentor is kind of being on the sides. You're not driving, you're not pulling, you are along the side of them, helping them be the driver, but giving them what they need, and especially through this process of questioning. So one thing that I always tell people is go three days without telling your kid a declarative sentence, with only asking your kid questions. And it is such a good mental exercise. It is to notice how often you're you're just you're giving your kid answers or you're telling them things. Think about if you even if you want your kids to pick up their dishes, what's I mean, what's something you might ask that might, besides like, will you pick up your dishes? That doesn't count. That's cheating. But you might say, What do you see? Do you see anything that's out? And then you see how that flips the script and it forces them to actually be the one that's using their observational skills. It's training them to actually look around them and see what needs to be done and step in. So every time we can put that learning, put the onus of the work back on our children, then it's getting them to learn more and to grow more and to really be agentive, active learners.

SPEAKER_01 10:24

Do you? I would love to hear from both of you on this one, but do you guys have go-to prompting questions that you feel like is on repeat in your house or during the time you're in school? Could you share?

SPEAKER_00 10:33

Yeah. What what do you need to know next is really, I would say, where do we go from here? What do we need to learn about next? How are you gonna figure this out? But really, it's like, what what's next? What do you need to know?

SPEAKER_02 10:46

One thing for me is also what is the problem? Like, if you the more clear you can get the child to describe the problem, the answer will pop out to them and you don't have to say anything, you don't have to solve anything for them. If they can give you a really clear statement, even if it's an argument between them and their sibling, okay, what is actually the problem here? And you just keep drilling down, then as soon as they get to that point where the problem becomes very clear, then the answer also is very clear, like nine times out of ten. Kids are very smart, they're very capable at solving problems, especially if they're motivated.

SPEAKER_01 11:19

And I think as I'm listening, it's just being intentional as a parent to set them in, set them up in scenarios where they have to use their critical thinking rather than us just solving it for them because we need to get to the next thing because we're trying to get out the door, whatever the case may be. But okay, so I just want to peel back for a second. So the Socratic method is just purely asking questions as a mentor versus presenting and giving information and telling them what they need to know. Am I correct on that? Yep. In a nutshell, that's that's pretty much it. Well, this next question is coming to front, is because I asked my guests to give a title for their episode. And this, you two decided to say project-based learning, the best kept secret. So I want to hear why you think project-based learning is still considered the best kept secret. And um, I would love to hear both of you for for this one too. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:09

Yeah. So I I when I discovered project-based learning with Danica, I was like, this is what we are looking for. I have a kid, I have a kid who is loves projects, is driven to do a project and intrinsically wants to do projects all the time. And I have a kid who is very like, you call it a project, I'm not doing it. Um but this and I I we were doing all the curriculum, we were had all this structure in our day, and I wanted something that allowed us the freedom and flexibility to dive into their interests, to to um be able to take a step back and get the most out of what they were interested in, or out of the most for my oldest, it's all his projects. I wanted to be able to get the most out of learning, like learning that went into his projects. And for my youngest, I wanted to capture the things he was already doing that he didn't think were projects and get learning out of that. And like be able to reflect on it and adding that collaboration piece in and all the things that go with project-based homeschooling. And so it's it's that perfect blend of um tying in the uh like the desire, the drive for your own intrinsic learning. Um and the where am I going with this? I have like the outcome, I have the outcome of actually learning. Right, structure. The blend of yeah, structure uh structure and the flexibility and freedom. Um so if you if you're a really structured homeschooler and you want to dive into projects, it's great. But if you are somebody who doesn't have a lot of structure or unschooling, it gives you that structure to capture all that learning.

SPEAKER_02 13:44

Right. So, so back to kind of my origin story. When I was kind of in this searching phase of, I know there's something better out here. I'm homeschooling to do something different with my kids. Where is it? Where is that thing? I was seeing a lot of people who were like this unschooling. I would flip-flop between unschooling, where you have this beautiful, wild, passionate learning, but sometimes it felt like you you floundered in the the structure aspect. And I I saw Charlotte Mason or classical learning where they were very formal, or at least more formal, but they built these beautiful habits and structures and holding kids to a high standard. And I thought that's really good too. So how do I blend those? And then I found this project-based learning, which is out there. It's actually there are people that do it, there are there are schools that do it, there's a lot of education resources out there for it, but all of those resources are directed to public school teachers or charter school teachers. So there there is a lot of information, but I felt like I had to translate it to homeschooling. But everything that I was finding, I was like, this is this is perfect for homeschoolers. This is made for homeschoolers. When I went to the UPenn certification course, everyone else in that program was an actual teacher. I saw their struggles. They they have a really hard time implementing. They see the beauty in project-based learning, but they can't implement it in a classroom setting, especially with administrators bringing them breathing down their neck about benchmarks and the things that they have to hit and the order of things that they have to teach where they can't, they can't dive deep on certain things and they can't really do the full learning that this gives you. So it's really made for homeschoolers, but there's this gap between information and homeschoolers. So that's kind of like I this this needs to be talked about. This is something that most homeschoolers are looking for that sweet spot where you have that passion and that meaningful learning, but you also have these habit-building, habit-forming skills and actual structured mentorship that you feel like you are confident and know what you're doing and not just, it's not just a free-for-all or kids, you know, doing whatever they want.

SPEAKER_01 15:46

Right. No, exactly. And so these resources, um, is there a certain person you follow, or do you, is there a certain website you go to that they post new ideas or new, you know, because you said it's going to the teachers. Is there any access that homeschoolers can have, or even just parents are like, I would love to motivate my child. I know they love Pokemon. I want to do something like project-based learning so that I can just get them excited about something again, right? Is there anything, any advice you can give for these parents?

SPEAKER_02 16:14

So there are, there's a number of resources online. There's PBL Works, which is a website. There's EL Education, and theirs is kind of more broad, but they have a lot about project-based learning. There are a few project-based learning schools out there. Most of them are charter schools or different experiential learning schools, high tech high in California. Some of these places have project banks where you can go and you can see all these different project ideas that classes have done. Those are so inspirational. I love looking at them. Um you just have to keep in mind, these are done in a classroom. You can take that however you want. You can do, but the cool thing is about projects is you can see a project that was done for high schoolers and you can do it with elementary school kids, and it just looks a little bit different. But most of these projects you can take and use however you want. One really fun project that any family can do, whether they're homeschoolers or public schoolers or anything in between, is planning a vacation together. If you do, if you have the goal to go on this fun vacation, think about all the learning that happens if you sit down with a family and say, this is what we want to do. What do we need to know in order to go to Europe or go to Yosemite or whatever it is? And then what roles is that? Can we have somebody looking up the accommodations? Can we have somebody planning food so that everybody has a task that's meaningful and interdependent, um, relying on each other? And can you see what that could do for the family? How it can bring people together, inspire kids to learn how to research, learn how to present what they're doing, learn how to work through struggles. Unfortunately, one of the up and downsides of project-based learning is that it's real and there's always problems. There's always things that you run into, and you have to figure out how do we communicate this, how do we make decisions as a group. And hey, that's real life. And that is one of the biggest things that adults need to learn. And if our society could figure out how to have these conversations better, we would all be in a much better place.

SPEAKER_01 18:01

I absolutely agree. And I love that idea for the vacation planning, especially because you might have kids at different age levels and have different cares and concerns or things that they're interested in looking at. That if you don't even open up that question to the family of being like, well, what do you want out of this family vacation? Do you want, you know, camping time? Do you want to be going on roller coasters, like all these things of just having them have a say, I think just is encouraging them to start thinking critically and being like, this could actually mean something for me. This is like, I'm a part of this and this is important. I think that um what you guys are doing and how you guys are sharing it with the community is very important. I homeschooled my younger two just for one year when they were in kindergarten pre-K, because we lived on like a little format at the time. And so, like, life is school schools, life is a little bit like unschooling, but we also had some structure every day. Um, and the structure included taking care of the animals on the farm and things like that, which was really cool. But at the time, I had bought a book on project-based learning because I the same thing. When we went to high school and stuff, that memorization, I was top-notch at. But then I come out of 12 years of school and I'm like, what do I actually know? Like, I know how to memorize. That's that's a little bit uh concerning. So skill learning and I think project-based learning is is teaching these children that they are building not only just like learning information about the world and the weather and different things, but they're building skills of how to put things together or how to even ask questions or just approaching learning in a totally different way.

SPEAKER_02 19:36

So true. And if you think about it, the way the way the world is going, what are these kids actually going to need to know how to do? And it is learn. They're gonna need to learn how to solve a problem. And if they run into, you know what, this job isn't gonna work anymore. Well, what do I need to know in order to find a new job? Like it's those same questions, those same skills of pivoting and solving problems. And that's that's the education they really need.

SPEAKER_01 20:00

I completely, completely agree. And I really hope that there is some light bulbs going off in all my listeners' brains and hearts right now because I'm like, yeah, yeah, I'm like, I'm here for this. I love it. You want your children to come out of your home confident and competent to feel like I can take on whatever happens because there is gonna be adversity. Like you said, real life comes with real problems. And you want your kids to not be like, I've never dealt with a problem ever in my life, and now I have a huge one and now I'm going under. You know, you want them to be like, okay, dealt with this before. Remember in the project when we did blah, blah, blah, blah. Remember when something happened in the family and we all had to sit down, we had to figure this out. Like that type of situation is what we need to be enforcing in our home, whether we homeschool or not, just to make sure that our kids feel when they are an adult in the world competent and confident. So I don't know. Well, how do you feel about that?

SPEAKER_00 20:49

Yeah, I I love the fact that it's pushing my kids out of their comfort levels in so many ways. They're learning new skills that are real life skills. My my 10-year-old is better at using Canva than I am. And because of these projects, he's driven to learn these skills that may not necessarily be academic, but he's applying in himself in new ways that are going to benefit him in the future. But he's also learning to work with other people in figure doing this solve uh problem solving and figuring things out. And he's understanding how to learn deeply. Not just like, oh, he's memorizing everything about American history, but he is taking something that either it may interest him, or maybe the skill he's learning interests him, and he's learning something that doesn't interest him, but he's learning it deeply through this process. Um, so there's just so many different benefits that are coming from mentoring my kids this way.

SPEAKER_01 21:41

I love it. All right, ladies, what is the good news about all the things that we just talked about? I would love for you to share.

SPEAKER_02 21:48

The good news about project based learning is that everybody can do it and that it will help every family and every child be more prepared for the world and to be better human beings. And isn't That's what we all want? Yes. Easy.

SPEAKER_01 22:04

Easy. Okay, great. And and then where can we find you? What do you guys have going on?

SPEAKER_02 22:09

Well, we have a lot of exciting things going on.

SPEAKER_01 22:11

We're kind of in launch mode.

SPEAKER_02 22:12

Do you want to tell you about that?

SPEAKER_00 22:13

So so we we do have a lot of things going on. Um, so you can follow us on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Ramblewood Mamas. I also have Project-based homeschool mom. And then we have our Bucksmond Homeschool Conference coming up on March 14th, uh, which is a hyperlocal conference where we're bringing all of our resources in our community together. We have tons of amazing workshops this year. We have more workshops than we've ever done before, um, including project-based learning, and we have one on focusing on reflection, um, which is such a big part of project-based homeschooling. Um, we have a podcast. We do, we just started our own podcast. Oh my gosh, congratulations.

SPEAKER_01 22:54

That's awesome. What's it called?

SPEAKER_02 22:55

What's it called? It's called Bramblewood Mamas, the Project Based Homeschool. And we have one. Hopefully, by the time this comes out, we'll have our second episode out. But that is that is our project right now. Um and we and we just launched an online course. We have we have a lot going on right now. We have an online course, it's it's the project-based learning, project-based homeschooling basics. So it's everything you need to know to just get yourself started. We actually walk you through planning projects on your own so you can just you can hit the ground running with all of that.

SPEAKER_01 23:26

Oh my gosh, this is wonderful. So um, I just think this is really, really intentional parenting and having our kids think beyond just memorization and to have a passion and a reason and an intention and a motivation for learning. Listeners, thank you so much for joining us today. I really hope you check out all the things that Danica and Kelly have going on and Bramblewood uh community and Bramblewood Mamas and all the information I will have absolutely attached at the end of the show notes here. So thank you for joining us, and I hope everyone has a great rest of the week.

SPEAKER_02 23:58

Thanks so much. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 24:00

Listeners, thanks for hanging out with me in the classroom today. If today's episode sparked a new idea for you, please make sure to click follow on your podcast app so you never miss a conversation. If you know a parent who is currently struggling to find answers, please share this episode with them. You just might be that link to help them on their journey. And finally, if you're a wellness expert or mom with a story to share, email me. I'd love to have you on the show. Until next time, keep them healthy.