Abstract:

The possibility for students to take part in meaningful and challenging activities is recognized as one of the strategic dimensions for qualify university formative processes and for promote students’ development of leadership skills (Baeten et al., 2010; Moretti & Giuliani, 2016; Sternberg, 2016). Those who work in the educational field have been interested in active teaching methods for a long time (Nigris et al., 2007; Kane, 2007; Hunt & Chalmers, 2021), and the advantages that they highlight are connected to the possibility for students to increase their level of engagement and sense of responsibility and to develop skills in an open and flexible learning context (Kahu, 2013; Domenici, 2017; Hodges, 2020). Linked to other instructional tools that encourage peers’ collaborations, active methodologies can promote the development of communication and relational skills too (Bartkus, 2001; Asoodeh et al., 2012).

Project-based learning is one of the active teaching strategies that has proven to be very effective due to its ability to promote the development of skills on a personal and relational dimension (Pellerey, 2005; Bell, 2010; Guo et al., 2020). By involving students in the management of small group projects, project-based learning should propose tasks that are motivating and close to real life. The skills on which it is possible to work through an instructional design that enhances project-based learning are consistent with the construct of students’ distributed leadership investigated in the literature (Leithwood et al., 2004; Komives et al., 2011; Giuliani, 2019), and in the paper will be deepen a practical experience developed in this regard.

The paper explores a laboratory developed in the Department of Education of Roma Tre University (Italy). The laboratory involved 56 students and asked them to work on a project in small groups. At the end of the formative process, each group was asked to produce an artifact to present to the teacher and other peer groups the results of the study conducted.

The groups had organizational autonomy to develop the project and had to: identify and study different sources; design an educational module aimed at promoting the pleasure of reading in childhood services; produce teaching materials and data collection tools; report in a final multimedia presentation what they done and detected.

The main findings that emerged confirm the effectiveness of problem-based learning in promoting an active approach of students during their formative processes. Students’ leadership skills relating to the personal and social dimension, at the end of the laboratory, reached good levels in almost the cases and the feedback that the students themselves returned on the activities developed was very positive.

Keywords:

Active education, Instructional design, Project-based learning, Students’ leadership, University.