The project method of teaching was first propounded by:

Concept: The project method is a learner-centred, experiential method of teaching that follows from the pragmatist principle that knowledge is built through purposeful activity rather than received as ready-made subject matter. Its governing idea is “learning by doing”: the pupil undertakes a purposeful task in a natural, social setting, and the subject matter — measurement, language, science, cooperation — is drawn in as the task demands it.

Application: That pragmatic, experience-centred foundation was propounded by John Dewey. In The School and Society (1899) and Democracy and Education (1916), and in practice at his University of Chicago Laboratory School, Dewey argued that education is the continuous reconstruction of experience and that a purposeful activity carried out in a social setting is the natural unit of learning — the philosophy on which the project method rests. His pupil and colleague William Heard Kilpatrick later systematised and named the technique in his 1918 essay “The Project Method”, classifying projects into constructive, aesthetic, problem-solving and drill types. The line of descent therefore runs Dewey, who first propounded the underlying principle, to Kilpatrick, who worked it into a classroom procedure; of the names offered here, it is John Dewey.

Cross-check — what the other names are associated with:

• Crow and Crow — educational psychology; definitions of learning, growth, adjustment and mental hygiene of the learner.

• Robert B. Miller — task analysis, the breaking of a job into component tasks and sub-tasks for systematic training design.

• Robert F. Mager — behavioural instructional objectives stated as performance, condition and criterion.

A note on the attribution: Organised project-style work predates both men, and it was Kilpatrick who fixed the name “Project Method” in 1918. “First propounded” in this item therefore follows the standard examination attribution, which credits Dewey with originating the guiding principle of the method.

Result: the project method of teaching was first propounded by John Dewey.