It’s official: The School District of Philadelphia will educate students via virtual learning through at least November. As difficult as the transition may be for regular schools — and students — to go virtual during the pandemic, project-based schools have their own challenges in adapting to the moment.

Matthew Riggan is cofounder and executive director of The Workshop School, a seven-year-old, project-based high school in University City that operates within the Philly school district. Here, the roughly 250 students normally engage in collaborative, skills-based projects based on in-person interaction. You might know the school for making things like cars and laser-cut “jawn” ornaments and launching Little Baby’s Ice Cream into space from Delco. The idea is that the work always has some real-world correlation and is therefore more engaging and useful to students than in the typical learning model.

Riggan has no doubts that teaching this fall will feel a lot different. How it goes will be contingent on how the environment educators work in continues to shift and how they can combine virtual and tactile learning to create that experience.

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