7 Reasons Not to Schedule Your Class Around A Weekly Project

When teachers are not physically present with the student, they cannot easily engage in the kind of joint attention required for a high-quality Socratic discussion that enables students to make good, independent sense of the content—also known as “essential overload.”
Students are often distracted by a novel task and not focused on the content itself.
Big projects are often a form of massed practice—“This week is all about titration!” Massed practice is inferior to distributed practice for long-term mastery.
By assigning several smaller tasks (also known as “segmenting”), students are more likely to be independently successful at the tasks.
When teachers don’t use a variety of tasks all focused on the same goal, students don’t extract the underlying principles of the concept. This means they have difficulty differentiating the key ideas.
Performing big tasks in isolation means that students don’t center the content into a larger historical or conceptual network.
Students with special education needs often require more practice, or alternative approaches to content—this is not learning styles, but a diagnosed physiological difference such as a visual impairment, an attention deficit disorder, etc.