Thematic and project-based education makes learning meaningful and connects students to the world. By questioning, broadening and deepening a topic, pupils learn how to get a grip on the world in which they live. In addition, school subjects are offered in a daily-life context and students learn how school subjects are related to each other. In addition, project-based and thematic education provides more room for the skill-based learning, interaction between students and student participation.

Although many primary schools work thematically, achieving the above goals is not simple. For instance, how do you learn students to come up with (good) questions about a topic or theme? And how do you ensure that students not only carry out fun activities, but also broaden and deepen their knowledge? And how can you help students to recognise the core and coherence in subject content?

Perspectives have been developed by ICLON to answer the above questions and offer a practical way to shape thematic an project-based education. It is important for students to learn to question a topic or subject from multiple angles and to broaden and deepen their understanding because it helps them get a grip on the world around them. But many pupils do not ask many questions or find it difficult to think of questions. Perspectives can help students learn to ask good questions about a topic or theme.

With a new theme or topic, a teacher can use perspectives as eye openers to encourage students to think of questions from the different perspectives. This helps students learn to look at a theme or topic from different perspectives. With the perspectives and the accompanying questions, students are inspired to formulate their own questions. As the perspectives are in line with the curriculum, it also helps students see the relationship between the world and school subjects.

There are different ways to use perspectives for the design of thematic education. Perspectives can be used in teacher-centerer or student-centered education. When a teacher or team of teachers want to design a lesson series around a project or a theme, they can start by choosing different perspectives relevant to the theme. In general, a theme or topic can be questioned from many different angles and therefore the choice of perspectives can be very diverse, but generally 3-5 perspectives are sufficient for an educational project.

Approaching a topic from multiple perspectives creates wonder and curiosity. Perspectives help students formulate questions with which they can further investigate a subject. In this way, students increasingly learn to use perspectives themselves to discover and expand their world.