Project Based Learning

Project Based Learning (PBL) is a teaching method in which students learn by actively engaging in real-world and personally meaningful projects.

Students work on a project over an extended period of time – from a week up to a semester – that engages them in solving a real-world problem or answering a complex question. They demonstrate their knowledge and skills by creating a public product or presentation for a real audience.

As a result, students develop deep content knowledge as well as critical thinking, collaboration, creativity, and communication skills. Project Based Learning unleashes a contagious, creative energy among students and teachers.

PBL is becoming widely used in schools and other educational settings, with different varieties being practiced. However, there are key characteristics that differentiate "doing a project" from engaging in rigorous Project Based Learning.

We find it helpful to distinguish a "dessert project" - a short, intellectually-light project served up after the teacher covers the content of a unit in the usual way - from a "main course" project, in which the project is the unit. In Project Based Learning, the project is the vehicle for teaching the important knowledge and skills student need to learn. The project contains and frames curriculum and instruction.

In contrast to dessert projects, PBL requires critical thinking, problem solving, collaboration, and various forms of communication. To answer a Driving Question and create high-quality work, students need to do much more than remember information. They need to use higher-order thinking skills and learn to work as a team.

In the Google Classroom Stream, share one reason that you think project based learning could be successful for your students.

To help ensure your students are getting the main course and are engaging in quality Project Based Learning, PBLWorks promotes a research-based model for “Gold Standard PBL.”

A research-informed model for measuring, calibrating, and improving your practice.

Student learning goals for projects include standards-based content as well as skills such as critical thinking, problem solving, communication, self management, project management, and collaboration.

What is Gold Standard PBL?

To help teachers do PBL well, we created a comprehensive, research-informed model for PBL to help teachers, schools, and organizations measure, calibrate, and improve their practice. In Gold Standard PBL, projects are focused on students' acquiring key knowledge, understanding, and success skills.

The project is framed by a meaningful problem to be solved or a question to answer, at the appropriate level of challenge

What is a challenging problem or question that you may use as the framework for a project? Share your problem or question in the Google Classroom Stream. Read the responses from your colleagues and provide feedback to the post of one other person.

Students engage in a rigorous, extended process of posing questions, finding resources, and applying information.

The project involves real-world context, tasks and tools, quality standards, or impact, or the project speaks to personal concerns, interests, and issues in the students’ lives.

Students make some decisions about the project, including how they work and what they create.

Students and teachers reflect on the learning, the effectiveness of their inquiry and project activities, the quality of student work, and obstacles that arise and strategies for overcoming them.

Students give, receive, and apply feedback to improve their process and products.

Students make their project work public by explaining, displaying and/or presenting it to audiences beyond the classroom.

When transitioning to PBL, one of the biggest hurdles for many teachers is the need to give up some degree of control over the classroom, and trust in their students. But even though they are more often the “guide on the side” than the “sage on the stage,” this most certainly does not mean that teachers don’t “teach” in a PBL classroom. Many traditional practices remain, but are reframed in the context of a project.

What is Gold Standard PBL? To help teachers do PBL well, we created a comprehensive, research-informed model for PBL to help teachers, schools, and organizations measure, calibrate, and improve their practice. In Gold Standard PBL, projects are focused on students' acquiring key knowledge, understanding, and success skills.

Teachers create or adapt a project for their context and students, and plan its implementation from launch to culmination while allowing for some degree of student voice and choice.

Teachers use standards to plan the project and make sure it addresses key knowledge and understanding from subject areas to be included.

Teachers explicitly and implicitly promote student independence and growth, open-ended inquiry, team spirit, and attention to quality.

Teachers work with students to organize tasks and schedules, set checkpoints and deadlines, find and use resources, create products and make them public.

Teachers employ a variety of lessons, tools, and instructional strategies to support all students in reaching project goals.

Teachers use formative and summative assessments of knowledge, understanding, and success skills, and include self and peer assessment of team and individual work.

Teachers engage in learning and creating alongside students, and identify when they need skill-building, redirection, encouragement, and celebration.

The Essential Project Design Elements Checklist can be used for a quick evaluation of a project's design, to see if it includes all the essential elements of rigorous, effective PBL. This checklist is a user-friendly tool, and based on our Project Design Rubric. Use this tool before, during, and after designing projects to check on their quality. Also helpful for communicating the meaning of PBL to various audiences.

Review this example of a unit designed using project based learning. Choose ONE of the elements of design to identify and evaluate. Share your evaluation in the Google Classroom Stream. Read the responses of your colleagues - do you agree or disagree with their posting. Explain your agreement or disagreement in a response.

When you’re ready to design a project for your classroom, it’s helpful to have a framework to capture your ideas and organize your plans. A Gold Standard PBL unit has a lot of pieces to plan: your goals for student learning, entry event and driving question, major product(s) students will create, daily lessons, and more. It’s also a good idea for a school to use a common framework for PBL unit planning, so teachers can collaborate using the same language, and share projects more easily with colleagues.

The Project Planner has five parts:

1. Project Overview: Key features of your project

2. Learning Goals: Standards, success skills, literacy skills, rubrics

3. Project Milestones: Significant steps in the project

4. Project Calendar: Day-by-day activities in the project

5. Lesson Planner: Supporting resource with guidance on planning daily lessons to meet the needs of all learners

Based on everything you read, viewed, and discussed, construct a personal TKES SMART goal based on strategies that improve instruction using project based learning design.
S-Strategic
M-Measurable
A-Achievable
R-Realistic
T-Timely