What is Project-Based Learning?

Project Based Learning is an instructional approach that emphasizes critical-thinking,collaboration and personalized learning. In project-based learning, student groups engage in meaningful inquiry that is of personal interest to them. These projects are based on problems which are real-life oriented, curriculum-based, and often interdisciplinary. Learners decide how to approach a problem and what activities or processes they will perform. They collect information from a variety of sources, analyze, synthesize and derive understanding from it.

The real-world focus of PBL activities is central to the process because it motivates students and adds value to their work. Their learning is connected to something real and involves life skills such as collaboration and reflection. Technology enables students and teachers invarious phases of the PBL process. At the end of the PBL, students demonstrate their newly acquired knowledge and are evaluated by how much they have learned and how well they communicate it. Students also conduct self-evaluation to assess their own growth and learning. Throughout this process, the teacher's role is to guide and advise students, rather than to direct and manage student work.

What are the components of Project-Based Learning?

According to the Buck Institute for Education there are eight essential components of meaningful PBL experiences. These essentials are summarized below.

1. Significant content: The project focuses on important knowledge and concepts derived from the standards and targets essential understanding in the course. Students should find the content to be significant in terms of their own lives and interests. A well designed PBL is an effective vehicle for understanding content more deeply than by traditional methods such as lectures and textbooks.

2. A Need to Know: Teachers powerfully activate students’ need to know content by launching a project with an “entry event” that engages student interest and initiates questioning. The entry event can be anything that sparks student inquiry such as a video, a discussion, a guest speaker, a field trip, a laboratory experience, etc. In contrast, announcing a project with a packet of papers will likely not create excitement and an atmosphere of active learning. Simply telling students that they should learn something because they will need it later does not motivate them. With a compelling student project, the reason for learning relevant material becomes personal and purposeful to the student.

3. A Driving Question: After the discussion and brainstorming, students create a Driving Question to focus their efforts. A good Driving Question captures the heart of the project in clear, compelling language. The Question should be provocative, open-ended, complex, and linked to the core of what we want students to learn. It could be abstract, concrete, or focused on solving a problem. The Driving Question allows students to understand why they are undertaking a project as well as the sequence of activities that ensues from their personal challenge.

4. Student Choice and Voice: Students’ interest is captured by a challenging question that is selected and crafted by the students. This provides the student Choice to the project. The requirements of the projects such as project report, digital and oral presentations, visual demonstrations etc. provide Student Voice to the project. The Student Choice and Voice makes the project meaningful to the students. The more Voice and Choice for the student, the greater the ownership of the learning will be. However, projects should be designed with the extent of student choice that best fits each student. On the limited-choice end of the scale, learners can select what topic to study or choose how to design, create, and present products. As a middle ground, teachers might provide a limited menu of options to prevent students from becoming overwhelmed by choices. On the “the more the better” end of the scale, students can decide what product they will create, what resources they will use, how they will structure their time or even their topic and Driving Question.

5. 21st Century Skills: Collaboration is central to the PBL learning experience. A project should give students opportunities to build valuable 21st century skills such as collaboration, communication, critical thinking, and the use of technology, which will serve them well in the workplace and in life. Once students have decided on the Driving Question, they form teams of three or four and begin planning how they would work together. Each team regularly pauses to review their progress. Teachers can help grow these collaboration skills by using team building techniques and time/task organizers. Teachers in a Project Based Learning environment also assess these skills and provide frequent opportunities for students to assess themselves.

6. Inquiry and Innovation: Brainstorming sessions as a class helps students generate new ideas and questions. Student team discussion allows opportunities to fine-tune their own Driving Questions and to discuss resources and procedures. Students find project work to be more meaningful if they conduct real inquiry that begins with their own questions, leads to a search for resources and the discovery of answers, and which ultimately leads to generating new questions, testing ideas, and drawing their own conclusions. With real inquiry comes innovation – a new answer to a Driving Question, a new product, a new solution to a problem. Students are not expected to simply reproduce provided information in a pretty format. The teacher’s task is to create the context for real inquiry in the classroom and to guide students through the process.

7. Feedback and Revision: As students develop their ideas and products, student teams use rubrics and exemplars to review and critique one another’s work. The teacher checks research notes, reviews rough drafts and plans, and meets with teams to monitor their progress. The mentoring process of monitoring and feedback is formalized and structured so all student teams have guidance from their teacher throughout the duration of the project. Students learn through this mentoring that first attempts do not always result in high quality and that revisions are a frequent feature of real-world work. In addition to providing direct feedback, a teacher coaches students in using rubrics or other sets of criteria to critique one another’s work. Teachers can arrange for experts or adult mentors to provide feedback, which is especially meaningful to students because of the source.

8. Publicly Presented Product: Student teams present their findings, conclusions, and solutions to audiences such as peers, parents, representatives of community, business, government organizations and professionals from various industries. Students answer questions and reflect on how they completed the project, next steps they might take, and what they gained in terms of knowledge and skills and pride. When they present their work to a real audience, they connect to real life through their PBL projects. These projects become authentic when the process replicates real-life tasks and students are no longer observers but participants in real life experiences.

What is Standards-Focused PBL?

There is no one accepted definition of PBL. However, BIE defines standards-focused PBL as a systematic teaching method that engages students in learning knowledge and skills through an extended inquiry process structured around complex, authentic questions and carefully designed products and tasks. This definition encompasses a spectrum ranging from brief projects of one to two weeks based on a single subject in one classroom to year long, interdisciplinary projects that involve community participation and adults outside the school. More important than the definition itself are the attributes of effective projects. You will find that the BIE planning model is based on a number of criteria that distinguish carefully planned projects from other extended activities in the classroom.

Outstanding projects...

● Recognize students’ inherent drive to learn, their capability to do important work, and their need to be taken seriously by putting them at the center of the learning process.

● Engage students in the central concepts and principles of a discipline. The project work is central rather than peripheral to the curriculum.

● Highlight provocative issues or questions that lead students to in-depth exploration of authentic and important topics.

● Require the use of essential tools and skills, including technology, for learning, self-management, and project management.

● Specify products that solve problems, explain dilemmas, or present information generated through investigation, research, or reasoning.

● Include multiple products that permit frequent feedback and consistent opportunities for student to learn from experience.

● Use performance-based assessments that communicate high expectations, present rigorous challenges, and require a range of skills and knowledge.

● Encourage collaboration in some form, either through small groups, student-led presentation, or whole-class evaluations of project results.

The BIE model for PBL also addresses a singular need in the field of PBL: to create

standards-focused projects that fit well with the era of accountability and performance. Often projects have been used as fun or change-of-pace events completed after students have been pushed through homework assignments, lectures, and tests. In standards-based PBL, students are pulled through the curriculum by a Driving Question or authentic problem that creates a need to know the material. The Driving Question is tied to content standards in the curriculum, and assessment is explicitly designed to evaluate the students’ knowledge of the content. Similarly, Project Based Learning is sometimes equated with inquiry-based or experiential learning. Though PBL shares some overlapping characteristics with these two terms, standards-focused PBL is designed to acknowledge the importance of standards and evaluation of student learning. In an era of accountability, with testing and performance uppermost in the minds of parents and educators, it is imperative that all instructional methods incorporate high standards, rigorous challenges, and valid assessment methods.