Project-Based Learning, at its core, is a purposefully planned unit of study where students learn content as they work towards solving an overarching problem to answer a driving question. To ensure that learning happens throughout a PBL and not just at the end, we need to carefully plan the how students will learn content. The Map of Student learning puts all your instructional decisions and plans in one place: phases of your PBL, learning outcomes of each place, instructional plans (aka lesson plans) to guide students to learn, and assessments that will help you measure if students have mastered the learning outcomes.

This pages gives guidance and resources on how to do this, but ultimately you decide what is most helpful to your planning process. As you sit down to design your Map of Student Learning we recommend you have your standards and any past lesson plans or instructional materials and assessments.

Incorporating Sustained Inquiry is an essential part of the PBL planning process. We need to shift our teaching practice from starting with direct instruction to seeing what students can learn independently first, then filling in the gaps with direct instruction. This helps in several ways:

1. It makes the time in the classroom more efficient. Less time is wasted on instructional strategies or practices that do not lead to learning, and more time is focused on what will help students remember content over the long term.

2. When students do the work, they feel more empowered and are more likely to engage in the learning process, which in turn increases their likelihood of learning and remembering content.

3. It frees up an instructor's time to manage and monitor the progress of a PBL and support students who need it most.

To do this well, you will need to employ different teaching and learning strategies. Below are some lists to get you started.

• Student-Centered Instructional Strategies (One-Pager)

• Itty Bitty Book of Protocols

• Visible Thinking (practices and routines to make student thinking visible)

• Reading Rockets (Provides strategies for supporting students to learn from reading)

One of the questions we get most often is, "How do we grade a PBL?" Let's confront a huge myth about PBL: PBL is not just one group grade - Just as you would with any unit, you should be grading and assessing student learning along the way. Explore the resources below to learn more about assessment and grading within a PBL. 

• I Let Students Choose Their Grading Criteria, and Here’s How It Went

• Choosing Effective Assessments for PBL

• Practical PBL: The Ongoing Challenges of Assessment

• Evaluation Within PBL

• PBL Pilot: Formative Assessment and PBL

• The Elephant in the Room: Grading in PBL

It may also be helpful to have a guiding rubric for students on the important parts of their PBL. Below are resources to help you create rubrics.

• Checklist Rubric

• Developmental rubric

  • Collaboration

  • Prototype

• Single Point Rubric

  • Example: Advanced Manufacturing Single Point Rubric 

Another key to supporting learning within a PBL is to provide time for students to reflect on their work and make revisions before finalizing any major components of a PBL. Reflecting throughout a PBL on the learning goals also helps them to make the connection between what they are doing in a PBL and how that translates to learning course content. As you plan your PBL, go through and identify places where 

1. Students can give and receive feedback on major products,

2. Students reflect on their learning in each phase of the project and

3. Students can make revisions before final submissions. 

To the right are videos, articles and other resources to support this component of PBL.