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Encouraging students to engage in inquiry, explore real-world contexts, and share their learning lies at the heart of PBL. As an instructional framework, it allows teachers to achieve these goals while still meeting curriculum requirements.

He used PBL to: Guide his students' problem solving Support their collaboration and critical thinking Provide voice and choice in how they demonstrated their learning Empower them to realize that their contributions to the community make a tangible difference

However, viewing PBL as a process rather than a product means that teachers can fit it within existing curricular objectives, as exemplified by Jodie Deinhammer.

According to the Stanford d-School process guide, design thinking begins with empathy: What do your students consider important? Which topics spark their curiosity? How might they want to engage with this specific content? How might they choose to demonstrate their learning?

In the next phase of design thinking, you define a problem. In school terms, this could be a curricular unit, a set of skills, or a broader community challenge.

With the problem articulated, start generating ideas. During the ideate phase, the goal is breadth because the answer may not be readily apparent. Many of these ideas then turn into prototypes, simplified versions of potential solutions.

This gives you the freedom to experiment without concerns about failing with students. When ready, produce the final lesson, unit, activity, or even a complete PBL experience.

2. Reflection and Goal Setting

Throughout the project, students should be reflecting on their work and setting goals for further learning. This is a great opportunity for them to set personalized learning goals and for you to target instruction specific to the goals they set.

3. Mini-Lessons, Centers, and Resources

Perhaps you offer mini-lessons or center work to support your students' learning, or maybe you show students a variety of resources from which to learn, including videos, games, and readings.

1. Differentiate Through Teams

4. Voice and Choice in Products

Another essential component of PBL is student voice and choice, both in terms of what students produce and how they use their time.

"How can I allow for voice and choice here?"

5. Differentiate Through Formative Assessments

as you check for understanding along the way, you can formatively assess in different ways when appropriate.

6. Balance Teamwork and Individual Work

We want to leverage collaboration as much as content. However, there are times when individual instruction and practice may be needed. You need to differentiate the learning environment because some students learn better on their own, and others learn better in a team. In fact, we all need time to process and think alone just as much as we need time to learn from our peers. Make sure to balance both so that you are supporting a collaborative environment while allowing time to meet students on an individual basis.

consider Werberger's questions for thinking about final products: Will students love what they have created? Where will this go when it's done? Will it make the world a better or more beautiful place?

As a resource to help with your own project remodeling, think about the teaching and learning strategies you notice in the film, such as Socratic seminars, authentic deadlines, and an emphasis on public exhibitions. Do you see ideas you might want to borrow to improve your next project?

How will your next project help students learn to think more analytically and creatively to design solutions to complex problems? How might you remodel a project to help students get better at monitoring and directing their own learning?

evaluations should have four dimensions: Self Peer Teacher Audience

oral and written feedback is more personal and specific.

Self-evaluation is an especially important piece of the summative evaluation because it taps into higher-level thinking and awareness of the material, process, and final product.

Peer evaluations are unique to collaborative projects, and I find that they facilitate a better collaborative process because the teacher considers the student experience. We can use this information to modify the workflow for the next project and hold students accountable for their work (effort, constructive contributions to the team, etc.).

allow for audience feedback to evaluate that project's levels of success. Public critiques (such as comments on blog posts) and class discussion help provide wider perspective and may even carry more meaning for the student than teacher feedback.

Find a combination of both public and private evaluations that you feel is right for your students or the project.

Critique Sandwich A negative comment about a problem or flaw is presented between positive comments about something done well. "I Like That. . ." Require feedback that includes answers to all of these statements: I like that. . . I wonder if. . . Best next steps might be. . .

Rose/Thorn/Bud This critique also addresses the good (rose) and the bad (thorn), but also the potential (bud) for what may be a good idea but needs work.

Perhaps you're scrambling to coordinate project showcase events before the holiday break. But it's well worth your time, while your memory's fresh, to make some notes and gather information about how things went this time around.

Don't rely on your own impressions. Ask students to share their insights about the strengths and weaknesses of a project.

By inviting student feedback, you demonstrate respect for their opinions and underscore the value of student voice.

Be sure to ask open-ended questions

Some PBL teachers make reflection a habit by blogging about projects as they unfold. In the process, they create an archive of observations that they can refer back to later.

While individual teacher reflection is valuable, reflecting with colleagues can be even better.

Think of yourselves as doctors on rounds, suggests the Coalition of Essential Schools (11), as you look closely for evidence of student learning.

In "Wild About Cramlington," (12) teacher Darren Mead describes the challenge of giving his students an experience with "just enough failure to act and think in a way different from the normal school day."

Then Project Aristotle began looking at group norms – the culture of unwritten rules that guide people when they collaborate – and hit pay dirt. It turned out that two group norms were shared by virtually all of Google’s most effective teams: -   Equal air time – In teams that got the best results, members participated roughly the same amount during meetings. “As long as everyone got a chance to talk, the team did well,” said Google researcher Anita Woolley. “But if only one person or a small group spoke all the time, the collective intelligence declined.” -   Interpersonal sensitivity – Effective team members had the ability to intuit how colleagues felt by their tone of voice, facial expressions, and other nonverbal cues. The members of less-effective teams were less tuned in to their teammates’ feelings.

The behaviors that create psychological safety – conversational turn-taking and empathy – are part of the same unwritten rules we often turn to, as individuals, when we need to establish a bond. And those human bonds matter as much at work as anywhere else. In fact, they sometimes matter more.”

In the best teams, members listen to one another and show sensitivity to feelings and needs.”

He believes there are two “ubiquitous features of conventional school environments” that trigger and reinforce the psychological factors noted above, augment the disadvantages with which minority students enter school, and feed the peer pressures to disengage from schooling – all of which creates a self-reinforcing downward spiral of achievement. The two features are: -   Students being given work that is too difficult for their current academic level; -   Students getting low grades on their work rather than frequent, individualized, objective feedback.

“The hypothesis,” say Yeh, “is that the conventional school system is inadvertently structured in a way that fosters disengagement, thereby reducing effort, which depresses achievement and grades, causing demoralization, which further reduces engagement and achievement.” The process kicks in around third grade, when struggling students begin to view themselves as intellectually inferior because their grades are lower than their classmates’, contributing to decreased self-efficacy and increasing passivity; it accelerates in middle school, at which point low grades strongly correlate with eventually dropping out.

What is to be done? Yeh’s theory is that by flipping the two pernicious factors, schools can turn the downward spiral into a virtuous upward cycle of achievement. That involves: -   Adjusting task difficulty for low-performing students to an appropriate level of challenge so that if they apply effective effort, they will be successful. -   Rapid performance feedback with respect to a standard, not other students.

He cites positive research on two programs using this approach – Reading Assessment and Math Assessment – and reports on a systematic study comparing different interventions aimed at closing the achievement gap – charter schools, voucher programs, an additional year of school, various high-quality pre-school programs, full-day kindergarten, class size reduction, value-added assessment, summer school, teacher salary incentives, teacher experience, teacher PD, longer school day, computer instruction, tutoring, and school reform. Rapid assessment is dramatically more successful at raising student achievement than any of the others.

by far the most powerful and cost-effective intervention is to adjust task difficulty and provide students with prompt, objective feedback on their efforts.

“When students engage in project-based learning over the course of their time in school,” says John Larmer (Buck Institute for Education) in this article in Educational Leadership, “there’s an accumulating effect. They feel empowered. They see that they can make a difference.” In addition, they’re more likely to acquire the skills, knowledge, and dispositions needed for college and career success.

the key elements of project-based learning, carefully planned and skillfully managed by the teacher:

A challenging problem or question

Sustained inquiry

Authenticity

Student voice and choice

Reflection

Critique and revision

Public product

four ways that project-based learning can go off the rails and not fulfill its potential: -   Mistake #1: Using materials that aren’t truly project-based; beware of PBL-lite! -   Mistake #2: Providing inadequate training and support for teachers; one-shot workshops are not enough. -   Mistake #3: Over-using projects in the curriculum; basic skills can still be taught in a more conventional format. -   Mistake #4: Implementing project-based learning on an ad hoc basis; to get the long-term effect, students need to engage in high-quality projects on a regular basis through their school years.

AltSchools encourage students to dive into topics they’re passionate about, with teachers tracking everything they do using classroom video cameras and elaborate K-8 databases. The schools make a point of shaping diverse student bodies by giving scholarships to students whose parents can’t afford the $30,000-a-year tuition.

We are raising a generation that will have the sum of human knowledge at their fingertips, for every minute of their life, so clearly education needs to change to accommodate that.”

“Basically, what we have told teachers is we have hired you for your creative teacher brains, and anytime you are doing something that doesn’t require your creative teacher brain that a computer could be doing as well as or better than you, then a computer should do it.”

To a computer measuring keystrokes, a student zoning out because he’s bored is indistinguishable from one who is moved by her book to imagine a world of her own.”

“People are very focused on the algorithm. But equally important is the quality of the materials” – the clarity of the math questions and the worthiness of the readings being presented on students’ computer screens. Willingham also notes that teachers in high-tech classrooms often have to prepare two lesson plans – one that uses the technology and one for when the technology breaks down.

Hire capable, well-matched teachers. Detailed advertisements and postings are important to giving candidates a clear idea of each position, says Clement. She also recommends longer interviews with more candidates, enlisting experienced teachers to take part in interviews, and gathering information on candidates from multiple sources.

Provide continuous professional development. This should include induction that eases new teachers into the demands of the full job – orientation before classes begin, well-matched mentors through the first five years, and ongoing PD specific to rookies’ needs.

Use colleagues to provide feedback. Traditional “gotcha” teacher evaluation has rarely been helpful in supporting new teachers, says Clement. Trained mentors can provide non-evaluative feedback that really makes a difference, perhaps with a firewall between their observations and the formal evaluation process. Of course it’s important that incoming teachers know the district’s criteria for effective teaching and are familiar with how administrators will assess their work.

Understand millennials. “This generation of teachers wants to network and have input,” says Clement. Most have a strong preference for electronic interaction, and administrators and colleagues should meet young teachers where they are tech-wise and provide strong online resources.

• Provide leadership opportunities. “While many new teachers are just surviving, others actively seek an avenue to truly make a difference,” says Clement. To find fulfillment in teaching and stay in the profession, they need to get involved in meaningful roles outside their classrooms. Some possibilities: speaking at induction ceremonies and serving on a welcome committee for the newest hires; leading book study groups; taking part in social service organizations on campus; and serving on curriculum committees

students who read about scientists’ struggles, whether intellectual or personal, got better grades in science after reading the texts. The positive effect was most pronounced among students whose science grades were low before the experiment.

Another finding: both before and after reading the texts, students who had a “growth” mindset (effort, not innate talent, determines success) tended to do better in science classes than students with a “fixed” mindset.

problem-BL is still more often seen in the post-secondary world than in K-12, where project-BL is more common. Problem-based learning typically follow prescribed steps: Presentation of an "ill-structured" (open-ended, "messy") problem Problem definition or formulation (the problem statement) Generation of a "knowledge inventory" (a list of "what we know about the problem" and "what we need to know") Generation of possible solutions Formulation of learning issues for self-directed and coached learning Sharing of findings and solutions

By using problem-BL, these teachers feel they can design single-subject math projects -- aka "problems" -- that effectively teach more math content by being more limited in scope than many typical project-BL units.