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"John Mergendoller is Executive Director of the Buck Institute for Education, where he leads a talented team focused on building the capacity of districts, schools and teachers to do high quality Project Based learning. He has taught in both elementary and high schools, and received his Ph.D. in Education and Psychology from the University of Michigan."

"Education is catastrophically deficient in trust. Pro-accountability education reformers presume that, absent carrots and sticks, classrooms would be overrun with lazy and incapable teachers. Traditional instructors presume that, absent carrots and sticks, classrooms would be overrun with lazy and incapable students. Both viewpoints emerge from a noble desire to make classrooms high-performance spaces, but in actuality they suppress excellence."

"On a given day, how much time do your students spend working on their fluency? At the elementary level, hours are devoted to reading and speaking fluency. In middle and high school, students read aloud, deliver oral presentations, and write in a variety of formats to improve upon their language fluency. And yet, while we devote a significant portion of every school day to a student's reading, writing and language fluency, how much time is devoted to the development of their technology fluency? "

It's a practical guide to building 21st century-student competency in the "4 C's" - critical thinking, collaboration, communication, and creativity/innovation. The book is designed for middle school and high school teachers, instructional coaches, and school leaders. It also shows how the 4 C's in a PBL context align with the Common Core State Standards. Sample projects, CCSS-aligned 4 C's rubrics, tips for technology in projects, notes for school leaders on building support for 21st century learning with PBL. Authors: Suzie Boss, author and BIE National Faculty, and John Larmer, Editor-in-Chief, BIE

Another blog piece by Andrew Miller on how to make good DQ's

In 1968, two researchers conducted a fascinating study that proved the extent to which teacher expectations influence student performance. Positive expectations influence performance positively, and negative expectations influence performance negatively. In educational circles, this has been termed the Pygmalion Effect, or more colloquially, a self-fulfilling prophecy. What has always intrigued me about this study is specifically what the teachers did to communicate that they believed a certain set of students had "unusual potential for academic growth." The research isn't overly explicit about this, but it indicates that the teachers "may have paid closer attention to the students, and treated them differently in times of difficulty." This begs the following questions: Why can't teachers treat all of their students like this? How do we communicate to students whether we believe in them or not?