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We do not need to teach creativity, but rather inspire its daily practice. Somewhere along the way, we simply forgot to honor this innate gift and how to access its power. Our role as educators is to encourage learning experiences that increase the ability to recognize and listen to our inner voice.

This blog is an excerpt from the book Bringing Innovation to School: Empowering Students to Thrive in a Changing World, published June 2012 by Solution Tree.

I had the privilege to 'hangout' with Suzie Boss and Jamie McGrath to talk about PBL and how messy it can be.

Good review from #PBLWorld about driving questions, and links to more resources, including from BIE and Edutopia

Reflections on student engagement in his/her own learning and inquiry.

"caffolding Culture How are you building a culture of collaboration in your classroom? Teachers should not forget the importance of scaffolding the skills needed for students to work in groups. Paired with a good collaboration rubric, where students know what is expected of them in terms of behavior, teachers need to scaffold skills such consensus building, effective communication, and the ability to critique. Educators need to explicitly teach and assess collaboration, a critical 21st century skill, if they want their group work to be productive."

Do you really 'cover' the material for a class or do you design learning experiences which lead students to discover / uncover things for themselves? PBL offers many opportunities to acquire critical thinking skills which are far more important than covering a list of standards.

Edutopia is offering a free month-long PBL camp (I'm facilitating). We're going to use the oil spill as the starting place for designing collaborative projects that get students thinking as problem-solvers. Great opportunities here for finding classroom partners and like-minded collaborators. Please join us!

Want to know your learning style? Take the quiz. There are 24 questions, and it will take less than five minutes to complete. Try not to think too hard -- just go with your first thought when describing your daily activities and interests. At the end, you'll find out more about how you learn.

In this Edutopia post, I share ideas from teachers who are using today's headlines to design relevant projects. The challenges: maintaining student attention once the news cycle ends, and going deep into content areas. Pls share more ideas in comments.

Troubles in the Flatlands! Cautionary tale re: global, collaborative, hugely popular project and potential for copyright issues.

Here's a new Edutopia post where I use Tim Brown's strategies from his book, Change by Design, as guidelines for project-based learning. Feedback welcome.

Edutopia post includes highlights from recent webinar series featuring some outstanding PBL teachers