What Is “High Quality” PBL?

In this April 2017 essay, Thom Markham asks how educators should define high quality project-based learning and argues that it depends on the teacher as designer as much as on a list of methods. A section added in 2026 follows Markham’s text and describes the Gold Standard PBL model used today, and what research says about project-based learning results.

Project-based learning relies on an innovative and ever-evolving design process

“You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.”

– Friedrich Nietzsche

This may be the first time in history that Nietzsche’s philosophy has been applied to Project Based Learning (PBL), but it’s a perfect starting point for discussing a topic on the minds of educational leaders and PBL practitioners these days: How do we define ‘high quality’ PBL?

There’s a sense of desperation around this task. The 500-year old model of learning is burned into our DNA by now, and it’s easy to picture rows of students taking notes, listening to a lecture, reading a textbook, and bending over an exam with furrowed brow and pencil in hand. But as PBL has grown in popularity and emerged as the chief learning mode for 21^st century education, no similar shared mental model has emerged that can easily be translated into instruction, training, and teacher evaluation. As one principal noted, “I have no idea what to look for when I come into a classroom where a project is happening. It just looks like chaos.”

In that statement lies the first clue to the challenge of defining high quality PBL: Every project looks slightly different. Precisely because PBL mirrors the chaos inherent in open-ended decision making and problem solving around authentic issues across a vast terrain of potential subjects, it’s hard to categorize and the process is inherently messy.

Because of a deep need to train more PBL teachers, replicate good projects, and advance PBL as a coherent teaching practice, the untidiness does not satisfy educators. It’s definitely time to move forward on developing a shared mental model and set of best practices that distinguish quality PBL from old-style projects or much of the sub-standard PBL taking place in classrooms today.

This task is underway through organizations like the Buck Institute for Education or PBL Global, which feature a field-tested set of tools and design principles for quality projects. The principles outline a planning and design sequence that enables teachers to put together a coherent plan for a project, including setting an authentic challenge, crafting a driving question, forming student teams, encouraging student voice, inserting peer collaboration and design thinking into the process, requiring public products or an exhibition of learning, and building solid formative and summative assessments into the project design.

There is good news on this front. Compared to a short five years ago, many more teachers are familiar with PBL best practices. That’s led to better quality projects. But many of those projects still do not lead to deeper learning. To achieve that goal, the real work lies ahead, and involves a more difficult mind shift. For a very long time, it’s been assumed that any teacher can be given a curriculum, a set of materials, a pacing guide, and enough training — and succeed. In a traditional classroom focused on content delivery, this was possible. But we’re no longer dealing with a linear environment and straightforward delivery and recall.

The great realization is this: PBL is not Geometry. PBL relies on a design process, which can’t be captured in the same concrete way that a traditional lesson plan can be described. The best design leads to a learning experience in which students draw upon knowledge, skills, and strengths to navigate a through a problem, decide a course of action, and offer evidence for their conclusion. Content is vital, but thinking is the ultimate objective.

This is the second clue to defining high quality PBL. Providing a list of PBL methods and best practices, no matter how clever the graphics or inventive the terms or high-sounding the label, will never suffice for training teachers to create a powerful project experience for students. No teacher can take the list of methods off the shelf and put them to work across the curriculum. Designing a project is an interpretative act filtered through the sensibility, knowledge, and experience of the teacher. In fact, turning a teacher into a designer, as PBL requires, inevitably places the teacher back at the center of learning. The ability to deliver content is replaced by a teacher’s professional and even personal ability to assemble the many moving parts of PBL into a coherent, deeper learning experience.

This is not an entirely happy situation because it disrupts well entrenched ideas about how teachers become trained and ready for a 21^st Century classroom. Just as PBL and inquiry has begun to affect traditional notions of ‘academic rigor’ for students, it does the same for defining a teacher’s ‘rigorous’ skill set. Teachers have already begun to respond to this new reality by rejecting traditional professional development and embracing more peer-driven, personalized, just-in-time learning through personal learning networks, social media or on demand courses.

Thus, the final clue: The approach to high quality PBL must be asymmetric, blending methods, personal skill set, authentic experience and feedback from the classroom, and a strategic sense of design and judgment into a holistic vision of the capable PBL teacher. Teaching PBL methods is the starting point, but more critical is the underlying skill set that drives the process and makes the methods come alive, such as mastering the fundamental techniques of an inquiry-based classroom, knowing how to redefine rigor by integrating inquiry, standards, and student voice, learning to coach and mentor, tracking and supporting social-emotional strengths, knowing how to teach and assess 21^st Century skills, teaching design thinking and encouraging innovation, and knowing how to meld a formal curriculum with authentic tasks and assessment.

None of these sub skills come easily, by the way, and all require a highly professional, mature personality that can handle complexity, choice, and collaborative growth. That’s the real challenge for high quality PBL. Can we recruit and train enough teachers of this caliber to take us successfully through the 21^st Century?

Gold Standard PBL: what high quality project-based learning looks like now

Thom Markham recounts above a principal who said that walking into a project-based classroom just looks like chaos. That worry is the reason many schools now use a shared description called Gold Standard PBL. This section sets out that model, compares it with the principles Markham lists, and reviews the evidence for project-based learning that follows from it.

The seven design elements

The Buck Institute for Education publishes, at pblworks.org, Gold Standard PBL: Seven Essential Project Design Elements. The page lists them as follows:

1. A challenging problem or question, set at an appropriate difficulty.
2. Sustained inquiry, an extended cycle of asking questions, finding resources and applying what students learn.
3. Authenticity, through real-world contexts, tasks, tools or impact, or a connection to students’ own lives.
4. Student voice and choice, in how students work and what they create.
5. Reflection on the learning, the quality of work and the obstacles met.
6. Critique and revision, in which students give, receive and act on feedback.
7. Public product, shared with an audience beyond the classroom.

The page also mentions seven teaching practices for facilitating projects without listing them, and it shows no publication date for the model, so a reader should check PBLWorks directly for the current version. Compared with Markham’s 2017 description of the Buck Institute and PBL Global principles, which included an authentic challenge, a driving question, student teams, student voice, peer collaboration, public products and built-in assessment, the seven elements do not name teams or assessment as separate items, although the page refers to a Project Design Rubric and to a set of teaching practices.

Why a list is not enough

Markham argues that a list of methods will never suffice for training teachers, because designing a project is an interpretative act that depends on the teacher’s knowledge and experience. The Gold Standard page is consistent with that point in what it leaves open: the elements describe what a project contains, and they do not say how a teacher designs one. For a principal who wants to know what to look for in a classroom, the elements work as questions to ask during a visit. Is there a problem students are working on that is hard enough? What are students doing right now to find out? Who will see the product? Did students have a say?

What research says about results

The strongest evidence found for this section comes from studies of one model, supported by Lucas Education Research. A University of Washington College of Education news report from February 23, 2021 says the first year of the Knowledge in Action model was a randomized controlled trial, and that PBL students outperformed their peers on exams by eight percentage points in year one and ten in year two. The report adds that they were more likely to earn a score of 3 or above on Advanced Placement exams. Those scores can qualify for college credit.

The page carries cautions. It gives no sample sizes or confidence intervals, and a university news item that promotes a model its creators developed is not a neutral source. The result is for one specific model, Knowledge in Action, with an Advanced Placement outcome, so it does not show that any project in any classroom will produce the same gain. Markham’s concern that much of what is called PBL is below standard is a reminder to look at how a project is designed before expecting such results.

What a district can do

• Agree on a shared description before observing. Staff and evaluators who use the same seven elements will be looking at the same things.
• Invest in teacher design time. Markham’s point that the teacher becomes a designer implies planning time and peer coaching, which the edCircuit professional development guide discusses.
• Start with fewer, stronger projects. One project that has a real audience can teach a staff more than several that do not.
• Connect projects to student strengths. Markham’s companion essay, SEL and PBL: Let’s Have One Conversation, takes up the social-emotional side.

Further Reading

1. News and Tribune-  GCCS to switch to academy model
2. The Columbian – PBL principal combines music, real-world problem solving to prepare students
3. WCNC – SC has the worst schools in the nation? Education Chief says no

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