Reinventing PBL to Focus on Human Performance

In this 2017 essay, Thom Markham argues that project based learning should aim at what Markham calls brightness and proposes six shifts, including new rubrics for human performance. A new section after Markham’s text looks at how project based learning assessment works in practice and what recent research adds.

Watching fourth graders working in a team on a creative PBL science project (Their problem to solve: Educate parents and community about how common devices like TV’s and phones rely on wave technology) reminded me that great project based learning aims to produce brightness. That’s a non-evidence-based term unrelated to the repetitive mantra of more rigor.

Brightness is hard to define, but certain markers identify it: Big eyes, with greater than usual sparkle; wide grins; lots of excited chatter; deep concentration; and body language that signals increased confidence and maturity—exactly what those 4th graders were demonstrating.

The underlying cause of brightness is no mystery. It’s a natural byproduct of exceptional human performance driven by the opportunity to thrive and shine, and a state of being reached by learners of all ages when they accept a challenge, engage in creative work, experience intellectual mastery, trade ideas, find joy in trying and persisting, craft an acceptable solution, discover new facets about themselves, sense their growth, and share the whole process with someone who cares.  

Do educators like brightness? Of course. It’s a fuzzy outcome, but it warms the heart of every teacher because it’s direct evidence of internal awakening. ‘Iceberg’ traits such as curiosity, creativity, and openness have been stirred. Visible joy equals meaningful learning, and often leads to higher test scores. And, as most educators sense, the tide of history is flowing toward fuzzy outcomes. At some point, they will be considered primary outcomes rather than chance byproducts of an academic system.  

Here’s the argument: We’ve hit that point. Brightness now matters more than test scores. The globalized, networked, just in time world invaded classrooms a decade ago, but has finally forced upon education the Great Shift: People’s strengths count more than credentials. Many hard truths emerge from this new reality. Knowledge without application has less value. Attitude matters. Openness and flexibility determine success. Skillfulness, discernment, engagement, and creative impulse become the rulers of the land. And, the final fact: Today’s system, with its focus on content rather than human performance, will be tested until it breaks.

There’s a lot of noise in education right now, but only one signal: The need to invent a system designed for brightness so that inner strengths routinely surface in children. Can it be done? Yes, if we weave together three dominant trends in schooling today—the rise of PBL, our growing commitment to social emotional competency, and the refocus on student agency and inquiry—into a coherent human performance system.

Transforming PBL: From High Quality to High Performance

Advocates for ‘high quality’ PBL push teachers to adopt best practices that go beyond traditional ‘projects’ and engage students in authentic inquiry, deeper problem solving, and applying core skills such as teamwork and communication. This is good work, but slow—and there’s a reason: PBL relies on an outdated platform. It’s built on teacher methodology, tying it to a behavioral worldview which presumes that standards-based thinking and ‘strategies’ provoke deeper student awareness and problem-solving. While a great deal of lip service is paid to authenticity and student-driven work, most PBL doesn’t really begin with the student. It’s seen as an educational method, not a system to support human growth.

This was not always the case. In fact, PBL is a method for brightness. That’s what it’s intended to do. PBL began as ‘problem based learning’ in Canadian and Dutch medical schools in the 1960’s. Not coincidentally, this was the exact dawn of the human potential movement, in which pioneers like Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers began developing a humanistic approach to psychology that emphasized self-aspiration, inner reflection, and a ‘person-centered’ approach to life. This cultural shift influenced early adherents of PBL, who wanted to move prospective doctors in the direction of deeper learning through less textbook diagnosis and more communication with patients.

If we want a replicable model of PBL that incorporates standards and knowledge, but also reliably yields successful fuzzy outcomes, the first step is to reclaim the belief that PBL is designed to facilitate personal growth and unleash human potential. It’s a psychological process as well as an educational tool.

With that mindset, PBL takes on a different hue. The principles of high quality project design are familiar to well-trained PBL teachers, and a reinvented PBL retains those principles. But each can be infused with a higher purpose by intentionally eliciting social emotional strengths and supporting growth while learning takes place. This requires systematic design, not lesson planning. The principles function as parts of the whole, creating a continuous set of Petri-like conditions that work synergistically to shift a student’s awareness in the direction of openness, curiosity, flexibility, perseverance, discernment, deeper engagement, mastery of content and—eventually—wisdom. Consider a transformed PBL process that can be put in place right now:

From standards to purposeful challenge.

Every great project begins with a ‘why’ that starts the engines of the inner life and spurs openness. Preparing for a test is not a ‘why’ nor do standards stir the soul. Begin with powerful, meaningful ideas that invoke meaning, purpose, and service. Go deep, then import standards into the project. The times demand it.

From a Driving Question to a ‘wicked’ problem.

The true test of the quality of a Driving Question is whether it forces discernment and flexibility. A wicked problem with multiple solutions and clear constraints—the kind that dominates life today—invites powerful critical thinking that invokes deep inner resources. PBL is NOT a brain-based exercise; it’s whole body learning experience that yields appreciation for the richness and complexity of knowledge and lingers throughout a lifetime as curiosity. 

From fast to slow learning.

PBL oriented to human performance requires abandoning the folk myth that fast learners are smarter and that coverage equals learning. The quality of the work should include attention to detail, perseverance, reflection, and creative effort. The underlying change is from a ‘hand it in’ classroom culture to a design, draft, fail and perform culture that values depth over coverage.  

From groups to intentional collaboration.

Group work inspires chat, but when interacting in well-organized teams or cohorts students must stretch communication skills. Those skills manifest as good listening or visible support of teammates. But ultimately, communication succeeds in the presence of empathy, tolerance, kindness, and self-awareness. Since working in teams brings out individual personality, teamwork gives teachers a grand opportunity to observe students and coach them on behavior and self-restraint.  

From educational rubrics to human performance measures.

PBL has birthed a set of excellent performance rubrics that describe skills as well as content, but the new generation of rubrics must add measures that focus on the strengths underlying the skills, such as confidence, resiliency, and other factors that support the growth mindset. It will not be enough to hope that students develop strengths; the next generation of rubrics must show and tell.

From teacher to co-creator.

Differentiating ‘teacher centered’ from ‘student centered’ is no longer useful. In the system to come, everyone plays a role as a learning partner holding respect for each other. In PBL, the teacher designs, guides, mentors, teaches, and evaluates—but also incorporates creative insights, student wisdom, and opportunities to produce new knowledge. All this cannot happen unless teachers take a similar journey as students: Toward more depth of awareness, acceptance of multiple talents, deeper empathy, a never-satisfied curiosity, and the experience of the joy of work well done and knowledge well applied. The goal for both teacher and student? Brightness.

Project based learning assessment in 2026: how to judge the work and the growth behind it

Thom Markham proposes above that project based learning should aim for what Markham calls brightness, and Markham ends with a call for a new generation of rubrics that measure confidence and resilience as well as content and skills. That raises a question teachers and principals face in every project: project based learning assessment, meaning what a teacher looks at, when, and who takes part in judging it. This section sets out how a widely used framework answers that question, what 2021 research adds, and how Markham’s proposal can be tried carefully.

How a standard framework describes assessment

PBLWorks, a long-standing provider of project based learning training, lists seven project based teaching practices. One of them, assessing student learning, calls for both ongoing (formative) and final (summative) checks on knowledge, understanding and what the framework calls success skills. Students also assess their own work and their peers’ work, covering both team and individual contributions. That combination matters because a team project can hide differences between members, and a grade given only for the finished product cannot show where learning stalled along the way.

PBLWorks’ essential project design elements, last dated May 2023 on the page, put assessment inside the structure of a project. Two of the seven elements are directly relevant. Critique and revision asks students to give and receive feedback using rubrics, models and protocols and then improve their work, which shifts formative assessment from the teacher alone to the whole class. Reflection asks students and teachers to think regularly about what, how and why they are learning. The same page says each project should explicitly teach and assess one or two success skills, not a long list.

Where the driving question comes in

Markham asks teachers to move from a driving question to a wicked problem with several possible answers and clear constraints. PBLWorks describes the driving question as the focus of the project, similar to a thesis in an essay: open-ended, hard to answer simply, and linked to learning goals. One example it gives is how a school could improve its recycling system to reduce waste.

The assessment connection is practical. A question with several defensible answers cannot be graded against a single answer key, so a teacher needs criteria before the project begins. The criteria usually cover the content the standards require, the quality of reasoning, the strength of the evidence, and the skills of collaboration and communication. Students who see those criteria at the start can use them while they draft.

What the 2021 studies add

Jill Barshay of The Hechinger Report reported in 2021 on four studies financed through Lucas Education Research, in third-grade science, second-grade social studies, sixth-grade science and high school Advanced Placement courses. Students in the project-based curricula had higher achievement than peers taught the usual way. In the sixth-grade study, which involved more than 100 students in high-poverty California schools, students scored 11 percentage points higher on a science assessment. One study also measured social-emotional outcomes and found higher results.

The assessments in those studies were mostly science tests, Advanced Placement exams and state tests. So the results show that students in well-supported project curricula can do well on conventional measures. They do not show that a teacher can reliably measure confidence or resilience. Barshay also notes the limits: the curricula were highly structured, the term project based learning is loosely defined, and the studies do not prove that every teacher should teach this way.

Trying Markham’s human performance measures

Markham’s call for rubrics that capture strengths such as confidence and resiliency is a proposal, and it comes with a practical difficulty. Qualities of that kind are harder to observe and are easier to misjudge than a cited source or a correct calculation. A teacher who tries it can reduce the risk in a few ways.

1. Describe observable behavior. Instead of scoring confidence, a rubric line can describe what a student does, such as revising a draft after critique or explaining a decision to an outside audience.
2. Keep the content grade separate. A student’s understanding of the standard and growth in a success skill are different questions, and a single score can blur them.
3. Use self and peer reflection as evidence. Students’ own accounts of what changed in their thinking sit naturally beside the teacher’s observations, as the framework above suggests.
4. Limit the number of success skills. One or two per project is enough to give feedback that students can use.
5. Share the results with caution. A rubric for personal strengths is best used for coaching and conversation, and families should see it described that way.

For a school adopting project based learning, the sensible order is to make the assessments of content and skills dependable first, then add reflection on personal growth as a supplement. Markham describes a goal worth considering, and the teaching practices above give a way to begin without waiting for a new generation of rubrics to be written.

For a related view, see the edCircuit article Is Project Based Learning Here to Stay?

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