Project-based learning relies on an innovative and ever-evolving design process
By Thom Markham
“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 21st 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 21st 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 21st 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 21st Century?
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Further Reading
- News and Tribune- GCCS to switch to academy model
- The Columbian – PBL principal combines music, real-world problem solving to prepare students
- WCNC – SC has the worst schools in the nation? Education Chief says no
Since the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) in 2015, governmental support for the education of English language learners (ELLs) has shifted. In order to properly provide for their students, ELL instructors need to understand what these changes mean, what new resources are available, and what accountability measures are in place.
The Block grant, called the Student Support and Academic Enrichment Grant, is something school leaders have since been buzzing about. It’s a sizeable fund — $1.65 billion in fiscal year 2017 — with few apparent restrictions. Initial language in the law appears to give broad flexibility for these funds, of which 95 percent will be allocated to districts. Districts must conduct a needs assessment that will guide the use of funds and are required to prioritize spending so that the highest-need student populations receive the most support. Block grant funds may be spent on:
As the Curriculum Director for 
English language proficiency is now one of the four indicators that must be included in the accountability systems of state plans, so all schools will need to demonstrate that they are improving the outcomes for ELLs. It’s difficult to predict for certain how they can demonstrate this improvement, but the accountability in this area will likely focus on the extent to which schools can move ELL students from pull-out/push-in and sheltered instruction models to full English inclusion.
What if the mayhem going on presently in the United States was not in 2017? What if this was actually 1968 or 2087? Would we keep labeling our educational needs “21st century”? Maybe this is actually the 58th century, as it is in the Hebrew Calendar, or the 48th, as it is in the Chinese? Do we need a “58th Century” or “48th Century” education? Why do we have to label change as such?
Empathy is the pathway between us. Like a trail winding through the woods it connects each of us through shared experiences and emotions. As educators, it connects us to our students, our colleagues and our communities. Empathy can be used to cultivate shared experiences and bring essential understanding to our differences. Kindness, helpfulness, collaboration, authentic connection, happiness and joy are all byproducts of empathy expression. If empathy were at the core of our educational system how might our schools differ? If we were to value empathy and compassion as much as we do academic standards and test scores would our students’ happiness improve?
We are at a time in history when students and staff are confused by the world around them. Bewildered by the endless mass of streaming content, the average person spends upwards of 10.5 hours a day in front of a screen. The neurological impact is largely understudied, and the early indicators do not look good. Research has shown digital stimulation associated with screen time can damage an area of the brain called the insula. This area is directly related to empathy development along with other brain activities such as executive functioning. All of this is hugely important to the brain functions and happiness of our current students.
Empathy requires specific conditions in which it can thrive. It demands time and attention to active listening and thoughtful speaking. Without the practiced art of conversation, empathy cannot be communicated well, and it absolutely requires more than 140 characters.
There are many things a school and district can do to meet the need for empathy creation directly. It is imperative that counseling departments be fully staffed with experts in the field. Professional development around organizational empathy will bring about a positive staff attitude prepared to engage in the task of empathetic education. In my school, we have instituted Screen Free Fridays to allow our students and staff a break from digital inputs. All are steps in the right direction; however, we are swimming against a mighty digital and economic current.
