Overview of Project Based Learning

Reflections & Questions About PBL Resources

Resource 1: Buck Institute for Education (BIE) 
Gold Standard PBL (1)

2 Separate related components:
   1. Essential Project Design Elements
   2. Project Based Teaching Practice

Image taken from: bie.org








BIE states that PBL:

• Makes school more engaging
• Improves learning
• Builds success skills for college, career, and life
• Helps address standards
• Provides opportunities for students to use technology
• Makes teaching more enjoyable and rewarding
• Connects students and schools with communities and the real world

I agree, that this would be an amazing way for the students to learn, but are public schools ready to transition to this? My questions/comments to these statements would be:

• With all the focus on standardized testing, will this prepare students to perform well?          PBL and Standardized Tests? It Can Work! (2) - According to an article in Edutopia, "...PBL projects can not only serve as a scaffold for these tests, but also prepare our students for college, career, and life!" As in current classroom work, skills that the students need in order to be successful on the standardized tests can be embedded into the PBL lessons.
• How do teachers ensure that students are learning what they need to know?                          How Do I Get High-Quality Student Work in PBL? (3) John Larmer lists some things that will help to ensure successful PBL: 

1. Use of rubrics and exemplars
2. Effective formative assessment
3. Enough time
4. Authentic subject matter
5. Classroom/school cultivated a culture of quality

• Will this model of learning prepare students for college or will they arrive at colleges with the expectation that they learn/test under the "old school" model?                                                  
• What will it take to get schools to support the change and will they be ready to support the challenges it will involve?                                                                                                        

Resource 2: Edutopia - 5 Keys to Rigorous PBL (4)

Series of 6 Videos

1. Real World Connections - Use a driving question to address a real world problem. Students choose the path that they want to take in order to explore the problem. They decide who outside of the school would be good to connect with in order to work on the problem, and by bringing in an outside expert will make the project more real and personal for the students. Taking students out into the community, having people visit the classroom and using the Internet are all feasible options for making connections. 
2. Building Rigorous Projects - Use PBL for the "meat" of the assignment, not as an extra. Design the projects with the standards in mind. Also, the final exam requirements need to be kept in mind when designing the PBL. Accountability for the meeting the standards is still important. Students will learn to use critical thinking and collaboration skills,  and to be creative, while they are learning. Students will not only obtain the knowledge that they need, but learn to apply that knowledge at the same time.
3. Structuring Collaboration for Student Success - Teacher needs to plan ahead by properly grouping the students, teach them about teamwork (language used, roles, responsibilities, processes), supply outlines, how to use each other, respect for each other, teacher is a facilitator, create agendas so that the students are able to be more independent and guide themselves.
4. Facilitating Learning in a Student-Centered Environment - Scaffold all of the lessong so that the students know exactly what to do. Supply clues, ideas, guidance, but the students do the work. Introduce a topic in a way that the students will want to discover more about it. Students need to work together to find answers. Build in opportunities for the students to reflect and have conversations with their piers in order to build knowledge and understanding. Have learning goals for every day so that students can track their progress so that they know that they are learning. 
5. Embedding Assessment Throughout the Project - Keep track of where students are as they work through the project to be sure that they are on track. Perform a lot of small formative assessments, such as: checking in to see how the students feel about reaching their daily target; checking for understanding; opportunities to assess themselves and their teammates. The culminating event, product, idea, or solution is the true test of understanding and knowledge.

One of my concerns that I mentioned after the first resource was if this approach would prepare students for their future educational experiences. I was glad to hear in the second video that exams are still required, because I think that this is still a skill that students will need in high school and college. 

PBL does require a lot of planning and preparation of a different type than what classroom teachers are used to. It would seem that if a school was going to change over to this model, administration should commit to a lot of professional development for the teachers to ensure that it is implemented properly. Unfortunately, many times schools "jump" into new methods without supplying the needed training for teachers.

Work Cited

1. (2015). Why We Changed Our Model of the “8 Essential Elements of PBL” - BIE. Retrieved May 10, 2016, from http://bie.org/object/document/why_we_changed_our_model_of_the_8_essential_elements_of_pbl.
2. 
   
   (2012). PBL and Standardized Tests? It Can Work! | Edutopia. Retrieved May 11, 2016, from http://www.edutopia.org/blog/PBL-and-standardized-tests-andrew-miller.
3. (2013). How to Get High-Quality Student Work in PBL | Edutopia. Retrieved May 11, 2016, from http://www.edutopia.org/blog/high-quality-student-work-pbl-john-larmer.
4. (2015). 5 Keys to Rigorous Project-Based Learning | Edutopia. Retrieved May 10, 2016, from http://www.edutopia.org/video/5-keys-rigorous-project-based-learning.