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First, think skills. A coherent approach to inquiry begins with knowing that skills, not content, underlie the inquiry process. To link PBL with other parts of the school, have all teachers to sign onto the two chief skills required in PBL, teamwork and presentation. Use school-wide rubrics to assess the skills. Think of projects as the time when students really practice those skills at a high level for public consumption.

Think strategically. Plan for PBL over the course of the year, but don't expect every teacher to do a project. For instance, step back and analyze an entire ninth-grade class. How many projects will they experience in the course of the year? Who will conduct the projects? If students participate in three or four projects every year, they will get what they need.

Use PBL for entrepreneurial inquiry. When teachers want students to go deep into an important topic, grapple with a community issue, or experience the persistence and intellectual rigor necessary to dig in to something meaningful, that's the perfect time for PBL. Otherwise, normal inquiry gets the job done.

Differentiate subjects. Not all subjects fit PBL in the same way. Courses such as AP Calculus and Physics may use a shorter, more contained problem-based approach, or a more activity-based approach. Humanities projects may take on community issues. Both approaches are valid and use similar design principles, but have different objectives.

2. Blend surface knowledge and deeper learning.

It is impossible at this historical juncture to figure out how much students need to put into hard-wired long term memory versus how much information they simply download, pass through, and apply. Google is ruining the curriculum, no doubt about it. On the other hand, you have to know in order to think. But in the zeal to expand the constructivist side of PBL, we're losing the knowing-the kind of facts, terms, and vocabulary of the discipline that allow a student to express knowledge coherently. This is not a matter of test preparation as much as a design issue to make sure students have a sufficient knowledge base. Some solutions:

Let go of theory. In theory, a question or challenge posed in PBL is so compelling that students will learn all essential facts necessary to answer the question. In practice, this doesn't work. Teachers must make an intentional effort to design surface knowledge into a project. This is not so easy, because PBL focuses on authentic questions that lead to open ended problem solving. Content can get lost, and often does.

Analyze the project. Start a project design with a creative challenge and end with an authentic product, but carefully analyze the design to make sure essential facts and concepts will be taught. If students require certain facts and concepts for tests, but those facts don't fit into the design, take a breath and just teach them. The project won't fail because you took one day to 'cover' material.

Use direct instruction. Direct instruction is not the same as boring lectures-and it's time to distinguish them. Direct instruction works quite well when dosed with questioning and small group discussions. Use it to transmit essential information efficiently and quickly during the course of a project.

3. Start with a sophisticated student-centered culture.

The greatest number of failures in PBL occurs in schools that attempt to graft PBL onto a traditional, row-centered, front of the room classroom culture. A teacher-centered system and a student-centered system are different life forms. One is focused on content delivery and a "hand it in, hand it back" approach; the other requires openness, coaching, and an "errors are fine" philosophy. Unless a teacher uses the tools of a positive culture and high performance, students don't engage at the level necessary to persist, investigate, and hold themselves accountable for mastery. Creating this culture requires more than liking your students. Instead, it is necessary for educators to intentionally teach students to perform skillfully and learn to coach those skills at a high level. Some steps:

Reflect. Your personality and attitude, particularly listening skills and openness, will directly affect the quality of the project. System wide, remember that PBL is personality driven. If certain teachers don't embrace PBL, but do a good job of stimulating inquiry, let them be. Everyone will be happier.

Build student capacity. Prior to projects, take time for students to reflect on their skills and attitudes, practice team building, setting norms, and examining responsibilities and aspirations. For PBL to succeed, the entire pace of instruction must be slowed.

Know the neuroscience. Every study shows the same results: Your attitude, beliefs, and hidden expectations are communicated to students-and change their brain. Take care with messaging.

4. Make collaboration as powerful in school as it is in life.

Group work and cooperative learning are giving PBL a hangover. It is time to make a fundamental shift in the direction of teamwork. In a relationship-driven world, the era of the individual scholar is coming to an end. PBL is a perfect method for helping reveal how peers will work together in the future to create and analyze content. Teachers can speed this process.

Make collaboration the foundational skill. Instead of seeing 21st-century skills as a laundry list, prioritize by making teamwork the basis for academic work, particularly in projects. Move from the loose language of "groups" to the more accountable language of teams and cohorts.

Make teams purposeful. Bring teams together for the purpose of creating better products, not just discussing and brainstorming.

Require teams to participate deeply in the design process. Have them regularly and frequently exchange design ideas, test prototypes, follow protocols, use the vocabulary of the discipline, and exhibit mature responses to feedback from peers.

Make peer review the norm. Don't look at any student work until it has gone through a peer review process that pushes students to present their best work for your evaluation and feedback.

5. Understand that PBL cannot be done alone.

PBL is a complex form of teaching, with many moving parts and a creative element. Teachers will benefit enormously, and grow their expertise much faster, if they can discuss and refine their projects together. The opposite is true, also; if schools continue to limit collaborative time to Monday mornings between 8 am and 9 am, or something similar, PBL will fail. Inquiry simply demands more depth and conversation than the traditional system allows. Many changes are required here, but the step with the greatest leverage? Try this.

Institutionalize Critical Friends Protocols. A 25 minute protocol, in which teachers present ideas to peers and receive feedback about a project in a respectful, professional environment, is a game changer. It sets a higher bar for discourse, encourages teachers to think more deeply, and takes education away from its familiar staples of "neat" ideas and endless inputs. The protocols work well in department meetings, staff meetings, or at PD days.

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How to Reinvent Project Based Learning to Be More Meaningful | KQED

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Project-based learning continues to be misinterpreted as a single teaching strategy rather than as a set of design principles that allow us to introduce the philosophy of inquiry into education in an intelligent and grounded way.

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5 Keys  to Rigorous PBL

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Five Keys to Rigorous Project-Based Learning

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Presentation Tools for PBL

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 EdTech for  Managing Your PBL Projects 

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 EdTech for  Managing Your PBL Projects 

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Great Webinar on the best technology practices for PBL .

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Education Technology and Managing Your Project

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Learn more about Project Based Learning (PBL) at : http://bie.org/. BIE National Faculty members Dayna Laur and Mike Gorman discuss the education technology tools available for teachers and students that help effectively manage the implementation of a project.

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Q: What’s the role of technology in PBL?

A: A very powerful one. Technology absolutely explodes the things students can do. One of the things that made PBL so difficult to do in the past was how long it took. A documentary film project in 1975—you were shooting it on film, cutting it yourself—it might have taken you months to make. Now we can do that in a fraction of that time.
-SLA Principal, Chris Lehmann
http://www.scholastic.com/browse/article.jsp?id=3751748

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Join us for a webinar with Dani Kennis Wednesday, July 13 at 1pm PDT where she will demonstrate GAFE Student Projects Using Chromebooks in greater detail. Register here: By Dani Kennis http://ctl.re/GAFE-Chromebook-Projects. Here, Dani gives us an overview of what will be covered in Wednesday's webinar. Can't make the live presentation? No problem. We record all our webinars and post the links on ctl.info/webinars.
What did school look and feel like when you were a child? For me, desks were in straight rows with an overhead projector at the front of the classroom. Students vigorously scrawled down what was on the screen without reflecting, understanding or applying information. I was never asked what I wanted to learn, I was simply expected to regurgitate information I was fed. Today, advancements in ed tech, such as Chromebooks, are changing the landscape of education and shifting the roles of teachers and students. Gone are the days of teachers acting as the sage on the stage. Instead, teachers are facilitators of knowledge who provide students with opportunities to explore inquiry, passion, and creativity through content.
Google Slides
Project Based Learning (PBL) is an inquiry driven model that focuses on real life application of knowledge and skills to solve relevant and interesting problems. It is an engaging, motivating and enjoyable way for students and teachers to embrace the cultural shift in the education landscape. This approach is made seamless through the use of Google Apps for Education. Below are some ideas for how to get started in creating a more learner-centered classroom by using GAFE in assigning student projects.

Create Your Own Adventure: (created by the brilliant and talented Caren MacConnell ) is the best step by step guide I have seen on creating a CYOA project. The beauty of these projects is in allowing students to think outside the box and ask those 'What If' questions, considering alternate endings in various historical situations.

Comic strip: By manipulating clip art and playing with features such as speech bubbles, animation, arrangement and order, students can design scenes of events and characters to showcase their knowledge. Some of my more ambitious students even experimented with stop animation, creating Play Dough figurines and using their phones to take pictures then create a story using Google Slides.

Google Sites Google Draw Google Forms Google Maps

Using one of the many available Facebook templates in Google Search ( here is one example ), students create a Facebook profile to showcase important information about historical or literary characters. Many of my students' favorite parts is creating a Facebook Wall dialogue between a character and his enemy!
Google Classroom

Using a Google Maps class account (Maps is not included in the GAFE suite), students create a map of a specific geographic area of study. Using tags, they provide written factual information on each specific place. Best of all - This map can be embedded into a Google Site!

While PBL is great for students, Google Classroom makes the process easy and efficient for teachers. It is invaluable in assigning, collecting, returning and grading student work in an efficient and timely manner. Additionally, it assists teachers in remaining organized and maintaining accurate records in order to best guide students to success.

Latest posts by Dani Kennis (see all)

A PBL approach using GAFE tools for projects requires teachers to be flexible and focused, keeping in mind that lessons should always be learning-driven, rather than tool-driven. We must remember to provide students with voice and choice in guiding them through the process of choosing the right technology tool for the task at hand. Done right, PBL creates a tangible sense of student empowerment and motivation through creativity and producing for an authentic audience. Providing our students with these experience is what truly will allow us to redefine the meaning and feel of 'school' for each individual student in our classes.
Dani is a high school Special Education Social Studies teacher and Technology Coach in the New York suburbs. She is also a Level 2 Google Certified Trainer and co-founder of The Education Calendar , a crowdsourced map and calendar of education events worldwide. Her blended classroom incorporates the use of Google Apps for Education as well as other Web 2.0 tools in order to prepare her students to be successful 21st century learners in a global community. She blogs about her work and teaching at DaniKennis.com and would love to connect on (@kennisdani).

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GAFE Project-Based Learning in the Chromebook Classroom

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Join us for a webinar with Dani Kennis Wednesday, July 13 at 1pm PDT where she will demonstrate GAFE Student Projects Using Chromebooks in greater detail. Register here: By Dani Kennis http://ctl.re/GAFE-Chromebook-Projects. Here, Dani gives us an overview of what will be covered in Wednesday's webinar. Can't make the live presentation?

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3 teachers talk about how they restructured their day to incorporate project based learning

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Welcome to PBL-Online, a one stop solution for Project Based Learning! You'll find all the resources you need to design and manage high quality projects for middle and high school students. You can:

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7 Essentials of Project Based Learning (EdLeadership Article)

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7 Essentials of Project Based Learning (EdLeadership Article)

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As Ms. McIntyre walked around her high school science classroom, she plopped a packet of papers on each student's desk and announced a "project." Each student would create a poster about a water-borne bacterium that can be harmful to humans, the bacterium's effects, and disease prevention and treatment. The handouts included an assignment sheet with due dates and grading policy, a guide for designing the poster, and a list of websites and books. The teacher would display the best posters.

Sound familiar? When you were in school, did you make posters, dioramas, and models of buildings or volcanoes? If you are a teacher, have you asked students to research a topic and present information with PowerPoint slides? These are all-too-common examples of the kind of meaning-lite assignments that teachers bill as projects. A classroom filled with student posters may suggest that students have engaged in meaningful learning. But it is the process of students' learning and the depth of their cognitive engagement-rather than the resulting product-that distinguishes projects from busywork.

A project is meaningful if it fulfills two criteria. First, students must perceive the work as personally meaningful, as a task that matters and that they want to do well. Second, a meaningful project fulfills an educational purpose. Well-designed and well-implemented project-based learning is meaningful in both ways.

As educators with the Buck Institute for Education, we provide professional development to help schools set up a sustained program of in-depth project-based learning throughout a district, network, or state. In our work with teachers, we have identified seven essential elements of meaningful projects. Let's look at each element by considering what the fictional Ms. McIntyre could have done to create a meaningful project instead of handing out prepared packets.

Imagine that on the first day of the infectious disease unit, Ms. McIntyre showed a video depicting a beautiful beach, which ended with a shot of a sign reading, "Beach Closed: Contaminated Water." Suppose watching this video led to a lively (and sometimes disgusting) discussion in which students shared their experiences with suspicious water quality, discussed times when beaches had been closed and why, and talked about how much pollution bothered them. The teacher could then introduce the project by telling students that they would be learning more about ocean pollution and proposing actions to combat it.

Teachers can powerfully activate students' need to know content by launching a project with an "entry event" that engages interest and initiates questioning. An entry event can be almost anything: a video, a lively discussion, a guest speaker, a field trip, or a piece of mock correspondence that sets up a scenario. In contrast, announcing a project by distributing a packet of papers is likely to turn students off; it looks like a prelude to busywork.

Many students find schoolwork meaningless because they don't perceive a need to know what they're being taught. They are unmotivated by a teacher's suggestion that they should learn something because they'll need it later in life, for the next course, or simply because "it's going to be on the test." With a compelling student project, the reason for learning relevant material becomes clear: I need to know this to meet the challenge I've accepted.

After the discussion about beach pollution, Ms. McIntyre led students in brainstorming possible solutions, such as enacting laws, designing better waste-treatment systems, and raising public awareness about the need to reduce contaminants. Students created a driving question to focus their efforts, focusing on a specific local area: How can we reduce the number of days Foster's Beach is closed because of poor water quality?

A good driving question captures the heart of the project in clear, compelling language, which gives students a sense of purpose and challenge. The question should be provocative, open-ended, complex, and linked to the core of what you want students to learn. It could be abstract (When is war justified?); concrete (Is our water safe to drink?); or focused on solving a problem (How can we improve this website so that more young people will use it?).

A project without a driving question is like an essay without a thesis. Without a thesis statement, a reader might be able to pick out the main point a writer is trying to make; but with a thesis statement, the main point is unmistakable. Without a driving question, students may not understand why they are undertaking a project. They know that the series of assigned activities has some connection with a time period, a place, or a concept. But if you asked, "What is the point of all these activities?" they might only be able to offer, "Because we're making a poster."

Once her students' interest was piqued by a challenging question, Ms. McIntyre explained the requirements for the "Don't Close the Beach" project, which included an individually written paper, an oral presentation of students' work accompanied by media technology, and a product of students' choice created by teams. Students chose to develop media kits, public service announcements, web pages, brochures, and letters to government and industry officials, among other products.

This element of project-based learning is key. In terms of making a project feel meaningful to students, the more voice and choice, the better. However, teachers should design projects with the extent of student choice that fits their own style and students.

On the limited-choice end of the scale, learners can select what topic to study within a general driving question or choose how to design, create, and present products. As a middle ground, teachers might provide a limited menu of options for creative products to prevent students from becoming overwhelmed by choices. On the "the more, the better" end of the scale, students can decide what products they will create, what resources they will use, and how they will structure their time. Students could even choose a project's topic and driving question.

Once Ms. McIntyre's students had decided on actions that would help them respond to their driving question, they got to work. Collaboration was central to the project. Students formed teams of three or four and began planning what tasks they would do and how they would work together.

As they worked, each team regularly paused to review how well they were collaborating and communicating, using rubrics they had developed with the teacher's guidance. To boost collaboration skills, Ms. McIntyre used role-playing and team-building activities. She showed students how to use time and task organizers. They practiced oral presentation skills and learned to produce videos and podcasts. In writing journals, students reflected on their thinking and problem-solving processes, which they knew they would need to explain in their oral presentation.

A project should give students opportunities to build such 21st century skills as collaboration, communication, critical thinking, and the use of technology, which will serve them well in the workplace and life. This exposure to authentic skills meets the second criterion for meaningful work-an important purpose. A teacher in a project-based learning environment explicitly teaches and assesses these skills and provides frequent opportunities for students to assess themselves.

After their discussion about encounters with pollution, in addition to choosing a driving question, Ms. McIntyre's students as a whole class generated a list of more detailed questions about diseases, bacteria and their effects, and sources of water contamination. Questions included, What diseases can you get from water? Do you have to drink it to get sick? and Where do bacteria come from? The teams fine-tuned their questions and discussed how to find answers from the teacher, books, articles, websites, experts, and visits to Foster's Beach.

As these learners found answers, they raised and investigated new questions. Students synthesized the information they gathered and used it both to inform their individually written papers on the driving question and to help create their team's product related to that question.

Students find project work more meaningful if they conduct real inquiry, which does not mean finding information in books or websites and pasting it onto a poster. In real inquiry, students follow a trail that begins with their own questions, leads to a search for resources and the discovery of answers, and often ultimately leads to generating new questions, testing ideas, and drawing their own conclusions. With real inquiry comes innovation-a new answer to a driving question, a new product, or an individually generated solution to a problem. The teacher does not ask students to simply reproduce teacher- or textbook-provided information in a pretty format.

To guide students in real inquiry, refer students to the list of questions they generated after the entry event. Coach them to add to this list as they discover new insights. The classroom culture should value questioning, hypothesizing, and openness to new ideas and perspectives.

As they developed their ideas and products, student teams critiqued one another's work, referring to rubrics and exemplars. Ms. McIntyre checked research notes, reviewed rough drafts and plans, and met with teams to monitor their progress.

Formalizing a process for feedback and revision during a project makes learning meaningful because it emphasizes that creating high-quality products and performances is an important purpose of the endeavor. Students need to learn that most people's first attempts don't result in high quality and that revision is a frequent feature of real-world work.

In addition to providing direct feedback, the teacher should coach students in using rubrics or other sets of criteria to critique one another's work. Teachers can arrange for experts or adult mentors to provide feedback, which is especially meaningful to students because of the source.

In Ms. McIntyre's class, teams presented their analyses of water contamination issues and proposals for addressing the problem at an exhibition night. The invited audience included parents, peers, and representatives of community, business, and government organizations. Students answered questions and reflected on how they completed the project, next steps they might take, and what they gained in terms of knowledge and skills-and pride.

Schoolwork is more meaningful when it's not done only for the teacher or the test. When students present their work to a real audience, they care more about its quality. Once again, it's "the more, the better" when it comes to authenticity. Students might replicate the kinds of tasks done by professionals-but even better, they might create real products that people outside school use.

The hypothetical project described here was inspired by a real project, "Media Saves the Beach," carried out by students at High Tech High in San Diego, California. In this real-life project, students worked alongside established local groups to advocate cleaner seashores. Several government agencies eventually came through with funding for water monitoring at local beaches.

In truth, one of the products students created was a poster. What made that poster different from the meaning-lite one Ms. McIntyre assigned? The High Tech High students chose to do their poster because it was an effective way to communicate their message at Exhibition Night-and the team stood nearby to explain it. To create the poster, students engaged in an extended process of inquiry, critique, and revision. They learned important things in the process. In short, even a poster can be meaning-heavy if it's part of a project embodying the seven essential elements of project-based learning.

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Seven Essentials for Project-Based Learning

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Some "projects" border on busywork. Others involve meaningful inquiry that engages students' minds.