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PBL Works: Project Based Learning For All (Ideas and Inspirations)

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PBL Works: Project Based Learning For All (Ideas and Inspirations)

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https://www.pblworks.org/?_ga=2.117729101.514592724.1682686330-1711693012.1682686330

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Although the worlds of comic book superheroes are fantastical, they are also filled with complex mathematical problems to solve, such as “How many aliens will have come through the portal before Shuri manages to close it?” “How many people can Iron Man rescue before the building explodes?”

In this project, students are challenged by a comic book publisher to create an engaging and mathematically meaningful comic book that will teach others about algebraic reasoning and mathematical modeling. Students explore the imaginary world(s) of superheroes in order to generate problems that their favorite characters might face. They model these problems using algebraic expressions or equations and use these ideas to create their own algebra comic books. Throughout the project, students will reflect on the ways in which the problems they create in their comic books mirror real-life situations.

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Ultimate Design Challenge - How can we redesign a product’s packaging to make it more environmentally friendly?

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Ultimate Design Challenge - How can we redesign a product’s packaging to make it more environmentally friendly?

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Product packaging often uses materials and processes that negatively affect the Earth. In their role as design engineers, students use the engineering-design process and geometric modeling to redesign a product’s packaging to render it more sustainable. Students explore volume, surface area, and dimensions of complex shapes to develop prototypes that meet the product’s packaging design constraints while limiting the packaging material used and/or waste generated.

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In this project, students read and analyze a work of literature and develop custom music playlists that portray the development of themes and/or characters over the course of the story.
Students might self-select a work to read or work with a core required text. Taking on the role of curators for a streaming music service (such as Spotify, Soundcloud, Pandora, or YouTube) that is producing a special edition collection of literary-inspired playlists, students break the literary work into sections, identify key themes or phases of character development in each section, and choose a song to capture the essence of each theme/character development.
Although this project is done individually or in pairs, students engage in peer critique processes during the development of their playlists and must (verbally and in writing) explain and refine their rationale for selecting each song.

Students publish their playlists, along with a detailed set of liner notes that provide an evidence-based analysis of the themes or character development throughout the written work and a rationale for the selection of each song. Students share their playlists and liner notes via social media and/or on a class website.

Note that the duration of this project may vary depending on the nature, complexity, and length of the texts students read.

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History is a process of interpretation and perspective-taking.

In this project, students research the history of their home community or region and use primary source materials to learn about the experiences and perspectives of multiple community members in relation to particular events. Students use what they learn to document and share the multiple (and sometimes conflicting) histories that coexist in their local community.

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Students work in design teams as part of a film scoring “company” to compose music (sound tracks, soundscapes) and develop a class portfolio of examples for movie studio clients. Taken collectively, the class portfolio includes a variety of moods and textures suitable for drama, comedy, action/adventure, sci-fi, and so on. The class should incorporate videos and music styles from a range of genres and cultures into its portfolio.

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of videos, planning forms, rubrics, blogs, and more. Whether you want to learn about PBL, or find classroom resources, our materials will support your journey.

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Article: "5 Fantastic Ideas for Collaboration Projects"

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Article: "5 Fantastic Ideas for Collaboration Projects"

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5 Fantastic Ideas for Collaboration Projects | Cult of Pedagogy

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These ideas can be adapted for any subject area, along with suggestions for adding criticality and opportunities for student agency to each one.

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Article: "New Research Makes a Powerful Case for PBL"

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Article: "New Research Makes a Powerful Case for PBL"

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When Gil Leal took AP Environmental Science in his junior year of high school, he was surprised by how different it was from his other AP classes. Instead of spending the bulk of the time sitting through lectures, taking notes, and studying abstract texts, his class visited a strawberry farm in the valley nearby.

It wasn't just for a tour. Leal and his peers were tasked with thinking about the many challenges that modern farms confront, from water shortages to pest infestations and erosion. More surprising to Leal: Students were asked to design their own solutions, incorporating what they had learned about things like soil composition, ecosystem dynamics, and irrigation systems.

Now an environmental science major at UCLA-and a first-generation college student-Leal sees the visit as a pivotal moment that led to his decision to pursue science in college. He had never visited a farm before, and was used to a traditional sit-and-listen learning model.

"In other classes, it was lecture, readings, test," said Leal, "but in AP Environmental Science we worked on projects with other students, discussed our ideas, considered different perspectives-and I learned so much more this way."

Leal's AP class, taught by Brandie Borges, is part of a new generation of classes that transform traditional teacher-led instruction into a more student-centered, project-based approach-requiring students to work together as they tackle complex, real-world problems that emphasize uncertainty, iterative thinking, and innovation. Proponents of project-based learning (PBL) argue that it fosters a sense of purpose in young learners, pushes them to think critically, and prepares them for modern careers that prize skills like collaboration, problem-solving, and creativity.

Critics say that the pedagogy places too much responsibility on novice learners, and ignores the evidence about the effectiveness of direct instruction by teachers. By de-emphasizing knowledge transfer from experts to beginners, the critics suggest, PBL undermines content knowledge and subject fluency.

While project-based learning and direct instruction aren't incompatible, evidence that might settle the deeper controversy over PBL's effectiveness has been sparse. Only a handful of studies over the last decades have established a causal relationship between structured project-based learning and student outcomes-in either direction.

But two major new gold-standard studies-both funded by Lucas Education Research, a sister division of Edutopia-conducted by researchers from the University of Southern California and Michigan State University, provide compelling evidence that project-based learning is an effective strategy for all students, outperforming traditional curricula not only for high achieving students, but across grade levels and racial and socioeconomic groups.

Reimagining Advanced Placement Courses

The two studies involved over 6,000 students in 114 schools across the nation, with more than 50 percent of students coming from low-income households.

In the AP study, which included Gil Leal's class along with over 3,600 students in both AP Environmental Science and AP U.S. Government and Politics courses from five districts serving a diverse student body, researchers looked at a broad range of project-based activities in the sciences and humanities.

In one example, students in Amber Graeber's AP Government class took part in a simulation of an electoral caucus. Meanwhile, instead of simply reading about Supreme Court cases, students in Erin Fisher's class studied historic cases and then took on real-world roles, arguing the cases in mock court, acting as reporters, and designing campaign ads and stump speeches to make their case.

Researchers found that nearly half of students in project-based classrooms passed their AP tests, outperforming students in traditional classrooms by 8 percentage points. Students from low-income households saw similar gains compared to their wealthier peers, making a strong case that well-structured PBL can be a more equitable approach than teacher-centered ones. Importantly, the improvements in teaching efficacy were both significant and durable: When teachers in the study taught the same curriculum for a second year, PBL students outperformed students in traditional classrooms by 10 percentage points.

The study results nudged at entrenched ideas about how to best teach students from different backgrounds. "There's a belief among some educators and some policymakers that students from underserved backgrounds... aren't ready to have student-centered instruction where they're driving their own learning," said USC researcher Anna Saavedra, the lead researcher on the AP study. "And so there's this idea, and the results of this study really challenged that notion."

Nationally, the researchers concluded, 30 percent of students from low-income households take AP tests, but that number jumped to 38 percent for students in PBL classrooms-there are more low-income students taking AP tests using project-based learning, and more are passing as well.

It may seem counterintuitive that a student-centered approach is effective in an environment that's so focused on high-stakes testing, but the results suggest otherwise.

"Students felt like the work was more authentic," said Saavedra, suggesting a possible explanation for the improvements. "There were more connections to their real lives. For example, in the AP Environmental Science course, they were learning about their ecological footprint and thinking: How do my behaviors affect the health of my community and of the larger world?"

Authentic Learning

But project-based learning isn't just for high school kids. In Billie Freeland's third-grade class, PBL not only builds students' interest in science but also helps them make more connections with the world around them, generating a deep understanding of-and appreciation for-science, she says.

"Third-grade students work on the 'Toy Unit,'" said Freeland. "But don't let the name fool you.... Third graders learn the concepts of gravity, friction, force, and direction by designing toys from simple objects such as water bottles, straws, and recycled milk cartons. The unit ends with them designing their own toys that use magnetic or electrical force," she told researchers, while emphasizing that the projects are aligned with Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS).

Freeland's class was one of dozens involved in the large-scale study examining the effectiveness of PBL in elementary science classes. In the study, researchers from Michigan State University and the University of Michigan studied 2,371 third-grade students in 46 schools who were randomly assigned to a business-as-usual control group or a treatment group. The schools selected for the study were diverse: 62 percent of the schools' student bodies qualified for free or reduced-price lunch, and 58 percent were students of color.

Like the high school students in the AP study, elementary students in PBL classrooms outperformed their peers, this time by 8 percentage points on a test of science learning. The pattern held across socioeconomic class and across all reading ability levels: In the project-based learning group, all boats rose on the tide-and both struggling readers and highly proficient readers outperformed their counterparts in traditional classrooms.

"The beauty of all of this, which is really quite lovely, is that we have PBL in science, a progression of it, from elementary through high school," said Barbara Schneider, a professor of education at Michigan State University who worked on the study. "Our findings are consistent all across elementary and secondary school, which is really quite remarkable. And in both cases, we're looking at substantial increases in science achievement."

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New Research Makes a Powerful Case for PBL

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Two new gold-standard studies provide compelling evidence that project-based learning is an effective strategy for all students-including historically marginalized ones.

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The Challenges

Like other World Language teachers, I am constantly trying to focus on the essentials in order to create a standards-driven, communication-based curriculum for my students. I am also keen on addressing the necessary skills students must acquire for the 21st century as outlined in the wonderful document from the Carnegie Institute available at www.p21.org. How can I know whether I have achieved my desired objective? I need authentic assessments to evaluate target language proficiencies, while offering opportunities for greater engagement, for working in collaborative teams, for developing critical thinking skills, for managing precious time and resources, for emphasizing global themes, and for preparing students toward the new AP exam in French starting next year! On top of that, I want them to learn how to use proficiently the wonderful technology tools now available. Sound familiar? We work hard as teachers! Darn hard! Oui, monsieur, dur, dur!

The Rationale for PBL

And so I come to project-based learning as a way of bringing it all together. Projects provide opportunities for students to engage in real life communication, in context, with real people, and across the globe. I try to align my projects according to the California WL Standards, and the fluency stages of the Language Learning Continuum found in chapter 2 of the California World Languages Framework. I also keep the 21st Century skills in mind, along with the more familiar five C's from ACTFL, and the many things I have learned about literacy, and cross-cultural issues. I have found that the projects address all these things and more. I have tried to make sure that they also offer students the opportunity to be creative and to explore their potentials and aspirations. It is a lot of fun to see this in action. How about some examples?

Stage 1 Fluency Example: The Menu Project

In this project, students play the role of a restaurant owner who needs to develop and create a menu for his/her restaurant established in one of the target language countries of the world. Their menus must have at least five categories, and twenty-five items, all authentic dishes of the target culture of their choice within the Francophone world. They must decide on an appropriate name, create an address, phone number, website and twitter account name, consistent with examples they find on-line from authentic restaurants of the target culture. Their menu items must be priced in the local currency, converted in an appropriate manner for the target culture. The students then do a speech either in small groups or for the whole class in which they speak to the group as the restaurant owner, suggesting good dishes, specialty items, etc. They must say at least 15 sentences, and can either present live or on video. I have a rubric for the menu and one for the speech, and am looking for Stage 1 fluency, namely, formulaic language (memorized chunks of discourse combined with lists of works). I find that the kids learn a lot about a country of their choice, while having fun being creative!

Stage 2 Fluency Example: The Children's Story Book

We refer to stage two fluency as created language. The premise here is that students take the formulae that they have learned so well in stage one, and combine them together into their own created sentences. These statements no longer sound like memorized sound bites given back in the same formula, but rather in individualized, self directed expressions of thoughts and ideas. The sentences are frequently complex, but do not contain subordinate clauses of the kind requiring specialized verb forms. They also do not necessarily have to be strung together in a particular order to make sense - if we were to reorder them, they would make just as much sense in the new order. In other words, these are lists of sentences, but the order of the lists are not significant.

I have developed a project to measure this stage of fluency which I call the Story Book project. Students create a set of characters who live in one of the target language countries. They write the story as if the main character were describing his life when he was five years old (which requires the imperfect tense in French). The students then describe a big event which occurred in the life of the character, such as his first day of school, and then the things which happened in that day (requiring the use of the passé composé in French). They need to research what a child's life is like in the target culture and create an authentic and visually rich situation for the story's setting. I usually ask students to write about 5 sentences per page, and about ten pages total. They do rough drafts and peer editing. I also look at the drafts and highlight what is correct, and make some suggestions for corrections. The editing process is a learning experience of its own.

As students write their stories, they cannot help but compare their own lives with those of the characters they have created. The compare and contrast paradigme creates a good context for created language. It also allows students to try out their knowledge of how to narrate in past time frames, and demonstrate that they know how to use the various past tenses typical of the second year language curriculum. We often find that students reach what we call "linguistic breakdown" as they use various verb forms, but they do not necessarily do so at the syntactic level. They are able to make the sentence structures fit together well, even when their verb forms are not always correct. Frankly, I think this is great! When my focus is on the fluency stage, and not on distinct verb forms, I find that my students are actually progressing very well in their journey toward language acquisition. In time, they will perfect their use of verb forms, but in the meantime, they are clearly able to communicate at a higher level of fluency even if their accuracy is not yet up to par. We do want accuracy, of course, but in terms of fluency, this is a lesser problem for communication than is the sentence structure.

Stage 3 Fluency Example: The ABC Book Project

In stage three fluency, the text type I am aiming for is planned language, ie, paragraphing, in which there is a topic sentence, supported by concrete details and commentary, and a concluding sentence to sum up the important ideas. In French, this requires that students know how to create complex sentences, using main and subordinate clauses, requiring the subjunctive, or "if/then" type sentences, requiring imperfect/conditional tenses, among others (other languages may require knowledge of other paradigms as well). I have done this project over the course of a whole semester, breaking it down in smaller parts over time, and with the focus being Québec. We study many different aspects of Québécois culture: short stories, poems, song lyrics, historical texts, current events... The students do smaller projects along the way, but as a result of their inquiry, they write a page on each topic of their choice. I have them write 20 pages, one for each of 20 letters of the alphabet, according to their choice. An example page might look like this in English:

Q is for Québec City (title sentence). Québec is the capital city of the province of Quebec, and sits on a bluff overlooking the Saint Lawrence River (topic sentence). It seems to me that the people of Québec have much for which they may be proud (detail). It is necessary that they invest wisely in the maintenance of their historical monuments, because it preserves the diversity of their historical heritage (commentary). If I were to visit Québec, I would want to look out over the Saint Lawrence from the Terasse Dufferein so I could enjoy the beautiful view of the river and of the Ile d'Orléans (commentary). If I went to Québec in winter, I would go during the Carnaval so I could participate in the many activities (commentary). It is interesting that the local accent is different in Québec than in France. (commentary). If I go to Québec, I will practice speaking French with the local people and hope that I will be able to understand their accent without any problems (conclusion)."

This is a fair amount of work for one page, let alone twenty, so I provide a page template for students to use to be sure they keep on track. I have them do rough drafts of each page. When they turn in the drafts, I highlight what is correct and return the pages. The students may resubmit the pages with corrections until they have perfected their work. In this way, I am reinforcing their own editing process, and helping them to focus on the details they might otherwise overlook. This project has proven to be great fun, and I have found that by the end of the semester, they have mastered complex sentences and paragraphing quite well.

Future Plans

Next year, I plan to augment my project-based approach by connecting my classes with classes in 3 Francophone countries - France, Canada, and Sénégal. I want the students to collaborate with their peers across the world in writing digital stories which they will post on the web for their friends to read, and so they can offer comments and engage in conversations about the stories. I plan to have the students explore many story genres, including comic strips, manga, short stories and poems, and other kinds of writing as their interests are piqued. The many web 2.0 applications which are now available will be a big help in giving students the tools they need to write and create their stories. I expect the project to provide greater opportunities for engagement, creativity, problem solving, and collaboration ? ie, they will learn to communicate in French while learning 21st century skills!

Let's have some fun, too! Join the conversation. Post an idea on the Edutopia WL group. Need an idea? Got a question? Found a cool website, app or tool? Let's collaborate as well! Shall we get started? Thanks in advance for sharing your ideas ? together is better!

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Using Project-Based Learning to Teach World Languages

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Like other World Language teachers, I am constantly trying to focus on the essentials in order to create a standards-driven, communication-based curriculum for my students. I am also keen on addressing the necessary skills students must acquire for the 21st century as outlined in the wonderful document from the Carnegie Institute available at www.p21.org.

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Assign students to small lab groups and provide them with an interactive science experiment to complete together.

Have groups use the shared screens to document their observations and results, and collaborate on analyzing and interpreting the data.

Encourage groups to share their findings with the class and engage in a group discussion about the scientific concepts and methods they used.

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Assign students to small music groups and provide them with a songwriting prompt or challenge, such as writing a song about a particular theme or topic.

Have groups use the shared screens and whiteboard to collaborate on brainstorming ideas, developing melodies, and crafting lyrics.

Encourage groups to share their songs with the class and engage in a group discussion about the different songwriting techniques and strategies they used.

As a final project, have each group record a demo of their song and present it to the class. This could be done using a simple recording app on a phone or computer.

This lesson can be adapted to different musical styles and genres, and can help students develop important skills such as collaboration, creativity, and communication. Additionally, students can learn about songwriting as a form of artistic expression and explore the ways in which music can convey emotions and ideas.

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Assign students to small writing groups and provide them with a creative writing prompt or challenge, such as creating a short story or script.

Have groups use the shared screens and whiteboard to brainstorm ideas, develop characters and settings, and collaborate on writing and revising their stories.

Encourage groups to share their stories with the class and engage in a group discussion about the different writing strategies they used.

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A Padlet within a Padlet: District Research 

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A Padlet within a Padlet: District Research 

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Students can work together to brainstorm different problem-solving strategies and write them on the whiteboard.

Students can use the shared screens to research different mathematical concepts and equations, and share their findings with the rest of the group.

Students can work together to visually represent different problem-solving steps and methods on the shared screens.

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Divide students into small groups and assign them a math challenge, such as solving a set of algebraic equations or creating a geometric design.

Have each group work together to solve the challenge, using the whiteboard and shared screens to brainstorm ideas and strategies.

Encourage groups to share their solutions with the class and engage in a group discussion about the different approaches they took.

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Assign students to small design groups and provide them with a design challenge, such as creating a product prototype or designing a new logo for the school.

Have groups use the shared screens and whiteboard to collaborate on sketching, planning, and revising their designs.

Encourage groups to share their designs with the class and engage in a group discussion about the different design strategies and techniques they used.

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Assign students to small groups and provide them with an interactive history lesson, such as analyzing a primary source document or participating in a historical role-play activity.

Have groups use the shared screens and whiteboard to collaborate on analyzing and interpreting the information, and develop a comprehensive understanding of the historical period or event.

Encourage groups to share their findings with the class and engage in a group discussion about the different perspectives and interpretations they developed.