INTENTIONAL PBL: WORKSHOPS

Intentional PBL is a concept that evolved from my personal experience first as a classroom teacher in a project-based learning environment, and then as an instructional coach on an all-PBL campus.  My first PBL classroom was a seventh-grade, high-ability science classroom in the middle of  a traditional middle school building with a classroom set of computers.  Once introduced to the model, my students couldn't get enough--of their own volition, they worked in my room before school, after school, during lunch and homeroom. They worked on projects and research at home. They thrived in the PBL world, and so did I. 

So I leaped at the opportunity to move to an all-PBL campus as a biology instructor.  The building had been designed with PBL in mind--open work spaces in and around classrooms, glass walls, and one-to-one technology for students.  Awesome, I thought, awesome!  But with traditional trappings gone, and sudden access to the internet all the time any time, I found that PBL was much more difficult to manage.  I discovered that students knew much less than I supposed they would--they didn't know how to manage digital documents, they didn't know how to hold each other accountable or manage their time, they didn't know how to work as a team or have deep academic discussions, they didn't know how to give presentations or what it meant to have a professional work ethic.  So even though PBL promotes independent learning, I found that many of the skills necessary for independent learning to occur needed to be scaffolded and modeled.  

As I moved into the role of instructional coach for my campus, talking and working with teachers and observing in their classrooms, I discovered that problems with student behavior or student work stemmed from the same issues I had discovered in my biology classroom--students just didn't know how to do a lot of the things we were expecting them to, and assuming they did, didn't make it so.  

The answer?  Intentional PBL--modeling and building capacities for skills in the PBL classroom that most of today's adults gained through years of experience.  Intentional PBL means that the teacher has deliberate systems in place for monitoring students and the work they do to ensure that skill development is occurring.  These deliberate systems--goal setting and checkpoints, contract arbitration, rubric evaluations, feedback and revision, rehearsal and delivery--must be scaffolded and intentionally implemented, modeled and monitored by the PBL instructor, heavily at first, with a gradual release until students are able to manage the process on their own.   

Intentional PBL workshops are designed with this in mind--practical guides to help teachers intentionally implement processes that will lead to student autonomy and life-long learning. Click on the options below to learn more about what we offer.