PBL Overview

The old-school model of a sage on the stage handing out facts to students and expecting those students to recite them back is not enough to prepare students to survive after high school. Today's educational community is tasked with teaching students to solve highly complex problems that require reading, writing, and math in addition to 21st century skills such as teamwork, time management, information gathering, data analysis, and effective use of high tech tools. The PBL model provides the framework for learning these skills, and requires teachers to guide and mentor students as they become directors and managers of their learning to enable them to compete in a knowledge-based, highly technological society.

Need-to-knows will be answered during this three-day, learn-by-doing workshop. Participants will experience the PBL process by creating the bones of their first project.

Planning

Project-based learning doesn't just happen. While it appears to be effortless once in progress, a successful project takes hours of planning before it is ready to be launched. From project blueprints, to contracts, task logs, and a variety of rubrics to guide project development, this two-day workshop helps teachers nail down the nuts and bolts of what it takes to plan an exemplary project.

Engagement

PBL without engagement is like music without notes. How to avoid this dilemma? Write a driving question that is open-ended, intriguing, relevant, and complex. Develop community connections by inviting experts into the classroom either digitally or in person. Ensure that student work is real work with a real application, and that they present to a real audience comprised of members from beyond the classroom walls. But most of all, remember that what is engaging to the adult may not be what is engaging to the student.

This half-day workshop invites teachers to explore what it is about PBL that motivates students, and provides a framework for them to use to create engagement.

Rubrics

Rubrics are the foundation for the deep thinking and learning that occur during the PBL process. They are more than just a piece of paper used to assess products at the end of a project. They are time management tools. They are feedback and revision tools. They are tools for self-evaluation, peer evaluation, and deeper learning. And they are based on the required standards for knowledge.

In this one-day workshop, teachers are engaged in unpacking their standards to get to the heart of what students need to know. Once revealed, the core need-to-knows will be woven into a rubric that both teachers and students can use to track progress toward learning goals.

Collaboration

Both teachers and students must be involved in setting norms for group work and in ensuring all group members fully participate in the process.

Goal setting, team contracts, and task logs are three core strategies used to facilitate collaboration during project-based learning. In this one-day workshop, participants experience using these strategies, and walk away with multiple tools to use when modeling these tasks in their classrooms.

Scaffolding

Scaffolding activities provide structure for rigorous dives into content, and include those structures and activities designed to provide differentiated access points for students as they seek the knowledge they need to successfully meet project goals.

Students don't arrive in your clasroom knowing how to “do PBL.” They need to learn to ask the right questions, think deeply about a topic, brianstorm ideas, and conduct research.

In this one-day workshop, discussion protocols, guided research, target rubrics, question matrices, and other strategies are experienced and shared to enable teachers to build student autonomy as the students engage in deep dives into content.

Kaizen

Beautiful work--what teachers long for their students to produce. However, beautiful work requires growing completely different classroom culture, one where mistakes are good and failures are opportunities for growth.

Kaizen--literally change for the good--occurs when students constantly evaluate their work with the mindset that there is always room for improvement. Kaizen enables students to develop critical habits of mind such as grit, perseverance, and resilience.

In this one-day workshop, participants explore the kaizen culture and walk away with strategies for building a classroom culture where kaizen is the norm and beautiful work is the end result.

Project Benchmarks

Project work must hit certain targets along the way to ensure a successful end product. Implementation of appropriate project benchmarks provides structure to the proess of PBL and ensures steady progress toward project goals. Benchmarking requires students to constantly monitor their work by providing built-in opportunities for feedback and revision.

In this one-day workshop, participants evaluate the structure of high quality project benchmarks, and design their own systems for creating benchmark structures for their projects.

Assessment

By the time students are at the end of a project timeline, their work should have been evaluated so often that there are simply no mistakes. How? Through frequent and thorough feedback and revision processes, formative assessments, and constant monitoring by the teacher through rubric evaluations, contract meetings, and other intentional review processes designed to embrace the kaizen mindset and give students opportunities to fix their work all along the way. Summative assessment? By the end of the project, everyone should get them all right.

In this one-day workshop, teachers practice intentional review and assessment processes and develop systems for embedding them into a project timeline.