Additional support as you plan your PBL project or grow in your PBL practice.
‘Āina Aloha means beloved place and emphasizes the importance of one‘s relationship with their place.
A set of competencies rooted in ‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i, Kuana‘ike, and Honua intended to support educators to refocus the perspective and focus of content and context of school environments/curricula to Hawai‘i.
Office of Hawaiian Education (OHE) Hub
Location, location, location! See what happens when school work explores students‘ connections with local history, environment, culture, and economy.
How place-based science education strategies can support equity for students, teachers, and communities
Teachers use formative and summative assessments of knowledge, understanding, and success skills, and include self- and peer assessment of team and individual work.
A list of resources to help teachers enhance their skill in PBL assessment.
Tips for sorting students’ questions at project launch, and using the list to track progress during a project.
An excerpt from the book Project Based, explaining the purpose and structure of a feedback protocol.
Used to determine what students have learned during a project. As with formative assessment, summative assessment in PBL includes assessment of both individual student learning and project products.
Exit tickets are brief formative assessment and/or reflection routines that students complete and submit at the end of a lesson or class period. This guide includes strategies for using exit tickets to support assessment and reflection within the context of PBL.
The project involved real-world context, tasks and tools, quality standards, or impact, or the project speaks to personal concerns, interests, and issues in the students’ lives.
How a school created a tool to guide professional development for PBL teachers seeking to make their projects more authentic
How to make learning experiences “real” or “real-world” for students.
One sunny day in May, I had the honor of attending a heartwarming Project Based Learning exhibition at a local retirement home.
Teachers explicitly and implicitly promote student independence and growth, open-ended inquiry, team spirit, and attention to quality.
A PBLWorks National Faculty member tells how she built a classroom culture for PBL, from the start of the year and beyond.
What to consider before launching the first project in the school year, and how to build students’ skills to prepare them for PBL.
A PBLWorks National Faculty and teacher explains the importance of relationships, student ownership, common language and processes, and promoting a growth mindset.
The principal of a low-income school tells how its staff involved parents, students in design thinking and modeled the PBL process.
The importance of relationships in PBL teaching, and how teachers can form closer connections to students.
Why projects should focus on student thinking, not only the product, with sample thinking routines for each of the 4 phrases of the project.
Ideas for developing relationships, co-creating norms, practicing protocols and establishing routines, and designing a classroom conducive to PBL.
An excerpt from the book Project Based Teaching, with several examples of strategies teachers can use to build a productive PBL culture in the classroom.
Students and teachers reflect on the effectiveness of their inquiry and project activities, the quality of student work, and obstacles and how to overcome them. Celebration of learning shouldn’t wait until the end of projects. High-fives, shout-outs, fist bumps, and other simple routines celebrate the small but important accomplishments that unfold along the way.
All throughout a project, look for things to celebrate, and ask students to do this too. It might be a norm having to do with “growth mindset”-have a shout-out when you or a student sees someone overcoming a challenge or learning something new. Or it might be a norm around “helping each other” – do a fist-bump to recognize when it happens.
Why and how to celebrate after a project’s final presentations or culminating event: An expert from the PBLWorks book, PBL Starter Kit: To-the-Point Advice, Tools and Tips for Your First Project.
It’s important to capture student interest and build excitement at the beginning of a project. It should feel like a special opportunity, not just another unit. The launch of a project typically features three components to engage students: the entry event, the driving question, and the generation of student’s “need to know” questions.
An entry event is not simply a “hook”. It’s meant to get students to feel and think, not just get their attention. This event is also meant to provoke curiosity and generate questions to begin the inquiry process.
An entry event might require one class period, sometimes more, and it can take many forms.
7 PBL Entry Events for Remote Learning
How to engage students at the launch of a project.
Examples: Fieldtrip; Guest speaker; Film, video, website; Simulation or activity; Provocative reading; Startling statistics; Puzzling problem; Song, poem, art; Lively discussion; Piece of real or mock correspondence.
“Educational equity means that each child receives what they need to develop to their full academic and social potential.”
– National Equity Project
4 Equity Levers in Project Based Learning
Each equity “lever” includes a guiding question and detailed description. Four considerations to support equity in your PBL classrooms.
When PBL is designed and implemented with these levers in mind, it can be a powerful way to challenge, support, and connect with all of the learners in your classroom and help them achieve their full potential.
How can I learn about (and build meaningful relationships with) my students to design and facilitate projects that capture their interest, honor their strengths and identities, and meet their needs?
How can I hold high intellectual expectations and provide appropriate support for all students, in order to advance each student’s academic mindset and cognitive growth?
How can I provide experiences that deepen students’ capacity to read, write, listen, and speak across a range of contexts and disciplines?
How do I cultivate student voice, choice, agency, and interdependence in our classroom?
Interesting projects often put students into specific, real-world roles. Experts whose work is related to your topic or content area can offer useful feedback during project planning and other parts of your project. The more you can bring in expert ways of thinking and working into PBL, the more authentic your projects will become.
In designing projects, we strive to have students doing the work of the world. Inviting those who actually do that work in the world into your project can be extremely powerful. Outside experts can be leveraged during each phase of the project; and they can come from a variety of places — your school, district, town or city, state, nation, and the world. This guide provides strategies for maximizing the power of outside experts in your projects.
Four tips for PBL teachers for how to communicate with, support, and involve guest experts in projects.
To promote student agency and ownership of assessment, teach them how to self-assess and do peer-assessment. Critique protocols are helpful tools for this – structured opportunities to give, receive, and apply peer feedback on their work in progress. The protocol you choose depends on what kind of feedback students need at various stages of a project.
Critique protocols are structured processes that guide students in giving and receiving feedback. This guide offers strategies for implementing peer critique protocols that enhance learning to improve the quality of student work.
Use these slides to guide students through a feedback protocol.
A teacher's advice for making sure critique protocols work well with students.
PBLWorks National Faculty members discuss how to build students’ skills in giving helpful critique, including low-stakes practice sessions and using rubrics with exemplars.
An excerpt from the book Project Based Teaching, with several examples of strategies teachers can use to build a productive PBL culture in the classroom.
A teacher reflects on a lesson learned from student feedback on a project, and offers 7 tips for how to effectively honor student voice by inviting student critique of projects and their implementation by the teacher.
Video demonstrates how the teacher guided students to zoom in on specific qualities of Austin’s drawing of a butterfly to improve the quality of the drawing.
How to make sure projects stay fresh and maintain students’ enthusiasm
In PBL, the culmination of a project is when the focus of assessment shifts from assessment for learning (formative) to assessment of learning (summative). “When a cook tastes the soup, that's formative; when the guests taste the soup, that’s summative” (Scriven, 1991).
Consider Various Grading Strategies in PBL
Tips from a veteran PBL high school teacher on how to handle assessment in projects, and the tricky issue of grading.
Editor in Chief John Larmer, with contributions from the PBLWorks National Faculty, offers tips for teachers to answer FAQs about grading issues in PBL.
A high school teacher gives advice on what to grade, how to grade, who evaluates, and public vs. private evaluation in PBL.
A Department-wide framework to develop the skills, behaviors and dispositions that are reminiscent of Hawaii‘s unique context, and to honor the qualities and values of the indigenous language and culture of Hawai‘i.
Every project you design and facilitate should help students build their literacy skills (reading, writing, speaking and listening). Literacy is an equity lever. In order to promote equitable access to and learning of content, all teachers, regardless of discipline, need to be literacy teachers.
Consider the following questions
If you are a math teacher with a project on compound interest and financial literacy, have students practice reading, analyzing, and writing financial reports and data visualization, and engage in discussions and presentations in which they explain their mathematical thinking.
If you are a science teacher doing a project about climate change, students might practice scientific reading reports, sets of data, and news articles about the topic.
A thorough look at how reading and writing goals can be integrated with other standards in projects.
Four strategies for building reading, writing, and presentations skills.
Consider the texts and resources students will engage with during the project. If they will be reading primary sources in history or theatrical scripts, consider the skills they will need to learn in order to make meaning of these texts. If students are producing podcasts, writing proposed legislation, or developing user guides, what will they need to learn in order to create products that are high-quality and relevant to the audience and purpose?
A secondary teacher provides 5 strategies for PBL units, such as leveled texts, graphic organizers, transition words, and text annotations, and more.
As you plan your project calendar, make time to explicitly teach (and formatively assess) the literacy skills you are targeting. This might include introducing and practicing relevant vocabulary, analyzing “mentor texts'' with students to explore specific attributes of a genre or text type, providing graphic organizers and checklists to help students plan and revise their written work and their presentations, and/or teaching mini-lessons on specific reading, writing, listening, or speaking strategies.
3 tips for supporting students during a project who need to build reading, writing, listening and speaking skills.
“Questioning is the ability to organize our thinking around what we don’t know.”
– The Right Question Institute
In PBL, we teach students how to identify and ask questions about what they don’t know, and use these questions to structure learning.
K-W-L Chart, which tracks what a student knows (K), wants to know (W), and has learned (L) about a topic, can be used before, during, and after research projects.
Students and teachers reflect on the effectiveness of their inquiry and project activities, the quality of student work, and obstacles and how to overcome them.
“We do not learn from experience...we learn from reflecting on experience.”
– John Dewey
In PBL, students should have regular opportunities to reflect, individually and with others, on both what and how they are learning. This guide provides a framework and strategies for supporting reflection on learning throughout a project.
WHY should I plan for reflection? By definition, reflection is serious thought and consideration about an idea or experience.
Open Mind Reflection Process
Three major areas of reflection:
When to ask students to reflect, how to organize the process, and what questions to ask.
Consider the rubric as a “roadmap” that shows what is taught, practiced, and assessed in a project. It provides students with a clear understanding of what must be done to demonstrate mastery of standards and success skills. It is a tool that is introduced early in the project and leveraged throughout the project to support formative assessment and promote reflection.
Gold Standards PBL Rubrics
The Project Design Rubric uses the Essential Project Design Elements as criteria to evaluate projects. The rubric aligns with PBLWorks' Gold Standard PBL model. Definitions and practical examples are used to clarify the meaning of each dimension. The rubric helps educators understand the difference between a simple "project" and rigorous Gold Standard PBL. Teachers who are new to PBL can see how to move from beginner to expert. You and your colleagues can use the rubric to guide the design of projects, give formative feedback, and reflect and revise.
This rubric describes beginning, developing, and Gold Standard levels for Project Based Teaching Practices for K-12 teachers and features detailed, concrete indicators that illustrate what it means to teach in a PBL environment. Teachers and school leaders can use this rubric to reflect on their practice and plan for professional growth.
Things to consider: Make expectations transparent, cultivate a growth mindset, give and receive feedback.
View the video to see how rubrics can support learning during a project.
Ways to use rubrics throughout a project.
An explanation of the purpose and structure of PBLWorks rubrics.
Free web-based teacher tool. Create a standards-based rubric in less than 1 minute.
Project Launch
Provide time for students to analyze rubrics for each product they will create in the project. Do this before they ever start creating products.
Create a routine in which students use the rubric to reflect on what they know and what they need to know in order to move forward.
Implement a regular routine in which students use the project rubric to self- and peer-assess progress.
Have students use the rubric to self-reflect on their final products. Provide an annotated rubric to students along with their final project grade.
Practice using the rubric on exemplars of work and the project’s products to build understanding, if you have them from previous projects or can find similar work samples.
You may find it useful to set aside a specific day of the week to check status/progress with the rubric. Writing rubric checks into your project calendar is a helpful reminder for you and your students to take the time to assess and reflect.
Have students use the rubric in critique protocols.
Use success skills rubrics for self- and peer-assessment of growth.
The most effective revisions help after taking time for reflection on the critique received. Make sure to build in these days up front when planning out how long your project will take.
Reserve a good chunk of time the day after the culmination of a project for students to go over audience, teacher, and peer feedback to accurately assess their work one final time, before you do the final assessment.
Teachers work with students to organize tasks and schedules, set checkpoints and deadlines, find and use resources, create products and make them public.
The team contract is a document introduced at the start of each project that asks project teams to think through and agree on how students will individually contribute to the team, how the members will work together, and how problems will be solved when they arise.
Effective teams require us to think carefully about the kind of work students will be doing throughout the project. What outcomes are most important? How can we utilize teams so students effectively reach those outcomes? We also need to think through our grouping strategy — whether homogeneous, heterogenous, or another strategy. This guide offers strategies for grouping and structuring teams as well as creating and assigning roles for effective collaboration.
A learning log is a tool that students use during the project to keep track of their questions and learning generated through their research. This guide offers strategies for teaching students to use learning logs to support inquiry throughout a project.
Helping all students (including English Language Learners) become fluent in the language of a project’s targeted content is an essential part of teaching in a PBL classroom. Project Based Learning classrooms offer rich opportunities to learn and apply vocabulary in authentic and meaning-oriented ways, but this is most powerful when PBL teachers plan intentionally for vocabulary development throughout the project.
This document helps a team organize what needs to be done, by which team member, and by when.
5 tips for aligning learning goals with products to help ensure equality work.
How to structure a block class period to include time for online learning, mini-lessons, and tracking team progress.
Teachers work with students to organize tasks and schedules, set checkpoints and deadlines, find and use resources, create products and make them public.
A detailed look at a tool for helping students manage themselves and their work in a project.
A teacher explains how he and his students keep track of multi-step projects.
A teacher’s advice for making sure critique protocols work well with students.
Critique protocols are structured processes that guide students in giving and receiving high quality feedback. This guide offers strategies for implementing peer critique protocols that enhance learning and improve the quality of student work.
Throughout a project — particularly during the build knowledge and develop and critique phases — students are engaged in extended work time to complete project tasks.
This document helps a project team keep track of project tasks, who is responsible for them, and by when.
This form may be used by students to track progress on a project and have them report on what they individually accomplished on a particular day or week.
As students work together on projects, they learn valuable skills for collaborating, managing group dynamics and conflict, and building on one another’s strengths.
This is a blank template which may be filled in by project team members to record agreements about how they will work together.
This document helps a team organize what needs to be done, by which team member, and by when.
A teacher and PBLWorks National Faculty member explains how he borrows a tool from restorative practice, the talking circle, to have students talk about collaboration and create their own team contract for projects.
This contract can be used by a project team to agree upon how they will work together.
Teachers work with students to organize tasks and schedules, set checkpoints and deadlines, find and use resources, create products and make them public.
Project Wall
Project walls are bulletin boards or wall spaces that guide learning and project management throughout the project.
At the beginning of the project, students are introduced to key content in an authentic context via a stimulus or hook, which in PBL we call an entry event.
A learning log is a tool that students use during the project to keep track of their questions and learning generated through their research. This guide offers strategies for teaching students to use learning logs to support inquiry throughout a project.
Articles, videos, and rubrics to help K-12 teachers learn how to manage activities in PBL units.
Norms are the agreed upon rules that build a productive, self-driven, and respectful culture. These norms, especially when co-created with students, can serve as the “north star” or guiding philosophy for all that happens in a classroom.
Information about the project to share with students as you launch the project.
Helping all students (including English Language Learners) become fluent in the language of a project’s targeted content is an essential part of teaching in a PBL classroom.
The project asks students to demonstrate what they learn by creating a product (artifact, presentation, performance, and/or event), which is shared with people beyond the classroom.
This guide provides strategies for effectively using an audience feedback form during project presentations.
This document helps students think about what they did in the project and how well their project went.
This document helps students organize their presentations with a specific audience in mind.
How students can reflect and report on how they completed a project, to help their audience better understand what happens in PBL.
This checklist helps teachers prepare for project presentations before they start.
A teacher explains how he uses discussion protocols during projects, plus presentation scripts and small-group audiences to ease the pressure.
This document can be used to help students reflect on how they worked, and on the project itself.
A school principal offers advice on how to make sure a public event to showcase students’ project work is beneficial for teachers and parents.
Teachers employ a variety of lessons, tools, and instructional strategies to support all students in reaching project goals. Create conditions so that every student – regardless of prior learning experiences, language fluency, or reading levels – can succeed in PBL.
How teachers can help at-first unwilling students rise to the challenge of a project, by modeling their own learning process to provide scaffolds to build a supportive culture.
3 tips: clarifying learning goals, formatively assess and provide guided practices, and create space for thinking about thinking
Both student outcomes and scaffolding will look different in a PBL classroom.
The English Learner Scaffolds for PBL document provides strategies and recommendations to support English Learners during each phase of a project. It includes guidance on scaffolding the project process, content learning, and language development.
How strategies for supporting the Essential Elements of Gold Standard PBL can promote equity.
A kindergarten teacher tells how she used “structured choices” and supported students in a community mapping project.
The learning goals are the whole point of the project and the teaching. Projects should focus on the important standards. Focus on standards that emphasize deeper understanding, disciplinary thinking, and real-world application.
The project allows students to make their voices heard, and to make choices about what they investigate, the products they create, and how they may work and use time, guided by the teacher as appropriate.
How to create a PBL culture inclusive to all learners, ensure all voices are heard, and ground PBL instruction in inclusive practices.
Consider letting students decide what they want to study, who they want to work with, what outcomes they expect, and where and when they do their work.
A 3rd grade teacher explains how she gave students four opportunities to make choices in a Heroes Museum project.
A teacher tells how a beginning French class project made her question self-imposed parameters for how to teach the course curriculum
6 best practices and tips for designing and facilitating projects to allow for student choice, and how “voice” is different.
Research-based rubrics that provide useful, formative information that teachers can use to guide instruction and provide feedback to students that they can use to reflect on their performance. Rubrics for each success skill are available by grade span: K-2, 3-5, and 6-12. The K-2 rubric includes both a teacher version and a version for primary students or early readers.
This resource list is intended to help teachers enhance their practice for building student competency in the 4 C’s in Project Based Learning
The first in a series of posts, summarizing research-based guidance for designing projects for critical thinking.
3 research-based insights to help guide the teaching of critical thinking in PBL.
You don’t have time not to; here’s how.