Project based learning handbook 2nd edition

Project-based Learning accommodates students with varying learning styles and differences. Children having different learning styles, build their knowledge on varying backgrounds and experiences.

It is also recognised that children have a broader range of capabilities than they have been permitted to show in regular classrooms with the traditional text-based focus. Project-based Learning addresses these differences because students must use all modalities in the process of researching and solving a problem, then communicating the solutions.

When children are interested in what they are doing and able to use their areas of strength, they achieve at a higher level. The curriculum develops in students a sense of social responsibility, so that they become aware of their obligations and duties as citizens in a democracy, and are especially sensitive to the needs of the poor and the aged. The curriculum develops in students an awareness of global interdependence in all aspects of life including the environment and the economy.

With Project-based Learning, students use collaborative and co-operative approaches to generate knowledge and this is the key to facilitate meaningful and real-life learning. Real PBL, by contrast, is deep, complex, rigorous, and integrated where each stakeholder in the school plays an important role. They include 1 content standards, 2 collaboration, 3 critical thinking, 4 oral communication, 5 written communication, 6 career preparation, 7 citizenship and ethics, and 8 technology literacy.

Project-based Learning, as with all lessons, requires much preparation and planning. When designing the project, it is essential that the content standards are addressed. With these standards in mind, devise a plan to integrate as many subjects as possible into the project.

Teachers must have ideas on what materials and resources to be made accessible to assist students. Next, students will also need to be given assistance in managing their time.

It is greater than the task at hand. It is open-ended. It will pose a problem or a situation that the students can tackle knowing that there is no ONE answer or solution. The question should have meaning in their lives at that moment of time. Involve students in the planning process. Students feel ownership of the project when they have an active role in deciding activities. Base on the curriculum, select activities that support the question.

Know what materials and resources to be made accessible to students. Be prepared to delve deeper into new topics and issues as students become more involved in pursuit of answers. Step 3 Create a Schedule Design a timeline for project components. Realise that changes to the schedule will happen. Allow students to go in new directions. Guide them when they appear to be going in a direction that has no connection to the project.

Teach students how to work collaboratively. Let students choose their primary roles but assume responsibility and interactivity for other group roles. Remind students that every part of the process belongs to them and needs their total involvement. Provide resources, guidance and assess the process through creating team rubrics and project rubrics. Team rubrics state the expectations of each team member while project rubrics refer to evaluation requirements of the projects.

As such, these requirements must be made clear to students to ensure success in their projects. Step 5 Assess the Outcome Assessment provides diagnostic feedback and helps educators set standards. It allows one to evaluate progress and to relate that progress to others. It gives students feedback on how well they understand the information and what they need to improve on.

Assessment also helps teachers design instruction to teach more effectively. Whenever possible, allow self-assessment among students. Share feelings and experiences, and discuss what worked well and what needs change. Share ideas that will lead to new questions, thus new projects. Naturally the project outcome is driven by the essential question or problem statement.

Often, brainstorming among peers would produce the best essential questions. Other aspects to be taken into consideration in crafting the essential question are the: 1 level of complexity, 2 level of coherence, and 3 level of authenticity.

Although standard classroom assignments and homework pose questions that students must answer, an essential question requires multiple activities and the synthesis of different types of information before it can be answered.

Level of authenticity in an essential question The essential question should address authentic concerns. Questions to be asked in the process should include the following. Source: www. Answers to essential questions cannot be found. They must be invented. It is like cooking a great meal. Only in this way, they create insights. Answering such questions may take a whole lifetime, and even then, the answers may only be tentative. In answering the essential question, research is required and it proceeds over the course of several weeks, with much of the information gathering activities taking place outside of the formally scheduled classroom hours.

Hence, the essential question would engage students in research which are similar to real-life applied problem-solving. Essential questions usually lend themselves well to multidisciplinary investigations, requiring students to apply skills and perspectives of math and language arts while wrestling with content from social studies or science.

With effective essential question driving PBL projects, teachers would be able to implement thematic and cross- curricular teaching and learning practices. Alternative assessment provides avenues to assess projects effectively. Alternative Assessment Alternative assessment assesses acquisition of knowledge and skills in ways other than the conventional methods such as traditional paper-and pencil tests.

It actively involves students in a process that combines what is taught, how it is taught, and how it is evaluated. This can be achieved by using a pre-determined set of criteria for instance rubrics, a scoring scale incorporating a set of essential criteria for the task and appropriate levels of performance for each criterion used.

Portfolio Assessment evaluates the compilation of work and processes attested in efforts and success of a particular project or area. Examinees are required to review and select items that best demonstrate their learning.

Example of portfolios can be paper-based, computer-based or a combination of both. Authentic assessment corresponds closely to real- world experience. Originally developed in the arts and apprenticeship systems, assessment has always been performance-based. Authentic assessment takes this principle of evaluating real work into all areas of the curriculum. Rubrics Rubrics are authentic assessment tools designed to simulate real-life activity where students are engaged in solving real-life problems.

It is particularly useful in assessing complex and subjective criteria. Formative assessment best describes rubrics and it becomes an ongoing part of the whole teaching and learning process.

Its assessment tools comprise the rating scale, a set of evaluation criteria and descriptors. They write down dates, times, how much of the moon was visible, and any other comments they have about their observations.

From there, they have to write up what patterns they observed and research why these patterns occur. They also must have a visual to go along with their observations. The idea is to get them to discover that there are phases of the moon, why there are phases, and how long a revolution takes. Visual The visual is The visual clearly The visual The visual is not colourful and represents the is somewhat representative of also clearly data and is meaningful.

The teacher's orchestrator role is to implement or most frequently also to create the scenarios or scripts as they are also called. This means basically to define a scenario as a sequence of clearly identifiable phases in a way that learners focus on a smaller amount of tasks at the same time and that these tasks are not too difficult to be solved at some point.

Let's have a look at a simple example. Imagine that for a given purpose, students need references for a project. We can turn this into a pedagogical activity with a scenario that includes the following steps:.

As we said before, scenarios should not be "over-scripted", the student should in general be its own master of the tasks and tasks should have some flavor of authenticity. Along similar lines, the teacher should not directly interfere with student's products, but only give feedback and evaluation and let the student fix things himself.

Defining a scenario therefore is a workflow design problem, but with the idea that pedagogical workflows are different from the ones in industry. In industry the goal is the product, in education the goal is apprenticeship, i. Global story boards are quite different according to level of education, field, total time, duration, etc. As the above example shows, most activity-based, constructive and collaborative pedagogies do not necessarily need any special tools, but work can be made more efficient after some adaptation period and certainly more powerful by adopting some support technology.

Walls in a classroom run out of space, paper is lost and collaboration within the classroom is under heavy time constraints and "home work" lacks the sort of support that classroom activities have. Content needs to managed, knowledge exchange must be organized, discussion tools must favor exchange of arguments, projects must run, and generated knowledge must be managed.

Internet technology supports most open-ended, creative and active pedagogies, as long as students can also be producers not just readers and exercise button pushers. While there is an interesting number of enabling software and while activity-based e. Exceptions like the Knowledge Forum System are rare. Besides commonly used tools like HTML pages and forums, there exist quite a number of interesting tools like participatory content management systems e. Weblogs , and collaborative hypertexts in various forms e.

However, we like to push one step further, i. Technical requirements for active and rich pedagogies are not extremely demanding, but interesting results could already be obtained by providing the following sort of functionalities :.

Activity-based pedagogies assign a better diverse role to documents used. Learners generally select by themselves the documents they need from a larger choice which includes the whole Internet.

More importantly, they actively participate in the production of documents, some of which can be reused later on.

Ideally, they also should be allowed to annotate documents, i. Writing in this perspective concerns producing short texts in various genres questions, arguments, links, definitions, etc. These learner productions plus interactions are meant to provoke various meta-cognitive mechanisms beneficial to learning e. In general terms, activity-based teaching needs mainly a computer as a facilitating structure, a thinking, working and communication tool instead of a content transmission device.

Accordingly, most student and teacher activities should be supported by computational tools and lead to new « contents ».

Within this perspective we can see that activities and roles are defined in a collaborative expressive digital media framework. The community factor is particularly important in open and distance learning situations. As formulated by e-learning practitioner Gilroy « E-learning should be first and foremost about creating a social space that must be managed for the teaching and learning needs of the particular group of people inhabiting that space ». While a large part of our knowledge comes indeed from formally planned learning scenarios, people learn a lot from informal exchange with fellow learners, with professors, experts, i.

It is very important that teaching should generate enthusiasm, enhance concentration and favor creativity, which are very distinct, but somehow interconnected phenomena. Rieber Smith and Noah convincingly argue that learning process itself -and not just the result- should be interesting, if one seeks higher motivation among learners.

According to Feldman, Csikszentmihalyi and Gardner , creativity should be studied and therefore facilitated by the teacher at three different levels : 1 the social field, e. It is clear that education cannot influence all variables, but pedagogical design certainly can have a positive influence on individual dispositions that already exist.

It can act upon conditions, i. By exposing students to open-ended, challenging, authentic and partly self-defined projects on one hand and by providing scaffolding and support on the other hand, the teacher does create situations where individual traits can be exposed and developed.

By taking into accout input from community of practice , flow theory , creativity theory etc. First, the portal should be a rich information space for « domain support » and it should encourage students to add their own contribution.

Such a space also encourages exploration. The typical tools used are links managers, Wikis, news engines and RSS feed that keep users up-to-date about articles posted to other interesting portals or individual Weblogs. Intellectual support is provided via forums, annotations and articles. Student productions are always accessible to all including visitors and therefore provide for recognition. In our experience, it has been shown that students are more likely to contribute to an environment if they own an identity.

In the student's partly automatically generated home page on the portal one can see their contributions, read public parts of their personal Weblog and conversely each production in the portal is signed with a clickable link to the author. In addition, we developed a tool that allows to list and display in detail all student productions throughout the various tools. A successful teaching by projects pedagogy needs to provide strong emotional support and it is therefore important to encourage spontaneous, playful interaction and corners for humor that will augment quality of on-line life and contribute to class spirit.

Tools like the shoutbox or a little quotation box can do wonders. Last, but not least, a personal Weblog diary can stimulate meta-reflection, in particular if the teacher requires that students write an entry after the completion of each activity. Our observations lead us to conclude that pedagogical portals should also be designed in the spirit of true virtual environments that have drawn a lot of attention in the last decade.

A pedagogical virtual environment VE consists in a constructed virtual information space built with the appropriate tools as outlined above. A virtual environment VE is also a social space, where pedagogical interactions take place. The educational technology and digital learning wiki.

Jump to: navigation , search. The long and distinguished history of the project method can be divided into five phases: The beginnings of project work at architectural schools in Europe.

Knoll, For over years, educators such as John Dewey have reported on the benefits of experiential, hands-on, student-directed learning. Designed for teachers of Kindergarten through 5th grade students, PBL in the Elementary Grades contains down-to-earth, classroom-tested advice, including sample projects, step-by-step guidance, tips from experienced practitioners, and planning tools.

Enriched Learning Projects effectively guides teachers through project planning, assessment, and implementation. Bellanca does this and more. His book is an intellectual dialogue direct with you, as a teacher, showing you not only how to design, assess, and implement projects, but also how to directly support your students with mind tools and mediation of critical thinking. Order the book here. Solution tree has also provided a superb reproducible resources page.

Learn how to implement a real-world approach to PBL. Authentic learning experiences are created around genuine, outside audiences and meaningful purposes. They meet the Common Core, engage students in critical thinking and 21st Century learning, teach important skills such as research and collaboration, and improve student learning.

This practical guide provides step-by-step instructions to make it easy for teachers to create their own authentic learning experiences. Buy the book at Amazon. The Project Based Learning Design and Coaching Guide will take you through the process of planning and managing world class projects.

Included is access to the latest tools, planning forms, and resources for PBL, as well as hundreds of tips on trouble shooting projects, improving project quality, and methods for motivating and engaging students in projects. Thom Markham's website. Reinventing Project-Based Learning offers educators an accessible guide for maximizing the benefits of project-based learning in today's technology-rich learning environment.