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Introduction

If you follow the headlines about the state of the U.S. education system, it’s easy to feel discouraged. International comparisons show American students lagging behind their peers in South Korea, Singapore, Finland, and many developed countries in measures of academic achievement. Fewer than three in ten Americans think high school graduates are prepared for college, and fewer than two in ten think their grads are ready for the workforce (Gallup, 2014). Teacher turnover is portrayed as yet another symptom of a broken system and dispirited teaching force.

Even worse, students themselves may be abandoning their youthful optimism. While 54 percent of students describe themselves as hopeful about the future, 32 percent say they feel “stuck,” and 14 percent are outright discouraged (Gallup, 2014). Although student engagement still runs high in the early grades, it falls steadily the longer students spend in school (Fullan & Donnelly, 2013).

Get past these negative sound bites and into actual classrooms, however, and you can find plenty of cause for optimism about today’s youth and their readiness to tackle challenges. That’s especially true in schools that leverage project-based learning (PBL) strategies, combined with ready access to technology.

In schools across the United States and internationally, I regularly encounter students who are working to improve their neighborhoods, address global inequities, and design innovations that will improve their families’ and communities’ health and economic prospects. They take advantage of digital tools to analyze issues that interest them and navigate online resources to guide their own learning. If they have questions that extend beyond their teachers’ expertise, they track down outside experts to help them figure out what they want to learn. They get their own work into the world, too, by publishing on online platforms and making convincing pitches to public audiences and government councils. It’s hard not to feel hopeful after talking to students engaged in these kinds of authentic learning experiences.

While attending a global youth conference in Shanghai, I sat down with student delegates from Northwest Passage High School, a project-based school in Coon Rapids, Minnesota (Boss, 2014b). The conference challenged them to work in small teams with Chinese and U.S. peers they had just met and devise solutions to compelling global issues related to health, education, and the environment. The students with PBL experience thrived, in many cases taking leadership roles on their teams. “We’re used to collaborating, figuring out how to define problems, and identifying our audience,” they told me. Students from more traditional schools, they noticed, struggled “without a lot of instruction. . . . We understand what it means to take control of our own education.”

Changing Roles

Students who have regular opportunities to take part in engaging, academically challenging PBL are still outliers in the education landscape, but their ranks are growing. Motivated by a desire to better prepare students for the challenges of college, careers, and citizenship, increasing numbers of teachers, school networks, and entire school systems are making a shift to project-based learning enabled by digital tools.

If you are considering this shift—for your classroom or an entire school system—recognize from the outset that it may not be easy. PBL demands new roles for teachers and students alike. In Reinventing Project-Based Learning, coauthor Jane Krauss and I (2014) document several changes that teachers can anticipate, including the following.

 Learning goals: Reconsider what you expect students to know and do.

 Ways of talking and engaging with students: Interact with your students in different ways. Get comfortable with messier learning, with students working more autonomously (and not necessarily all doing the same thing at the same time).

 Classroom management style: Help students better handle their own growth.

 Physical classroom arrangement: Reposition the classroom fixtures to enable teamwork and collaboration.

 Assessment thinking: Re-evaluate what you take note of during the learning process and adjust your teaching plan based on what you notice.

 Collected materials: Reconsider which learning artifacts you preserve.

 Communication with parents and colleagues: Defend the thinking behind the 21st century project approach, and encourage parents and other community members to find ways to support project work. For example, they might provide audience feedback, share their expertise, or help with the logistics of field research.

Teachers become change agents through these shifts, turning theories about education reform into noticeable differences in day-to-day learning experiences. School change experts Michael Fullan and Donnelly (2013) describe such reinvented classrooms in Alive in the Swamp: “Problems and questions are placed in real world contexts; the emphasis is on intellectual risk taking and trial-and-error problem solving; and there is a healthy partnership between the student and teacher that is built on enquiry and data” (p. 16).

Fortunately, teachers don’t have to figure out all these changes on their own. Educators who have already traveled this path provide insights for their colleagues to borrow and adapt. Rich examples help newcomers make a faster transition to teaching with real-world projects, answering Fullan and Langworthy’s (2013) call for more models that show “what teaching for this kind of connected and flourishing learning looks like” (p. 11).

Learning From Pioneers

In the vanguard of this nascent PBL movement are networks of schools that deliver all their instruction through projects. To leverage their collective wisdom, these PBL pioneers—including High Tech High, the New Tech Network, Expeditionary Learning, Envision Learning, and others—have joined the Deeper Learning Network, an initiative of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. By coming together as a network, they are in a better position to collaborate, share and model best practices, and communicate with the larger education field about how to achieve lasting school change (Boss & Krauss, 2014).

Although their models vary somewhat, they typically emphasize student-driven inquiry, authentic problem solving, and access to technology. Teachers in these settings rise to the challenge of being curriculum designers. They leverage peer collaboration, critiquing, and, often, instructional coaching to improve their practice.

Schools at the forefront of this movement tend to be transparent about their systemic approaches to rethinking education through PBL. They open their classrooms to visitors and, in many cases, make project examples and resources publicly available. That’s good news for educators who want to see PBL in action before taking the plunge themselves.

The Buck Institute for Education, a nonprofit that focuses on improving education globally, has been another driver of change, helping teachers and school systems around the world design and implement high-quality PBL. (Visit the Buck Institute for Education website [http://bie.org] for downloadable PBL planning resources. Full disclosure: I’m part of the Buck Institute for Education faculty and have collaborated on publications.)

Stand-alone schools, such as the well-respected Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, also share their PBL success stories and instructional strategies. The Science Leadership Academy hosts an annual conference, EduCon, that attracts hundreds of educators to its urban campus for conversations about reimagining K–12 education. Students at Science Leadership Academy take part in these conversations, reflecting on the projects that have challenged and inspired them, such as following in Alexis de Tocqueville’s footsteps to become modern-day historians themselves, using their understanding of science to design a solar-powered water purifier for the developing world, or teaching lessons about social justice and civil rights to middle schoolers in their community.

These pioneering schools’ strong results, along with mounting evidence about the effectiveness of PBL, have sparked interest in project-based learning in more mainstream settings. Since the 1990s, researchers have documented a range of benefits for PBL, including increased motivation and engagement, deeper understanding of academic content, and enhanced problem-solving skills (Finkelstein, Hanson, Huang, Hirschman, & Huang, 2010; Mergendoller, Maxwell, & Bellisimo, 2006; Stites, 1998; Thomas, 2000). A 2014 study of schools in the Deeper Learning Network, which includes the PBL schools mentioned previously, reports higher graduation rates, better test scores, and stronger interpersonal skills compared to more traditional schools (Zeiser, Taylor, Rickles, Garet, & Segeritz, 2014).

Bob Lenz, cofounder of Envision Education and incoming executive director of the Buck Institute for Education, finds particularly hopeful news embedded in this research. Blogging about the Deeper Learning Network research, he comments on the evidence of equity in PBL settings:

Perhaps two of the most significant findings from the list [of outcomes] above are that students are developing higher levels of academic engagement, collaboration, motivation, and self efficacy and that deeper learning is working with students regardless of their income levels or prior school achievement . . . Deeper learning strategies are giving all kids the opportunities, experiences, and skills each of us want for our own children. (Lenz, 2014)

Given the inequities that persist in education, this is hopeful news, indeed. Students who will be the first in their families to attend college dominate the California schools in the Envision network. (For a more comprehensive look at the research on PBL, see Vega, 2012, and visit go.solution-tree.com/technology to access the link.)

As PBL spreads from early-adopter schools to more mainstream contexts, various implementation models emerge. A shift to PBL sometimes starts at the grass roots with a core group of teachers who become advance scouts for their colleagues. Or an entire faculty or professional learning community might participate in professional development together to learn PBL fundamentals. In many schools, technology rollouts are the precipitating factors for rethinking instruction that leverages digital tools in new ways.

Instead of doing all projects all the time, some schools have students engage in PBL only a few times a year or just in certain disciplines, such as science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) or career and technical education. Even in smaller doses, PBL can produce transformative results if it helps students recognize their potential and see how school relates to their interests.

Whether projects last for a couple of weeks or an entire semester and whether they focus on one content area or cross disciplines, the same strategies apply. To make the most of the learning opportunities that PBL affords, keep in mind the following four core ideas (Boss & Krauss, 2014).

1 The inquiry project, framed by a driving question, is the centerpiece of instruction. It’s not an add-on or hands-on activity wrapping up a unit of study. Instead, the project is designed with specific learning goals in mind.

2 Students get involved in real-world problem solving, applying the strategies and tools used in authentic disciplines and, often, engaging with outside experts.

3 Students share their work with authentic audiences.

4 Technology is used as a means for students to collaborate, communicate, and make discoveries they wouldn’t otherwise gain.

By giving students a reason to engage and the opportunity to discover their passions and talents, PBL may help address the worrisome decline in student optimism discussed previously. Connie Rath, vice chair of Gallup Education, highlights this glimmer of positive news in a six-hundred-thousand-student Gallup survey:

Students who strongly agreed that their school is committed to building students’ strengths and that they have a teacher who makes them excited about the future are almost 30 times as likely to be engaged learners as their peers who strongly disagreed with both statements. (Gallup, 2014, p. 3)

About This Book

Implementing Project-Based Learning draws on the four core ideas, using my own experience with schools implementing PBL and interviews with teachers and students, to set the stage for rigorous, relevant, digital-age learning that excites students about the future.

Teachers who were the designers of the creative projects you will read about in the coming pages reflected on their PBL experiences in post-project interviews. Unless otherwise indicated, interviews took place during December 2014.

Chapter 1 lays the foundation for PBL, identifying the environment and critical skills essential to success and four phases every well-designed project goes through. Then, in chapters 2 through 6, I delve into five specific types of PBL: (1) geoliteracy projects, (2) data literacy projects, (3) entrepreneurship and innovation projects, (4) media literacy projects, and (5) storytelling projects. In the examples in chapters 2 through 6, you will read about projects that deliberately build on students’ strengths while introducing them to new ways of thinking and problem solving. Each chapter ends with helpful resources to get started with PBL. Finally, in chapter 7, I outline some challenges teachers face and questions they have when implementing PBL and offer assessment strategies. Visit go.solution-tree.com/technology to access materials related to this book.

As teachers reflect on successful project experiences, you can sense the contagious excitement that they bring into the classroom. The stories in the following chapters exemplify the reconsidered school experiences that “blow the lid off learning, whereby students and teachers as partners become captivated by education” (Fullan & Langworthy, 2013, p. 1). Can you picture your students in similar roles, learning by engaging with real issues and then sharing their project results with an appreciative audience? When students produce work that is taken seriously, that solves genuine problems, and that matters to them and the larger world, all of us have cause to be more optimistic about the future. So, let’s get started.