Taking the Project-Based Learning Plunge: A Starter's FAQ Guide

by Kate Wolfe Maxlow

You've made up your mind. Yeah, your students have to do well on the end-of-year standardized assessment, but you know that's not enough. You want YOUR students to be critical thinkers, solving problems together. Making the world a better place. Believing that

they can make the world a better place.

So, you research some different instructional models and decide that you're going to dip your toes in the Project-Based Learning water. You love that it allows your students to implement what they're learning in a real-world situation, that it gives them choice and voice in their own learning. And bonus: it's basically how most people in the real-world work every day, so you're actually preparing them for life beyond PreK-12 education.

But you're a savvy educator and have a few questions before you start. Good for you. Let's talk about some of the most common ones.

1. Does the research even support Project-Based Learning as an effective instructional method?
First of all, if you haven't read this blog on the limitations of educational research, go do that real quick. You probably noticed one important thing: Educational research usually uses standardized tests (which are notoriously full of lower-level multiple choice, non-authentic items) to determine the effectiveness of a strategy.

I'm going to be honest here. If your main goal for the year is to get through a curriculum that's a mile wide and an inch deep and test it with out-of-context problems that really only get through, at best, the Application level...Project-Based Learning might not be the instructional method for you. Likewise, if you're at the beginning of a unit and you just need students to get some fact and skill fluency, direct instruction is probably your best bet. There's a time and a place for different instructional models.

John Hattie, author of Visible Learning: A Synthesis of Over 800 Meta-Analyses Relating to Achievement, doesn't look at the numbers specifically on project-based learning, but he does investigate the effects of its cousin, problem-based learning, and has this to say about it:

"Dochy, Segers, Van den Bossche, and Gijbels (2003) found an overall negative effective for problem-based learning compared to a conventional learning environment on knowledge (d = -0.78) but noted that problem-based learning had a positive effective on skills (d = 0.66). It was the case that students taught using problem-based learning had less knowledge but had better recall of the knowledge they had."

A d = 0.66 is equivalent to an average of a 25 percentile point gain for students who engage in the strategy. (Want to know more about effect sizes? Check out what Marzano has to say about them here.) Meanwhile, direct instruction, the most common instructional method, only has an effect size of d = 0.59 (a 22 percentile point gain for students engaging in the strategy).

Inquiry learning, also similar to project-based learning, has similar research backing it up. It's bad for memorizing a bunch of facts; great for critical thinking and having students actually remember what they learn.

So, where does this leave us? Don't waste precious instructional time doing a project-based learning unit on things that aren't really important for your students to remember. Use project-based learning on the skills that will have the most impact on students' future lives--the ones that you want them to remember forever.


2. How on earth will I have time to do a project-based learning unit?
Yep, these take a long time. They take even longer if it'll be the first time your students have collaborated together all year. That doesn't mean it's impossible, however.

First, choose a standard that you know can't be taught with direct instruction alone (for instance, creating a work of art or doing an experiment or better understanding the judicial system). If possible, pick a time when you know students don't tend to get much work done anyway, like right before Winter Break or after their standardized test; that way, you'll feel less pressure to force-feed them mounds of curriculum. Plus, most projects are inherently motivating for students, so they'll actually be more likely to actually work instead of just zoning out.

Next, keep your project small. Don't plan to have students write, direct, sew costumes for, and create backdrops for a play in which they turn all five acts of MacBeth into a rom com for your first project. You and your students will get bogged down in the details and there's the risk that none of you will ever want to try it again. Instead, have them update one scene from MacBeth into a modern form, such as a graphic novel, a plan for an app (Out, Out Spots!), or a music video. Make sure it's something that can be done in a week or less.

Now, determine what about your project you'll need to front-load. For instance, it's not a good idea to have students make videos during this project if you've never taught them how to make videos. They'll get bogged down in the mechanics and your project will drag on and on. If you know that's going to be an essential part of your project, get with your librarian or instructional technology teacher well before the actual project to teach students those kinds of skills.

Note that you might also have to teach students how to collaborate with one another. Don't assume they know how to do it. Direct instruction and multiple choice assessments have been such a mainstay in our education system for most kids' entire lives...when combined with the screen-obsessed culture that plagues most of our houses, most of our young people today need some explicit instruction on how to interact with others productively.

3. Will PBL actually motivate my students?
Maybe? Probably? You know, I'm not sure because I don't know what your project is. If you design a project around a driving question that's meaningful to them in a personal way, they're a lot more likely to find it motivating. For instance, a project around the driving question, "How can we package ice cream more efficiently?" will probably only motivate your true geometry and ice cream lovers, but a question like, "How can we increase the availability of nutritious and delicious foods in America's food deserts?" might grab them a lot more.

4. PBL doesn't seem like anything new. Haven't we done this before?

You're right! It's a really old concept. You can probably consider the design and building of the pyramids at Giza as a form of project-based learning. John Dewey, educational thinker from the early 20th century, was a huge proponent of project-based learning type methods, saying, "Education is not process for life; education is life itself."

What is new is trying to fit project-based learning into our current standards-heavy curriculum. When you have a ton of content that students need to memorize, it can be challenging to have them go deep into exploration of a specific theme or project. Not only that, but with the way that technology has changed in order to allow us to collaborate more effectively, the management of PBL has changed significantly as well. It's no longer just about teaching students how to work together effectively in-person; we have to teach them how to add comments to a Google doc, organize their materials online, etc..

Rarely is anything in education new; instead, think about it as refining and old process for the new world that we're living in.

In Summary

PBL is a solid instructional model that can help to engage students and effectively prepare them for real-life. It's time- and energy-intensive for everyone involved, and the smart educator will plan a PBL specifically for a unit that is most likely to engage students.

Check back soon for an article on how to chunk PBLs into manageable pieces.

Kate Wolfe Maxlow is the Professional Learning Coordinator for Hampton City Schools in Hampton, Virginia. She can be reached at kmaxlow@hampton.k12.va.us.