Managing Your Project-Based Learning: The Phases Approach

by Kate Wolfe Maxlow

One of the reasons that teachers often shy away from Project-Based Learning is the worry about time. When we do training sessions on PBL, that's the main question participants ask: How do we fit this in?

I like to think about it like this: when you workout, do you get the biggest bang for your buck when you work out for 20 minutes every other day, or 60 minutes once a week? It's pretty well accepted that it's the former. Spaced exercise tends to keep us in better shape than one long session.

It's the same way with PBLs. You don't need to shut down your entire classroom for a week or two in order to do a PBL. In fact, it's probably better if you don't, because then students can easily become overwhelmed and not have enough time to do the deep thinking and processing required to complete a bang-up project.

Instead, consider leading up to your PBL throughout an entire unit, or even throughout a quarter or the year, so that by the time you get to the actual implementation phase of the PBL, students are raring to go and can get it completed quickly.

Let me give you an example. One year, my fourth grade team decided to create a museum about the history and geography of our home state, Virginia, that would culminate in a giant museum fair the same day as our PTA event at the end of the first quarter.

Our study of Virginia geography and early history spanned the entire first quarter. At no point did we shut down the classroom. Instead, we peppered in smaller projects throughout lessons. When we learned about the geography,  students made salt dough maps. When we learned about the resources of the regions, they made raps and a few students took the initiative to ask our Instructional Resource Teacher to film them and help them turn their song into a music video. We wrote stories from the point of view of the American Indians before the arrival of the settlers, which students typed up, illustrated, and then made into books.

The actual preparation for the museum itself only took about 2 days. During social studies class, the students drew up a plan for who would bring which of their projects, how to display them, who would man the various stations, and what these docents would say. Everything else was already done by that point. It ended up being a huge success, because it had been implemented in chunks throughout the entire quarter.

Need more ideas?

Another project that we did ended in a reverse career fair. Once again, the build-up to it took almost an entire quarter. I started by having students think about a future career they would like. Then, as part of their English class, I had them research the median income for that career AND how much post-high school work would be required in order to achieve that career. Some people who wanted to be police officers switched to brain surgeons once they saw the salaries, then switched back once they realized they would be in school for a really, really long time to accomplish that.

We didn't stop there, though. Once students had their median income, over the course of various mathematics lessons, they built budgets based on their desired careers and potential monthly salaries. They had to factor in the type of house and car that they wanted, groceries, gas, entertainment money, etc.. Some of the students once again refined their career choice.

We kept going. In another lesson (this time in writing) they actually created a resume as if applying for a job in their chosen career. They had to brainstorm and list their educational background (after researching what technical schools or colleges they would need to attend based on their career choice), internships they would have, their skills and strengths. Then they wrote a cover letter.

For the actual PBL itself, the reverse career fair, students dressed as they would for their career. They printed copies of their resumes. Parents came and mingled around, acting as potential interviewers with the students. For instance, "I see you want to be a veterinarian. Where did you go to college? Why do you think you're qualified for this job?" Students distributed their resumes and gave answers based on their research.

Again, we didn't shut down our classroom for two weeks to do this PBL. It was woven in through an entire quarter in small pieces where it made sense with what we were already doing. That allowed me to keep up with my curriculum and pacing. It allowed the students not to get overwhelmed and to think about their choices and refine them as they went. I was able to provide feedback as they went and no one was scrambling at the end because they'd put everything off until the last minute.

Consider how you can phase in your PBL like this. You don't have to do it all at once. In fact, the sooner that you introduce it, the more you can make connections to it throughout the learning. For instance, I once watched a geometry teacher start a unit on geometric probability by saying, "At the end of the this unit, you're going to create a carnival game that uses geometric probability to make the game fun enough to play while ensuring you don't lose money because it's too easy to win." As he went through the mathematics instruction, he would be able to occasionally stop and say, "And you'll use this same process later in the unit on your project..."

You can even use your PBL as your hook in the beginning of the year. For instance, if you're eventually going to have your students write and perform a one-act play, you can tell them at the very beginning of the year. Let them know that you'll work together during the first quarter just to explore various genres of plays. Maybe during the second quarter, they'll work on their outline. During the third quarter, they'll work intensely on the writing of the one act, and during the fourth quarter, they'll work on practicing and planning for the actual event. You can have them work on their one-act whenever they finish their other work early, as well as scheduling maybe 10 minutes a few times a week to get with their group and discuss. By the time you get to fourth quarter, they're going to have a mostly-finished product and you won't have to completely shut down your classroom.

Hopefully, those give you some ideas for how to implement in a way that will actually work for you, your students, and your curriculum.

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.

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.

Are Your Students Engaged...Or Just Compliant? Here's How to Tell

by Kate Wolfe Maxlow

Picture it: you're teaching your heart out with your carefully crafted slideshow. MacKenzie, as usual, sits in the front of the room, nodding along eagerly. As you make another brilliant point, you see her furrow her brow thoughtfully and write it down.

William, meanwhile, sits in the back row, digging through his backpack for another pen. This is a first...is he going to take notes? Nope, he's just using it to keep doodling on his notebook.

You decide it's time to get William's attention, so you call on him and ask him to repeat what you just said. Surprisingly, he does so word-for-word, and to your further astonishment, he adds a pretty insightful question at the end. Hoping for some classroom discussion, you ask if anyone else in the classroom can answer. Crickets.

You call on MacKenzie, who, despite making eye contact with you for much of the lecture, looks startled. "Um..." she murmurs. "What was the question?" Baffled, you walk over to her desk and realize she hasn't been taking notes at all...she's outlining her potential outfits for this Friday's dance.

What's going on?

Compliance vs. Engagement

On the surface, it seemed like MacKenzie was engaged and William wasn't, and it turned out to be the opposite. But that's the crux of it all: compliance and engagement aren't the same thing.

MacKenzie modeled compliance. She made eye contact. She nodded at all the right times. She wrote things down. On the surface, she did everything you would expect a fully engaged student to do. Her brain, however, was fully occupied with the merits of silk versus taffeta. Students who are compliant exhibit the desired behavior at a surface-level without actually engaging their minds.

William, meanwhile, displayed none of the usual signs of engagement, yet turned out to be listening, processing, and pondering on the topic at hand. Though he didn't look it, William was engaged the whole time. Students who are engaged are actually processing the current lesson.

Three Levels of Engagement

Almarode and Miller (2013) outline three levels of engagement.

1. Behavioral Engagement: Students are compliant with rules and instructions. This means that if you ask students to get out a sheet of paper, they do. It's a great first step. But it's not enough. Too often we settle for Behavioral Engagement, but it doesn't necessarily mean learning is taking place.
2. Emotional Engagement: Students are actually invested in what they are learning. They're enjoying it and valuing it. Of course, you can still have students enjoy themselves without actually learning. I remember doing a wonderful lesson my first year of teaching on the moon phases. I gave students Oreo cookies and had them take bites out and glue them onto paper. Students LOVED it. They were definitely behaviorally and emotionally engaged. And then on the unit assessment, most of them still got the moon phases question wrong.
3. Cognitive Engagement: Students' minds are actually thinking about and processing the task at-hand.

Combining the Levels of Engagement

If you want full student engagement, you have to plan for all three levels. In a classroom where the teacher has stopped at Behavioral Engagement, you might see students enter quietly. They'll diligently circle answers on their Do Now worksheet for the first five minutes of class. Then when the teacher starts to review the answers and calls on students, they will sit there, silently, until the teacher finally picks someone, who then might murmur something about "Answer Choice B?" When the teacher asks why the answer is "B," she once again stares at a sea of blank faces.

On the other hand, some teachers spend a ton of time crafting amazing experiments, projects, or centers for their students, but neglect the Behavioral Engagement piece. They instead end up with a chaotic classroom (not the organized chaos kind, either) in which students also have trouble engaging cognitively, even though they might be having the time of their lives.

In other words, you have to think through and plan for all three levels.

How do we do this? One way is to use the AbCD Learning Cycle. Don't spend too long on an Absorb activity before you navigate students into a Connect/Do activity. Make sure the Connect/Do activity is interesting and requires students to actually wrestle with the content they just absorbed.

Collecting Evidence on Engagement

Once you've developed your awesome plan to truly engage students, you then have to consider: how will you know they're actually engaged cognitively? As our fictional (yet all-too-like-real-life) student MacKenzie proved earlier, some students have mastered appearing engaged without actually hitting the level of Cognitive Engagement.

We can't peek into students' brains to see what they're actually thinking, which means we have to develop tasks in which they show us. Otherwise, we tend to default to measuring only Level 1: Behavioral Engagement.

Therefore, teachers must stop throughout lessons and give students opportunities to share what's in their minds. Whether it's a turn-and-talk, a quick write or a quick draw, answering a poll on their tablets, or just writing an answer on a good ol' fashioned whiteboard, we need some way to measure students' cognitive engagement.

You'll find that you can often measure their emotional engagement at the same time. Students who sigh and reluctantly turn to talk one another generally are not emotionally engaged. If your students write one sentence for their quick write and then put their heads down to catch up on much needed sleep after last night's basketball games, it might be a sign that you need to do something to crank up the emotional engagement.

Final Thought

Even the best teachers have days where they don't hit all three levels of engagement. I recall plenty of days when I went to try something new, and the lesson fell flat. For whatever reason, I failed to pique students' interest that day, and I could tell from my Connect/Do activities that their minds were not on the task at hand. It happens!

That's why it's so important to collect evidence of engagement throughout the lesson. If you find students sticking steadfastly to compliance and Level 1 and refusing to budge beyond, pivot and draw them back in...otherwise, you might find yourself teaching the same material again tomorrow.

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.

Instructional Models vs. Strategies vs. Techniques: What's the Difference and How Do We Use Them Together?

by Kate Wolfe Maxlow

Better conversations about instruction happen when we all use the same language. Too often in education, we use the same words to mean different things and different words to mean the same thing. Today, then, let's define some key terms for deciding what and how to teach based on your standards.

Let's first talk about the Instructional Model. Instructional Models are overarching approaches to teaching that involve a series of steps in a particular order that are designed to have students think and apply their knowledge in certain ways. For instance, a lesson using the Direct Instruction model is vastly different from a lesson using the Inquiry model, as you can see below:



You can read more about various types of instructional models (including the pros an cons of each) here. How do you decide which type of instructional model to use? Well, it really depends on the standard and how deep you want to go with it. For instance, if you're working on a standard that calls for students to design an experiment, then you probably need to use Inquiry Learning. But if your current standard is on memorizing multiplication facts, then Direct Instruction may be the way to go.



Once you've chosen your Instructional Model, next you're going to look at your Instructional Strategies. Instructional Strategies are categories of evidence-based actions that help students learn and be successful in multiple disciplines and real-life situations. Some of the most commonly considered "high yield" instructional strategies come from the work of Robert Marzano in his seminal book The Art and Science of Teaching. He includes strategies such as Learning Goals, Advance Cues and Organizers, Summarizing & Note Taking, Nonlinguistic Representations, Questioning, and Cooperative Learning.

Most of these strategies are not only good for learning in the classroom, but they're also useful in real-life. For instance, when I go to apply for a car loan, I probably need to have some questions developed (how long will it take me to pay off? how much of my monthly paycheck will it take?). I set goals for myself all the time in the real world (I WILL exercise at least three times this week), and most workplaces using a high degree of cooperative work these days.

You can see that these strategies, while not quite as broad as instructional models, are still more like categories of activities that actual activities themselves. For instance, you might decide that you want to use Note Taking in an upcoming lesson, but that doesn't necessarily describe the actual method you will use to have students take notes.


For that, you need Instructional Techniques. Instructional Techniques are the specific instructional activities that teachers use to engage students. For instance, you might decide to use Cornell Notes or Interactive Notebooks to engage your students in Note Taking. Or maybe you're going to use a Venn Diagram to help students organize information.

Can you mix and match Instructional Models, Strategies, and Techniques?

Yes! There's no one right or wrong way to put together a lesson. Some Instructional Models, Strategies, and Techniques DO tend to organically line up together (for instance, the Inquiry Model is often used with the Generating and Testing Hypotheses Strategy, which is often used with Graphic Organizers for collecting results.

Similarly, Direct Instruction often aligns well with Note Taking, which aligns well with something like Cornell Notes.


How do you use standards to choose an Instructional Models, Strategies, and Techniques?

Let's say that you're working with this Virginia Grade 8 English Standard: The student will find, evaluate, select, and synthesize appropriate resources to produce a research product. The Essential Knowledge, Skills, and Processes go on to describe how students should use primary sources, secondary sources, take notes, and evaluate credibility in creating their product.

So, which instructional methods would work best with this? You could choose Inquiry learning--the major purpose of Inquiry learning, after all, is to have students learn how to ask and answer questions. But you might also choose Project-Based Learning, because students are ultimately creating products. You might even use something slightly more esoteric like Jurisprudential Inquiry, in which students are assigned sides of a controversial issue and must find research to back up their assigned stances to convince a panel to agree with them over the other groups. 

Let's say that you decide to go bold and try out Jurisprudential Inquiry. Now that you've chosen an instructional model, you'll want to look at strategies. Without a doubt, you're going to want to use some kind of Graphic Organizer to help students take notes and organize their arguments. But what kind? Well, part of the Jurisprudential Inquiry process is using analogies to present the case for a particular side, so maybe you decide to use the Bridge Map (a type of Thinking Map) as your Instructional Technique on the day that you have students work on analogies in their groups.

The more instructional models, strategies, and techniques that you know, the more you'll be able to vary your classroom and choose intentionally choose purposeful activities that engage your students in meaningful work.