Implementing Project-Based Learning. Suzie Boss
education and innovation, including Bringing Innovation to School: Empowering Students to Thrive in a Changing World, Reinventing Project-Based Learning: Your Field Guide to Real-World Projects in the Digital Age, and Real-World Projects: How Do I Design Relevant and Engaging Learning Experiences? She is a regular contributor to Edutopia and the Stanford Social Innovation Review, and her work has appeared in a wide range of other publications, including Educational Leadership, Principal Leadership, the New York Times, the Huffington Post, and Education Week.
Suzie holds a bachelor of arts degree in communications from Stanford University.
To learn more about Suzie Boss’s work, visit her blog Reinventing Project-Based Learning (http://reinventingpbl.blogspot.com), and read her Edutopia contributions (www.edutopia.org/users/suzie-boss). Connect with her on Twitter @suzieboss.
To book Suzie Boss for professional development, contact [email protected].
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]