Teachers’ success with students begins and ends with engagement.  Without meaningfully engaging students in the learning process, students struggle to invest themselves in academic content and learning does not happen.  So, as schools design instructional systems, they must construct the systems around the research of how people learn.  

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The National Institute for School Leadership (NISL) has conducted decades of research about how people learn in an effort to train our nation’s school leaders to develop instructional systems that will close the gap between our country’s schools and the world’s highest performing public school systems.  NISL’s findings include a process of learning that promotes engaging prior knowledge, preconceptions and misconceptions, and addressing the misconceptions.  NISL also found that learners must apply mastery of content with active learning followed by a metacognition stage for students’ mastery of content to stick. 

In a related body of research, Dr. Robert Marzano’s work around depths of learning. He utilizes a taxonomy that plans for a scaffolded learning progression through four levels of depth that ends with “Level 4 Knowledge Utilization.”  At this final depth, students apply what they have mastered in the first three levels of Marzano’s taxonomy - 1 - Knowledge Retrieval, 2- Comprehension, and 3- Analysis.  The vast majority of state’s standards are written at level 3. This means the analysis level student product will support standards mastery.  With the most prominent standards, schools should target the goal of deepening students’ mastery beyond the level called for by the standard to ensure that the most important learning standards at a grade level are learned on the deepest level.  Level 4 Knowledge Utilization requires teachers to design units and lessons in a way that converts students into active learners who design products, apply skills and knowledge attained, produce a product, and reflect on their learning process to close any gaps that occurred along the way.  This learning progression provides a perfect system to match an instructional system to NISL’s research on how people learn and how the world’s highest performing school systems align instructional systems to how students learn best.  Enter project-based learning as the perfect catalyst to guiding all students to the deepest level of thinking and learning.  

Why Project- Based Learning? 

The concept of a “project” addresses the importance of the idea that how students learn is just as important as what students learn.  Infusing project-based learning allows our classrooms to mirror the real world and what professionals face in their places of work.  Just as is the case with professionals in careers, we need to prepare our students to analyze a problem or challenge and then to develop a solution or product that addresses the problem or challenge.  This process brings our classrooms to life as students assume the role of professionals and, following NISL’s and Dr. Marzano’s research, create real-world products that allow them to apply knowledge and skills to reach the active learning stage of knowledge utilization. This process connects classroom content to the real world and students’ own lives.  The result?  A school’s classrooms become workshops where students learn to appreciate the relevance of standards and fully engage with the learning process.  

Now for how to make project-based learning (PBL)  a key component of a school’s instructional system.  Based on The Buck Institute for Education, there are eight essential elements of PBL:

 

Key Knowledge, Understandings, and Success Skills

• Whether you’re planning a PBL or a project, you always start with mastery objectives and content. PBL goes the extra step of defining 21st century success skills, including critical thinking and problem solving, collaboration, self-management, and digital literacy.

Challenging Problem or Question

• A good PBL begins with a meaningful, authentic problem to solve or question to answer. You can also get creative and imagine a scenario in which students are expected to operate or adopt a role. A good challenging question is open ended, has a real-world context, and provides opportunities for answers touching on multiple subject areas.

• One way to introduce this challenge or question is with an engaging entry event. Introducing an exciting PBL should go beyond a simple handout or shared doc; it should be captivating, interesting, and spark curiosity. This is another good way to collaborate with other teachers, outside experts, or try something new like a guest speaker, a zoom with an expert in the field, or a field trip.

Sustained Inquiry

• Rather than incorporating inquiry in a defined step at the beginning of a project, a PBL promotes inquiry throughout. In other words, answers to questions generate more questions. Sustained inquiry is the key to enabling students to chart their own course to a solution or answer to the challenging problem.

Authenticity

• Your PBL exists in a real-world context. It may utilize a real-world question or macro issue, such as climate change, poverty, or gun control. It can also be more focused, such as designing a tool to accomplish a specific task. Either way, your PBL should utilize real world processes, tools, and standards. Ideally, this authenticity also touches on students’ own lives and communities. This is a good means of integrating projects that are meaningful to the local community.

Student Voice & Choice

• Many projects limit choice to a research topic. A good PBL will enable student choice and voice about the type of product groups create, how they work, how time is managed, and what resources are utilized. This is also where teacher guidance is essential. Breaking students out of a traditional mindset of being told what to do and helping them to think independently and creatively can be a worthwhile goal for a PBL all by itself.

Reflection

• Much like inquiry and voice, reflection should not be limited to a single step in the process. Rather, your PBL should provide opportunities for students to reflect on not only what is being learned, but how it is being learned. Promoting metacognition and self-evaluation can also help achieve 21st century success skills.

Critique & Revision

• Including processes for peer feedback is important in order to promote constant revision and improvement. It can also drive sustained inquiry and help students incorporate new perspectives and ideas.

Public Product

• On its most simple level, a public product takes the results of a PBL outside of the classroom. The extent of this publicity is dependent on the class, project scope, and potential effect, but regardless of what you choose, having students present and demonstrate what they’ve learned builds in accountability and meaning.

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A Suggested Roadmap for Including PBL in a School’s Instructional System

One possible plan for infusing PBL in a schools’ classrooms comes with teachers identifying target standards in their curriculum.  In collaborative teams, teachers can identify four of the most critical standards in their curriculums and develop a PBL unit around these “Target Standards” every grading period.  In constructing these units, teachers can guide students to develop Level 4 Knowledge Utilization products on Marzano’s taxonomy while including the Buck Institute’s essential elements of a PBL.  By the end of a grading period, students will reach the deepest levels of thinking while working on a sustained inquiry. This will enable students to connect their work to the real world.  These units will include all elements of NISL’s studies on how people learn and what the world’s highest-performing school systems do to engage students.  Learning will become about more than learning content; it will become meaningful and require a level of mastery that goes far beyond a test or quiz; it prepares students for what they will face in their careers ahead.