What Is PBL?
In Project Based Learning (PBL), students go through an extended process of inquiry in response to a complex question, problem, or challenge. While allowing for some degree of student "voice and choice," rigorous projects are carefully planned, managed, and assessed to help students learn key academic content, practice 21st Century Skills (such as collaboration, communication & critical thinking), and...
Does PBL Work?
There is forty years of accumulated evidence that the instructional strategies and procedures that make up standards-focused Project Based Learning are effective in building deep content understanding, raising academic achievement and encouraging student motivation to learn. Research studies have demonstrated...
What do students say?
“It really, actually changed my life.”
High school students reflect on their experience of project based learning and describe how they not only learned a great deal of content, but also practiced the 21st century skills needed for personal and workplace success. [Time: 4:00]
What does PBL look like?
Middle School Project: Public Art
Art, history, engineering, language arts, and technology, both old and new, come together for eighth grade students in this rich project learning expedition at King Middle School in Portland, Maine. [Time: 6:53]
How to do PBL
Designing Integrated Curriculum
Learn about one team's process for developing an integrated forensic project that meets state standards of various subject areas' curriculum units. [Time: 6:20]
What does PBL look like?
Elementary Project: Courtyard Redesign
5th graders from Madison Wisconsin public school present their finished designs to a group of school architects, planners, & designers. The video also demonstrates teacher planning. [Time: 8:41]
Cool Tools
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PBL Handbook ($35)
The PBL Handbook gives an overview of PBL, explains how to design and manage successful projects, provides sample rubrics, forms and handouts, and describes five example projects.
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PBL Starter Kit ($24)
The PBL Starter Kit contains BIE's latest guidance for planning & managing projects with planning forms, rubrics, handouts, 6 example projects, and practical advice for successfully running your first project.
