April 3-7, 2017

Each Friday we post a list of articles, blog posts, research studies, and other resources we’ve run across that relate to Project Based Learning.

Here’s what we liked this week:

Preparing to Lead in a Project-Based World
Getting Smart
Tom Vander Ark and Mary Ryerse have written a new paper to “highlight the ways leaders from education, business and the third sector can support deeper learning.”

Who Needs Charters When You Have Public Schools Like These?
New York Times
This article highlights several schools and districts around the U.S. where innovative, engaging instruction is happening, especially in STEM. A project example: eighth graders create an orthotic brace for a child with cerebral palsy.

Bringing the Outside In: 6 tips for inviting experts to your PBL classroom
LifePractice Learning
Great practical advice from Ginger Lewman in this post. Samples: “Help them understand the unit’s driving question or challenge” and “Help them to do more than just provide information.”

Project-Based Learning: Taking Students to a Deeper Level
Getting Smart
Nanda Krish gives an overview of what PBL is and the difference it makes for students. I especially like how she describes the social benefits, including this equity-related point: “In small-group environments, students are forced to negotiate between role needs and social statures (demographic or social clique differences), helping them to make decisions while pushing through sometimes awkward or uncomfortable situations.”

A Forensic Investigation into Group Work
Off Road Edu Adventures
Blogger Gavin Hays in Australia offers guidance for managing student teams, in a creatively written and graphically designed post. He uses a CSI-style “crime scene” of a dysfunctional group to illustrate his points, then follows with several handy classroom tools for teachers and students that would help solve the common problem.

8 Things I Learned My First Year Of Teaching With Project-Based Learning
TeachThought
A teacher offers some helpful tips, wisdom, and resources, including tech tools she and her students found useful. #1 on her list is that PBL is not “doing projects“—which is a drum we’ve been beating for several years now, but still needs repeating.

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