Buck Institute for Education

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• Teachers need to assess students' abilities and interests before beginning a project.
• We start the year in our academy with a mini-project that pairs incoming juniors and returning seniors. We do ten days of team building and getting to know each other. During this time, seniors teach juniors how we work.
• Students have to understand what the need is for the project, and I have to understand what their thinking is before I can get them involved in the project work.
• There will always be students and classes that are quicker or slower than others. Students who move more quickly have more opportunities with projects. You end up having to tailor the curriculum to your classes or groups because some projects may include additional activities while other omit certain activities.
• If you are teaching students who are less academically able, you have to take this into account when planning the project. The project won't be the same as you might have with an Advanced Placement class. You have to lighten up and find a way for students to use the skills they bring with them. Perhaps they aren't skilled in math but are great writers, or good artists. You can still develop a project so students can express themselves, which will encourage their skill development. You can use the same topics with students of differing ability. But change the final product so that it provides a better match for their skills.

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• Less is more--start small. The project is only part of the picture. You also have to reengineer the learning environment to change the way you work with kids. It's difficult to attack everything at once.
• The advantage of small projects is that you have time to analyze what you are doing, reflect on it, and make adjustments.  This should be done with any project, but it's easier with a small project.
• I would advise people to choose one project and do it really well. Don't start out with a lot of projects or a very broad project. Projects get overwhelming, and more complicated. You're always trying to rein the project in and get back in control.
• When a teacher is working on his or her first project, it's not necessarily the best thing to involve multiple teachers and make it a collaborative project. The struggle to get the logistics down can undermine the whole project. Once you have experience, collaborate with teachers in other content areas.
• Start by tweaking assignments that you ordinarily give; add some new elements to them. Many teachers can take an assignment that they've given for years and add something to make it more PBL-focused: for example, adding an interview with an adult outside of school when students are doing a research assignment.

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• With students who understand PBL, or who are mature and ready to participate, you can introduce a project in day one. With others, you have to teach them what PBL is all about. If kids don't know about PBL, I don't introduce a project before October.  Before that I have them do mini-units, work on group skills, cooperative learning, and I introduce them to self-monitoring.
• Repeated experiences build on one another. Our students begin projects in the 6th grade. By 8th grade, kids come in knowing how to do projects. I can start at the beginning of the year, and they know the ropes. They know how to work in teams.
• Think of the first project as an icebreaker; don't expect the world. As they work on more and more projects, kids get more efficient. Things that take two weeks in September will take only one week in April. Student skills improve: getting information, organizing, making decisions.

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The more you can do outside the context of the school, the more student engagement you have. If you are simply trying to develop skills or learn information that is not connected to current events, then don't do a project. Look through your curriculum for opportunities to take learning outside of your classroom.

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When we start projects, I create workspaces in my room and make sure I have basic supplies that all students will use. (As projects progress, students sometimes bring in additional materials from home.) You need files and boxes to keep materials together from each class period. At the end of class, I tell students, "All projects need to be stacked on the center table," and then I move all projects into specific storage areas for each period. Don't give students the opportunity to touch projects from another period.

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• Before starting a project, we get students thinking about it so they'll be ready to plunge in when it's time. Last year, we did a project in April on the physics of music, but we started talking about it in January, when the semester began. I suggested a number of questions they might want to pursue, and we discussed how they might form their work groups. The earlier students start thinking about it, the more prepared they are.
• When we started a new school wide project, we have a kickoff event that gets the students excited about the project and marks it as something different from typical schoolwork. This event has taken different forms. Most recently, we had an assembly and a group of faculty members put on a silly skit. Another time, we had a slide show that demonstrated the diversity of living things. After getting the students interested, we describe the project. We tell them what it's all about and what our expectations are for student work.

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• Schools don't necessarily acculturate students to be learners, at least not self-managing learners. We have to undo what's been done to them. In our academy, we have students for two years. We maintain a dialogue with them throughout that period. It can have a lot of starting points: curriculum standards, what kind of a person you want to be, what's required for college, how to study, or working in a high-performance environment.
• Part of your new role is not just to teach content, but also to teach kids how to learn content.  The high-achieving kids already know this. They know when they go to the library they have to get more than one book. They know not to choose broad topics like John F. Kennedy, because there is too much information available. Your role now is to work with kids who have never tackled a difficult question and to teach them the research and study skills necessary to tackle it.
• I had to learn to be patient as students develop adult time management and organization skills. We don't generally teach students how to manage time. In fact, traditional teachers and classrooms set up structures so that students don't need to know how to manage their time--it's managed by the teacher and the bell schedule.
• I had to unlearn the idea that teaching was about my content; I had to learn it was about their thinking. Most of the content students get is dismissed as soon as they graduate (or pass the test). I needed to learn how to help students think through the project work and to decide what it is going to look like, and not make all the decisions myself.
• Reengineering the learning environment means moving from the sage on the stage to the guide on the side. It means creating a more collaborative environment with students where projects are a mutual responsibility. You have to rethink your whole relationship with students and become more of a facilitator and coach. Bring the problems to the students to decide rather than solving the problems yourself and bringing the solutions to the students. Make the design of the project itself part of the curriculum. It looks like you are giving up control, but you aren't. You still have ultimate control of things, but you have decided what decisions students are able to make, and you are holding them accountable for making them.
• The transition from being teacher-directed to student-directed takes enormous changes and can be frustrating because there are a lot of new things to learn. I'm trying to become as dependent upon my kids as my kids are on me. At the beginning of the year, kids are very dependent on me. At the end of the year, I want to be depended on them.
• I had to learn not to give the answers and to ask students more questions--I would want to answer the questions for them. I also had to learn not to tell students what to do. You also have to ignore what other teachers think of your chaotic class--you've got kids moving around, going to the library, going to the computer lab.

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• In our projects, we have a single Driving Question. This year it was: "Are people influenced by their society or is society influenced by people?" Students break this down into many smaller questions. They conference with us, and we have to approve their question before they begin. We ask ourselves whether the rephrased question will lead to the depth of understanding we are looking for. We keep sending them back to the drawing board until we think they have a subquestion that will work.
• Teachers must be comfortable with not answering the question. The main purpose for using essential questions is to stimulate students to ponder ideas and issues that are intrinsically complex, and to understand that the search for knowledge is ongoing and does not end when a unit or course is over.
• Every student needs to be able to relate to the Driving Question on some level. The question should elicit multiple perspectives that intrigue and engage a diverse group of students.
• I like to refer back to the Driving Question each day of the project. That way the question becomes a diagnostic for the project: are we making progress toward answering the question?

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• I have the appropriate standards on my desk at all times. Our textbooks predate standards by ten years; they are only a baseline of information; they contain the minimum students are supposed to learn. We intend our projects to teach students more than they would learn from simply reading the text.
• Standards are a part of my world. All teachers have to come to terms with the idea that they have to focus their teaching on frameworks and standards. I set up performance standards at the beginning of the project and then plan assessments. Determine where you want students to be. Then figure out what the indicators are that you can look for and measure.
• A project digs really big holes [into the curriculum]; students go deep, not broad.  Make sure students will be going deep into essential standards or important things they need to know.
• First I come up with an idea for a project. Then I think about what could go into it. The I look at the standards to see what should be covered. (I'm preparing kids for state tests and SAT's so I have to take state standards seriously.) I also look at SCANS and Art Costa's Habits of Mind. So I take my idea and ask myself, what do I want students to be able to do at the end of the project besides design a bridge?
• You need to check your standards to see what you have to cover during the semester. Then you can ask yourself, "What's the best way to cover this? Would a project work?"
• Standards are written as if everything were equal; that's not true. Before we begin a project, we go through the curriculum content for the year and prioritize what kids need to understand. Then we build projects around the content objectives where you want kids to have a deep and abiding understanding, or where a project can meet multiple content objectives.

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• Kids won't know what high standards are unless they see them. I try to figure out how to derive models of excellence. You can use the work of previous students. Or, you can use professional work: blueprints done by real architects or poetry written by a local poet. You have to have models, or kids don't know what they are working toward.
• I show them examples of what was done the year before. It boosts the quality of projects--kids want to do better than the kids did last year. I was worried that students would just copy what last year's students did, but seeing previous student work actually sparks more ideas.

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• Involve students in the planning process to the extent that you can. Teachers can do the planning in broad brush strokes and have students work out the details. Have a written outline of where you are going and a timeline of when you will get there.
• We begin by being clear what curriculum content the project is going to cover. Then we invite students to brainstorm with us. How might we approach this? What skills do we need to learn? This encourages students to buy into the project. Then we look at the different roles needed to complete the project, divide students into teams, and assign roles. We make contractual agreements and get explicit student commitments. Then we ask how we will know if the project is a success. This leads to rubrics that we create with the students. Student involvement changes over the course of the year. On the first project, the teacher does more, as the year goes on, students do more.
• For our government strand, we first brainstormed seven or eight potential project topics (e.g., homelessness, school facilities) with the students. We had a class discussion to set criteria for what we wanted to get out of the project. Then we formed expert groups to look at the topics, and each expert group considered whether a project on this topic could meet the criteria we had agreed to. Each expert group reported, and we narrowed the potential topics down to two. Then we voted as a whole class and selected the topic.

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• The best way to grade project work is to have a rubric. The rubric should be known in advance by the kids. Students should be involved in developing and refining the rubric. Students should be able to restate a rubric in their own words. Then, when working on a project, they know what they are reading for and trying to accomplish. They have a standard they can apply to their own work and to the final evaluation.
• Projects often fail because we (teachers, principals, parents) are satisfied with too little. We don't really push for academic rigor and an authentic learning experience. We need to push ourselves and our kids harder

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• We favor individual over group grades. Kids want to know how they are doing; they want their own performance rewarded.
• I have 75 percent individual and 25 percent group components to the grade. All students in the same group get the same grade on the final product. All along the way there are individual grades, including tests and quizzes, on important concepts.
• I do not believe in group grades at all. Kids don't like them because somebody can get an "A" without doing anything while somebody else might get a "C" after doing all the work.
• I weight group and individual parts of the grade equally. Students need to know that team results matter. If kids know they are going to be evaluated on a project as a whole, they will encourage each other to work.

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• We use a variety of assessment methods. We set up rubrics with students at the beginning. We use traditional assessments for written and oral work. We give group grades depending on how their team has done. We give individual grades depending upon students' individual contributions to their groups. We have students grade themselves and assess what they have contributed. We also observe them and rate their workplace skills.
• I use a variety of grading strategies. Everyone gets an individual grade, as well as a group grade. Every student grades every other student in the group. Written and other "academic" work is graded individually along the way using rubrics--it's not considered part of the project grade. The project grade focuses on SCANS skills, self- and group management, organization, and promptness, as well as the final presentation. The grade encourages students to look at the process of how they have worked together and what has been accomplished.
• It's a good idea to give so many grades on a project that the significance of one grade disappears. Use 15 dimensions to grade a project. Brainstorm these dimensions with students to make sure you've covered everything. Break the project down into many different areas. That way, students don't think of it as an "A" or "D" project.
• You don't give up testing, essays, or quizzes when you do projects. The important question is, what kind of information will they give you? I use quizzes, for example, to find out if kids understand things so I can push on. Kids will always need to write essays. Use multiple measures to look for both content and process outcomes. When you give students a description of the project, explain what will be an individual assignment (and graded individually), and what will be a group assignment (with each person in the group receiving the same grade). Also, have students grade themselves and other members of the team.  Have an audience at an exhibition grade students' work.
• Why should the teacher be the only judge about whether this is a good project? Students tend to be harsher that I am on projects? I blend their judgments and mine for the final evaluation.
• Don't just translate your rubric grade into A, B, C, etc. Use a wide range of criteria, including affective criteria, to balance things out.

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When I do a project, I allow enough time at the end in case you have to move back a due date. Don't have an exhibition as a final exam because if you have delays, there's not time for the exhibition.

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• If you just do projects, kids and parents will complain that the teacher doesn't know anything and is just having students do activities. You need tests, lectures, videos.
• We might spend 40 percent of the time in a traditional classroom environment and 60 percent in project work. Once you set a learning goal, you have to determine what instructional strategy will best meet that goal. Think about what works well in traditional education and what you don't want to lose. Sometimes lectures are appropriate and the most immediate way of communicating information to students.
• It works better for us if we give students direct instruction first to communicate the basic information they need to know to frame and begin the project, and then turn them loose to do the project. This speeds up the project.
• If I can give students needed information quickly (and save time for more important project activities), I'll do it. If a project requires skills and students don't have those skills, I'll remediate to the best of my ability. One time I stopped the project and did a structured reading lesson on how to look for content on the Internet.
• PBL is not a valve you turn on and turn off. It's a continuum. You have to develop baselines of knowledge, build inquiry skills. A project may be running all the time, but at some time during the project, students may be reading a textbook. There are times when PBL is the best way to teach a concept--to show how a system works, for example, or to develop teamwork. There are other times when it doesn't make sense to use PBL--for example, when you are teaching specific algorithms.
• I used to teach all of the content and then introduce the project as an application activity. This didn't work because students didn't retain the content and have it available when they needed it for the project. Now I begin with the project and give students a product they need to create. This creates a need to know.

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• Initially, it took me several hours of carefully thinking things through to plan a project. I had to decide what I wanted students to produce, what decisions they would make.  A schoolwide project is even more complex. You need several after-school meetings and need to plan during common preps. Use butcher paper to outline your ideas, record the logistics, and plan the assemblies and field trips. The more people involved, the more you have to write everything down.
• I'm a document person. I write everything down and keep big notebooks. I write down the essential question, then guiding questions, then content standards. I want to write down exactly what I want kids to be able to know and do at the end of the project. This makes it easier to keep on track and make sure students get meaningful things out of the project.
• I use a template to frame my thinking, and I write down my plans. We look at the curriculum, look at the calendar, lay out what we want students to be able to do and know, consider how the project is going to benefit the community outside my classroom, then plan backwards: how are we going to get from there to here?
• Don't underestimate the value of your students' thinking: don't preplan everything. Be open to student ideas and incorporate them. Let students tumble and learn from their mistakes instead of scaffolding everything in such a way that they are going to be successful. Design learning experiences where they can take more responsibility for the work of learning the content and applying the content outside of school. This produces students who are more resourceful and engaged in their communities.

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• Projects should not replace end-of-quarter tests or papers; if that happens , then a lot of things are due at the same time and it's counterproductive.
• Almost everybody does projects at the same time. Students complain that they have five projects due in the same week. Teachers should talk to one another and space projects out over the course of the year. This would result in higher quality projects.

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• I use parents as liaisons and get them involved in making community connections and finding out where in the community the project could take place. They have more flexibility outside the classroom. I also encourage older students to make contacts, talk to businesses, and use the phone and e-mail.
• Businesses and other community organizations often do not understand what schools and students are really like. They need to learn about the reality of classrooms before they can provide meaningful help.
• Any outside organization that wants to work with a school needs to come in and spend some time in the school and see the kids. Outside organizations need to understand the range of capabilities we deal with, the nature of discipline, and why schools are structured the way they are. It's nice to theorize but when they look at a group of 7th graders, they understand whether they are willing to help and what kinds of things they could do. It's frustrating to sit in meetings with people who want to help in the schools but don't understand kids.
• Not everyone makes an effective resource. Different individuals have different things to offer.
• If at all possible, meet with the people in person that you want to help you with your project. Figure out who is an expert, who can come into your classroom and engage students, and who is an expert better suited simply to answering questions--say via e-mail. When experts do come in, prepare students for them
• Train students to interact with community members. Students need to know how to get funding and support for future projects.

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• Parents are involved in summer and school-year course and project planning. We have a fall parent meeting (in addition to the regular back-to-school night) to discuss standards for student work and projects. We want the family to understand and buy into the standards we have set for student work. We send material home and stay in close touch with parents. There is a mentor dinner at the end of the third-quarter internship that all parents attend.
• I put the projects up on our school Website. I invite parents to the kickoff meeting where I describe learning goals and expectations. At that time, I tell them what I need from them and when the culminating event will be. It's important to be up-front and honest that this work will look very different from that of a traditional classroom. This kind of work will require students to make phone calls, write letters, talk with people in the community, meet after school, etc.
• I call each parent before the open house and tell them that I expect them to attend.
• We inform parents using a newsletter, and we put it on the homework hotline and on the Website. We send a letter home with the project calendar, a list of checkpoints that tells when different parts of the project are due, a list of standards by which the project will be graded, and a phone number to call if they have questions. We ask parents to sign the letter and return it so we know they are aware of what will be happening. We send a second letter home with an invitation to parent presentation night near the end of the project.
• At the beginning of the year, I send out a description of the project we're going to do and a parent volunteer slip. Although the students are doing physics projects, you don't have to know about physics to volunteer--parents could tutor kids in PowerPoint, for example. I always have parents view and critique the practice exhibition that takes place about a week before the final exhibition. Parents also show up for open house, and I talk about the projects and display those from previous years.
• We have conversations with parents around first-quarter grades. At that time, we go over what the program is all about. Parents have to understand what students are learning. There is a lot of misunderstanding: "They've completed their learning and now you're doing a project?" You have to show parents evidence that students are learning as they work on the projects.
• When talking to parents about projects, be honest about the tradeoffs you made about the breadth and depth of content covered. All teaching (and projects) require tradeoffs. Kids don't cover as much content if they learn the content in depth. Parents want some kind of a mix between breadth and depth. They don't want their kids' learning to be restricted to a bunch of facts. They want their kids to think and reason.
• Come clean with parents: tell them how you structured the unit to provide both breadth and depth and what you were willing to leave out.

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• Block scheduling is extremely important, as is having flexible classroom space and computers. We also have a system of permanent passes so kids can go down to the library and move around the campus.

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Let the kids get frustrated trying to answer a question that is beyond them, and then bring the expert in. The expert will be treated like a hero.

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• The schedule you lay out is never the schedule you follow. It takes experience to know how much flexibility to give students and when to move the project ahead. If projects take forever, kids lose interest and focus. You have to know when to tighten up and maintain deadlines and when to loosen up and say, let's take another week.
• When planning a project, set a certain number of days and building in 20 percent overrun.
• You've got to keep a flexible project schedule. The weather may not cooperate. Students may complete things faster than you expected. Sometimes kids think they are done and you don't. We've had to give extensions to get expert interviews or because of technology breakdowns. Ideally the project is the outgrowth of other kinds of learning, so you can always reinforce subject matter learning when you can't work on the project.

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• Common planning time, opportunities for structured reflection on project design, teacher research groups investigating student work and projects, and summer planning time are all important project supports.
• I found that a collaborative project worked the best when another teacher and I had the same group of kids in back-to-back periods (a de facto block). We also had common planning periods.
• We hold meetings after school and try to get as many teachers as possible to attend. Everyone has the opportunity to help design and implement the project. Our projects have four main disciplines: Mathematics, Language Arts, Social Studies, and Science. Together, we plan the schedule, the end products, the standards, the checkpoints, and the assessment strategy.
• I had to learn how to share early with other faculty at the school what we were doing. We showed them student work as a way to get into the conversation about teaching and learning. We had to allow dissenters to ask fair questions and had to give them honest answers. We were all used to doing things the way we wanted to as teachers, so we had to learning to work with each other.
• In our academy, we all work in the same physical area and are constantly talking about projects and educational reform. We have formal planning sessions on Wednesday (30 minutes) and Friday (30 minutes). We make adjustments daily.

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• We use a variety of grouping strategies in the course of the year; sometimes the teacher chooses group members, sometimes students choose. We generally use heterogeneous grouping. Putting the higher academic kids with the lower kids brings the lower kids up yet doesn't hurt the upper kids. It also makes the school friendlier because kids make new friends. We let kids pick groups initially, but we're constantly reforming teams. Kids change in the course of a year; people change friends.
• One type of grouping strategy -- say, kids who are friends and want to work with each other -- works well on a task that requires a great deal of time out of school. A different type of group is necessary if the task is complex and requires a diverse set of skills—say the researching of a complex topic and the creation of multimedia and written reports. Think about the skills necessary to accomplish the task at hand when forming a group.
• You first have to think about the purpose of forming groups. We always controlled group characteristics. We had both juniors and seniors. We wanted seniors (who were experienced with projects) mixed in with juniors so they could teach them the ropes. Other teachers have each student pick another student to form a pair, and the teachers put different pairs together into four-person groups. This way both teachers and kids have control over how the groups are formed. My general experience is that three- or four-person groups work best.
• Think about why you are grouping kids before you do it. Make it appear random, but be highly manipulative in the background: Choose "random" techniques that will split problem kids apart. (By making the grouping appear "random," you take the heat off yourself.) Select strengths within groups, but don't only let kids exercise their strengths. Have kids reflect upon what they are strong and weak in: Target their weaknesses, don't just celebrate their strengths.
• We formed students into expert teams who investigated different areas and thus became experts. Then we formed new teams which had one member from each of the expert teams. That way each new team had an expert in each of the areas originally investigated.
• Teachers know students better than anyone else and they are in the best position to decide how to group students based on the project goals. You can group all the assertive students in one group, and then break the remaining students down by how much support they are going to need from you. You can group by gender. You can group by ability -- making a heterogeneous group with a high, medium, and low student in each group. If all of the students are going to do all of the work, then there's no reason to group students except to provide a way to share ideas.
• When it is time to work in groups on a project, I think about why I'm grouping and what the group needs to accomplish. My experience is that if you allow students to choose their own groups there will be some strong, mature groups and some wacky, immature groups. The strong groups wind up running the show. I don't want this to happen.
• I want leadership to rotate and be shared. When it was time to do water testing in a nearby stream, I put together field teams that had kids who were leaders, kids who needed leadership, conceptually strong students, and weak students. The kids complained, but the project itself-- doing water testing -- was so compelling that they didn't complain too much. Another part of the project required students working together over several weeks, putting data in spreadsheets, thinking about things and sharing ideas. I decided it would be OK for them to be with their friends, but I didn't want to have them simply choose their friends because some kids wouldn't get chosen. So I had them apply to work with one another. Then I looked at their choices and made up the groups. This way I was able to place the unpopular or behaviorally challenged kids in appropriate groups.
• Being in a socioeconomically challenged situation where transportation is a problem, students work outside of school and they have to mesh their schedules to find time to work together. I find there are fewer difficulties when they form groups that enable people to get together. Even though I allow students to choose their partners, I think it's important for the students in the group to have a variety of skills. I have them do an inventory during their first group meeting of their strengths and weaknesses. Then I tell them what they are going to have to be able to do to complete the project successfully, then ask the groups if they have the mix of abilities they need. Sometimes groups re­form so that they will have skills they were lacking.

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• The first day of the project is a warm-up. I have kids brainstorm questions and complete a research plan. I don't send them to the library until I'm sure they know why they are going there. Before they go anywhere outside the classroom, I have their time organized for them: "Here's your research topic for today. I'm going to check your notes at the end of the period."
• I have a private meeting with each group to get them started while the rest of the class in involved with a reading assignment. I discuss each group's research questions with them. Students often don't know what a good research question is. You have to tell them if they have written a question that is really hard to research.  I say, "Try it if you want, but here are my suggestions."
• At the beginning of a project, we require a product to be completed out of each work session. If it's a research period of one and one-half hours, we'll require them to make an oral group report about what they've learned. Or, we ask them to write an action plan. After they get used to our expectations, we will let them go for a couple of periods before asking for a report.
• Projects often fall apart because teachers don't pay enough attention to scaffolding students. A great deal of thought needs to be given to how to support students through coaching and mentoring. Students need to have milestones and benchmarks, perhaps even templates.

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I sometimes allow groups to fire individual members. That's like a business -- the project takes precedence over everything. Once they are off the team they have to do more traditional learning activities. If a student is not working in a group, take them out of the group. This can help the current project you're working on, but the same problem may arise with the next project.

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• I plan a group project so there's time for remediation with kids who just don't get it.
• We can cover a semester's material through lecture/discussion in less than 18 weeks, but if you allow time for kids to do their project as well as to internalize the material it takes the entire semester. While we're working, I give special attention to some kids and simply direct others to resources. I also have kids develop a portfolio so they can refer to it when they need something we've already covered.
• Students can get help from other group members, they can go to the teacher and say I need help, or they can ask for time to go to the library.
• You have to start students where they are and accept this. You then measure how much growth they've made. An F student can learn more than an A student. Try to find areas where students can shine.
• Try to make it possible for students to either work with their friends or work on a topic they are particularly interested in.
• We typically form groups according to who students want to work with, although we have to do a bit of shuffling sometimes. Not everybody gets their first choice. Students submit to us their first and second choices of partners and then we balance out the groups to get the strengths needed.
• We put out a list of topics and ask kids to rank them. We form groups so that every student gets to work on something they want, but they don't necessarily get to work with whom they want.

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• When a student complains that another student in the group is not working I bring the entire group in and say, "I've noticed that you are all not doing the same thing. Let's renegotiate the timeline. (Renegotiate means 'tighten up.') On this date (in the near future) you are going to come in at lunch and I'm going to give you a grade on what you've completed."
• When necessary, I call parents at home to let them know what's happening with the project (and, sometimes, tell them that their child has missed some checkpoints). I remind the parent that it's the child's responsibility to stay on track with the project and ask for suggestions about what the parent and I can do to help the child manage himself or herself better. For some kids, even this doesn't work. I believe middle school is a time for kids to make choices, and if they choose to fail, I'll give them a poor grade.
• I've never been in a group where everybody carried their own weight: This is not just a student problem. Students should know that they can come to you for intervention if they can't work it out among themselves as group members. This is something that should be dealt with early by the group and by the teacher if necessary.
• It's inevitable that not everyone in the group will carry their own weight. I deal with it by having individual and group reflection and critiques about process and product. I don't want to find out two months later that someone isn't working. I try to use peer pressure: Groups have to get up and talk about where they are and what they're finding out. If someone isn't pulling their own weight, then it emerges. There are lots of checkpoints, so I can make sure people are on track.
• You can't just tell a kid, "You have to start working." They'll feign work while you're there and then stop. If you ask them why they aren't working, they may tell you. They may not. It's a fine art of working with and motivating an individual. You just have to use all the tools you can. You can get everybody to sit down and ask the group. "How are we going to get you guys going again. I've been watching you for two periods and I haven't seen anything happening. What are we going to do about this?" Once you identify the issues you can work with the student using conversation and encouragement. No kid wants to be a failure unless they are having extreme emotional problems. If you can't get a group restarted, then ask them; "Is there an alternative, individual way of working on this project that will show me you've learned that material?" Students often don't want to work by themselves because it's not as much fun as working in a group.

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• I manage groups by running around madly -- it's like having ten pots on the stove and trying to stir each one. Students are working on computers at different locations in the school. I move around, see what they are doing, put out fires. There's no magic except for knowing which groups need more guidance and which are more independent.
• I manage groups by setting clear benchmarks and due dates, and holding "touch-ins" (short conferences) with groups on a regular basis. Some teachers set aside one day a week for a student-run discussion of group progress, problems, and opportunities.
• One approach is to have groups complete a planning form together that asks what they are intending to do over a specific time period, what resources they will need, how they will evaluate their progress, etc., and then the teacher conferences with each group using this planning form. I found 3x5 cards are handy to record observations of group progress and problems, as are clipboard checklists. Individual students and groups of students can be held accountable for self reflection and management or redirection of their activities. The goal of good management is to work smarter rather than harder. There isn't a cookbook here. You have to figure out what will work in your class with your students. If kids are not at some reasonable level of self-management, you won't be able to conference with individual groups because that means turning your back on other groups. You probably won't get it right the first time, so you should be prepared to readjust your group management strategy. It's very powerful when students see that adults, too, have to adjust their strategies when they don't work out.
• I keep a folder for each group that tells what's going on. It tells what the group did each day, what the group will do tomorrow. Groups also have folders recording what they have to do, what they accomplish. When I meet with groups, we go over the work in their folders, check off what they accomplished against what they said they were going to do, and assess the quality of the work they completed.

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Most of my group meetings are outside of class. I require my groups to keep a log which tells who was present, what they accomplished, and the agenda for the next meeting. I check these when I conference with the group.

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• I keep my records public so students have ownership of them. I use checklists that describe each component in a project. (A student will have to complete eight to ten components to complete the project.) When they complete each component satisfactorily, it is checked off. I put a student in charge of the progress chart. I'll have a class meeting and ask the student in charge of the progress chart to give an update of where everyone is. By making it public, there's no getting away from the accountability, and kids push each other. It's not just me nagging them.
• On a typical day we'll spend five minutes setting the period's objectives, then two hours of work, and five to ten minutes at the end of the period where we check off what the group has accomplished. We expect groups to be able to say this is what I found out and whether or not they met the objectives they set.
• I like to have graphic displays that show the whole class every group's progress. Anyone can walk over to see where groups are and what they have accomplished. It's also a way to show groups that they are on common ground (or have completed something important) and thus encourage group collaboration and resource sharing.

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• The Internet is a prime resource, but the school library/media center often has better information than the Internet. The librarian/media teacher has to be a project partner, brought in from the beginning and told what their role will be and how they can help.
• Students have to learn to find information on the Internet efficiently. For our projects, we don't just turn students loose and say go look up something. First, we preview websites that might be helpful and then give them a list of sites to start with. Otherwise they spend a lot of time on false starts.
• Often kids look at web sites, but they don't have the prerequisite knowledge and vocabulary to understand what they are seeing. You have to coach them. Kids aren't aware that the quality of information available on the Internet varies tremendously.
• You have to work with students so that they can evaluate the quality of information available and consider multiple sources to see if they are in agreement. In general, kids are too prone to use the Internet and ignore print resources.

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• It's helpful to have technology experts on call; glitches can really slow you down. You have to try out the technology yourself before asking students to use it. We learned PowerPoint before we taught the students to use it. You can easily waste a whole period when the technology doesn't work as you had expected it to.
• You'd better have somebody who can troubleshoot the technology. If the lab or the computer goes down, and you can't troubleshoot the problem yourself, you'll lose student work. Technology is dicey stuff. If you don't really know it, you'd better have a partner who does. It doesn't matter how fabulous technology can be if it results in utter frustration and no learning.

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• Let the meat of the project decide how technology is to be utilized. Don't think that in order to make a project successful one needs to use technology; community experience is more important than technology.
• It's important to not let the bells and whistles be the central focus of the project. Content slips away if there is too much emphasis on technology The important question to ask is what can be accomplished using a technological (or any other) tool? For example, we had kids use an authoring program to create a computer-based interactive presentation focusing on a 20th century American poet. Viewers could select academic background, the biography of the poet, students' analysis of his/her poems, a video about the poet, and then enter their own comments about the presentation. This was an example where technology let us create a product that could not be created without it.
• In our middle school, kids are just learning to use technology in the seventh grade. If you are going to include technology you have to have lab time planned for them to master it. Give limited, specific amounts of time in the lab. Have an assignment for each lab period -- don't just turn them loose. Make them turn in a design brief before they can use the computer.
• Use technology only when it is appropriate. Make sure the computer can do it better. Make sure the information sources are tailored to information needed. The Web may not be as good as the library for information on 16th century explorer.

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• There is no "cookie cutter" way to do projects. Don't be afraid to make mistakes. Initially I thought I was doing a disservice to students if I had something that didn't work. Now I realize it's better to make a mistake and discuss with students what needs to be changed to make it work. This has also improved my relationship with students -- it's more collegial now.

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• When it is apparent that students are missing something they need to know for the project, we have a whole class meeting and say, "OK, we've discovered that you are missing essential information, so let's take a day and do direct instruction on what you are missing." It's important to be transparent to the students: we missed it; let's do it now.
• If key things are not understood, stop the ship and say, "Time for a mid-course correction." You might want to give a lecture; you might want to have a class discussion about an important book. If you have an ongoing assessment model in place so you are periodically checking in with students and they are checking in with themselves, you will know whether the project is going according to plan. If students aren't getting something, address it.
• I sometimes make major changes in my projects when they are underway. Students may realize that it isn't feasible to do what they wanted to do. Or they realize that they want their project to be more complex and inclusive than they had originally planned. In these cases, we rework the timeline and give groups extensions so they can redo their projects.
• When a problem arises, I have a class meeting to debrief the incident and reassess the project. This opens up the student/teacher relationship and enables you to start with a new beginning. Sometimes it's hard to face the fact that your project isn't working as you had planned, but you have to bite the bullet, recognize a failure, and turn the failure into success. Focus on why the failure occurred and help students overcome whatever was blocking them (e.g., time management, organization, diligence, writing skills, etc.).
• Once a project is under way you may realize that some groups are not going to complete the project as you had expected. We then negotiate what is critical to accomplish and what would be nice to accomplish. Sometimes projects fall apart because of factors outside your control. Email partners stop responding. Technology goes down. It's important for groups to explain to the community audience at the culminating event why they didn't get to the goals they had set. Typically, mid-course corrections are more minor than major because you are having on-going conferences with individuals and groups and these allow you to address and resolve problems when they are still small.

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• I typically ask two questions when the project is complete: 1) What do you see of lasting value as a result of this project for yourself as a learner? and 2) What do you see of lasting value as a result of this project for the community? I also have a comment box and solicit suggestions from audience/students/observers about how we could do things better.
• Kids generally dislike and complain about reflecting on their own project work. I show them good models of reflection that other kids have done. Once they know what quality reflection looks like I ask them to reflect on their own work. The last part of the reflection asks them to select five projects done by other students in the class and describe what it was about those projects that impressed them. I emphasize the fact that if they are always choosing projects done by their friends, they're not being honest. Kids don't always want to write about what they've done, but they love to write about other projects they liked and tell why.
• Conversation and oral reflection is essential. Often you don't know what you are thinking until you say it out loud. You need to think about and answer the question, "Why didn't this work?"
• At the end of a project, we spend one-half or more of a period talking about what students have done well. This is really important after a technology project where kids work very hard for five days, but their animation is of poor quality. From looking at it, you can't tell whether they worked hard or threw it together. Reflection is also an important place for kids to say what didn't go right, for them to tell you things they want you to know when they are being graded, and to find out how they would grade themselves and their partners and why It's also a good time for students to tell you their complaints.
• Students always ask: is this going to be on the test? How many points is it worth? Post-project reflection is a way to move the focus of discussion to "Here's an end product. Are you proud of it? Did it do what you set out to do? How could it be made better? How could project activities have supported your work better?" Class reflection also provides feedback for the teacher. Maybe we should have talked about something earlier instead of waiting until the last week. Kids are going to do projects their whole life. They need a chance to think about what they've done and how they can do better.
• I give kids "post-its" and have a "post-it" session. Kids write comments and walk around and put them on other students' projects. We also debrief the project as a whole class, both the process of the project as well as the results. Students also write about the project itself, what worked, what they would do differently about getting the information they need. I have a project critique form that gives space for students to talk about how the different parts of the project worked.
• I also make notes constantly in my own binders regarding what I wouldn't use next year or where I need additional resources. I keep the student feedback sheets in a notebook. I review these during the summer when I'm planning for next year's work.
• Teachers don't put enough time and energy into really questioning what they've done, what the learning was, what kids thought was important. You have to take time to process what you've done.

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• Reviewing the Driving Question at the conclusion of a project is a great way to enhance learning and retention. Plus, it makes students think about the big issues in life and how challenging they can be to solve.