Top 7 PBL News Stories

 

Sept. 19-23, 2016

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

Here’s what we liked this week:

How Do We Prepare Civically Powerful Students? Share Your #CivicVoices!
ASCD/The Teachers Guild
Here’s a cool idea: this new collaborative effort is using design thinking to create a teacher-crowd-sourced collection of ideas for ways students can take civic action on “issues that matter to them.” They’re now in the “Discover” phase, and the “Ideate” phase begins Sept. 28 – get on board now!

Don’t Leave Learning Up to Chance: Framing and Reflection
KQED Mind/Shift
A good one about connecting maker education to PBL’s emphasis on rigorous learning by doing. Contains nifty graphics on how to “frame and frontload” maker activities so students think about the goals, and how students should reflect on the process, practicing metacognition and self-evaluation. (There’s another recent post on this topic at Edutopia, “Crafting Professional Development for Maker Educators.”)

inspirEd
Facebook/Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence
An interesting collaboration, also involving Lady Gaga’s Born This Way Foundation and co-designed by teens with the goal of creating “a positive climate in high school and greater well being for young people.” Some nice ideas for projects based on Social-Emotional Learning activities.

Teaching is a Project-Based Profession: 10 PBL Teacher Mindsets
Getting Smart
Great minds think alike – at BIE we’ve been talking lately about PBL teacher mindsets, and in this post Emily Liebtag and Bonnie Lathram suggest things like “possesses curiosity and is a lifelong learner” and “sees problems that need to be solved as a positive challenge.”

Report: STEM's Future Is Play, Inclusiveness, Lifelong Education
Education Week
The American Institutes for Research and U.S. Department of Education just released a report, "STEM 2026: A Vision for Innovation in STEM Education," that calls for “interdisciplinary projects that call on students to use several disciplines to solve problems” and “learning activities that encourage students to play and take risks.”

A City Looks To STEM School To Lift Economy, But Will Grads Stay?
National Public Radio
A story about Global Impact STEM Academy in Springfield, Ohio, a struggling city that has lost much of its manufacturing-based economy. The new high school is in a renovated historic building and has been seeing great results due to its use of PBL, business/industry internships, and “workplace environment.”

Celebrate National Park Centennial With a Project
Edutopia
In this timely post, Suzie Boss offers great ideas for national park-focused projects that are about celebration instead of the usual thing projects are about – a problem. She includes some tech products for such projects, gathered at a PBL session at the ISTE conference this summer.

 

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