How to plan for project-based learning

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Setting up your first project-based learning unit can be an intimidating task – especially for first-timers. There’s just so much to consider!

The first blog post in this series provided an overview of the 8 elements that must be incorporated into your project for it to be successful. Each of these elements require planning for – but how?

There are 2 broad areas you’ll need to take into consideration. The first is the exciting part – the project itself. This is all about planning the learning experience and making the project interesting but educational.

The second is the not-so-exciting practical stuff – time scale, funding, resources needed etc. It’s what you’ll need to think about to make sure the learning experience runs smoothly and students get the most out of it that they can.

This blog post will consider both of these areas.

Planning the learning experience

First off, you’ll need to identify the curriculum content you want to cover, as well as the 21^st century skills you want your students to develop.

Then you need to decide how you’re going to go about covering the content and developing your students' skills. You will need to consider:

1. The driving question

This is the stimulus that leads the entire project. For advice on creating your DQ, see the previous post in this series.

2. The final, publicly-presented product

What your students are working towards will shape the entire project, so you need to settle on this early on. There are endless possibilities for their final product depending on the skills you want them to develop – a film, a museum exhibition, a sales pitch, a blueprint, a sculpture, possibly even a garden.

The public presentation aspect of this is also very important. You’ll need to decide who your audience is. It could comprise of:

• Other students in the school
• Other adults in the school
• Other adults who visit the school (parents, experts, teachers from local schools etc. who come into the school to view the final product)
• People in the community or online (requires displaying students’ final products off site).

Or a combination of all four!

3. Structured activities

You should now consider what activities your students need to undertake in order to complete their product. Obviously, the whole point of PBL is to let students take the lead in directing their own learning, so some fluidity is necessary. However, it's also important to expose students to new experiences and give them the knowledge and skills they need to fulfil their brief. 

Structured activities can include presentations by guest speakers, educational visits, critiquing sessions (see 'Assessment and reflection' below), mini-research tasks, skills workshops and more.

4. Assessment and reflection

The next thing to decide is how you will assess your students’ work and development. You will need to consider both formative assessment (during the project) and summative assessment (after the project).

Formative assessment will involve assessing and providing feedback on the students’ work-in-progress. Students will need to complete multiple drafts of their work (or rehearsals in the case of an orally presented product) and learn how to produce formal critiques of each other’s work. Regular formal critiquing sessions throughout the project are vital, as critiquing involves a range of skills and concepts that students will need to be taught and practise.

Summative assessment will involve the assessment of the students’ product and how well they've answered the question/fulfilled the brief and how fully they understand the curriculum content covered. However, you’ll also need to assess the extent to which they’ve improved their product since the first draft and how well they’ve taken feedback on board.

You’ll also need to find a way to assess the 21^st century skills you identified at the outset. Self and peer evaluation, as well as whole-class discussion and focus groups, will be useful for this. Students will need to demonstrate they’ve understood the enquiry process – getting them to complete a learning log during the project, culminating in a final write-up of knowledge gained/skills developed, will make this easier to assess.

5. Entry event

Now you know where the project is headed and how you’re hoping the students will get there, you can consider how to introduce them to the project. According to the Buck Institute of Education (BIE), an entry event has two basic purposes:

• To spark students’ interest and curiosity
• to begin the inquiry process by leading students to ask questions

You’ve got to make this a day to remember – so bigger is better! The more dramatic your entry event, the more excited and intrigued your students are going to be to get on with the project and answer that juicy driving question.

Examples of entry events include:

• a film clip
• a dramatic performance (adult-in-role, though you could use older students)
• guest speaker
• presentation of a puzzling problem
• an activity or simulation

The possibilities are endless!

And if you need anywhere to store all this information, the BIE provides this brilliant interactive project planner tool. Definitely worth a look - even if only for inspiration.

Making sure it all runs smoothly

This is all about ensuring the project is sustainable and minimising the risk of things going hugely wrong i.e. nowhere to hold your final exhibition.

You will need to think about:

1. Resources

This area can be split into 3 sub-sections:

• Facilities – Where will students work during the project? Where will the final product be presented? Are there any other events which might clash? Will we need off-site facilities? How much will these cost? Can we make a deal with these off-site resources to reduce costs? How will students get there?
• Materials and equipment – What will students need to make the products? What technology will we need? Do we have enough or will we need to buy more in? Are any specialist resources needed? What safety measures do we need to consider?
• Human resources – Who will be involved in school? Do we need the help/input of anyone outside of the school? The BIE provides a list of potential human resources to consider:
• Older students
• Parents with special expertise, interests, hobbies, or skills that connect to your project
• Other teachers, administrators or staff members with special expertise
• School or local specialists in art, music, drama, technology, physical education
• Experts from local (or distant, reached online) non-profit organisations
• People from local businesses and industry
• Local government officials and agency representatives, police and fire departments
• Technical school, college and university faculties

Running a project doesn’t have to require a huge amount of resources, but it can do. Planning beforehand will minimise the costs.

Source: disneytheatricallicensing.com

2. Time scale

Make sure to plan and allocate time for your project. Projects can be run across consecutive weeks with a suspended timetable; however, an alternative is to run the same project throughout the school year in dedicated curriculum slots. Both options have benefits and drawbacks – decide what’s right for you. You can always try a different approach next time!

You will also need to schedule time to train staff to become more prepared to deal with the type of learning taking place and the philosophy behind PBL - especially if this is your school's first PBL project!

To help with your time management, you might like to download this brilliant project calendar from the BIE. This can be used to plan your project events, but may also come in handy during the project, as a record of activities and events for later scrutiny.

3. Funding

Ensure the project is supported by some allocated funding. The budget doesn’t have to be big but some money helps – especially for buying resources for the exhibition and facilitating trips for students whose families can’t afford it.

Make contact with people and organisations outside the school to sponsor the project or get involved in some way. The more high profile your project is, the more likely they are to invest in you! Use your connections in the community and promote the benefits to the students and local businesses/organisations should they get involved.

And if you can’t get it for free, see if you can negotiate a deal. The Innovation Unit’s guide to PBL reveals that one teacher held a premier of student-produced films in a local cinema by guaranteeing that the audience would spend at least £250 on food and drink.

Of course, convincing people to get involved, planning time off timetables and sourcing adequate funding is going to require the cooperation and consent of other teachers, the headteacher and students’ parents.

Getting people on board will be the theme of our next post in this series. Stick around – it’s due out next week!

Keep up with this blog by following us on Twitter @TeachingTimes or liking us on Facebook.

Even more advice on planning for PBL from our archives...

Busting the myths of project-based learning - Bob Lenz
A longer version of the blog post cited in this post, in which Bob tackles three major myths about PBL, proving them wrong with his own school's successful PBL unit.

PBL for beginners - Alyson Boustead
Plenty of advice in here, as Alyson explains everything she needed to think about when preparing and implementing her first project-based learning unit.

Project inspire - Geraldine Norman
Lots in this one about planning PBL - Geraldine explains the process she and other members of staff went through before coming to the conclusion that PBL was the best way forward!

The 8 essential elements of project-based learning

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We kickstart our new series on the practicalities of PBL with the 8 essential ingredients for perfect project-based learning.

Project-based learning seems to be the next big thing in the education world. And it’s really not hard to see why when you read of the amazing projects going on in schools all over the world. You can almost taste the excitement of both students and teachers in these accounts.

But what makes for good project-based learning? After all, we’re all familiar with the dreary ‘design a poster’ or ‘create a powerpoint’ type projects so common in our own youth.

Well, first off, a good project has to be meaningful to the students. It also has to fulfil an educational purpose. But that’s not all. Overall, there are 8 elements which are absolutely essential for any project to be a success:

1. Curriculum content

The project has to be aligned with the curriculum. It can cover curricular content in a range of subject areas, but there has to be a focus on teaching students important knowledge outlined in the curriculum.

2. 21st Century skills

Along with curricular knowledge, the project also needs to target the development of so -called ‘21st century skills’ and competencies. But what can we class as 21st century skills?

The University of Melbourne’s ATC21S project puts them into four categories:

• ways of thinking – creativity, critical thinking, problem-solving, decision-making and learning
• ways of working – communication and collaboration
• tools for working – information and communications technology (ICT) and information literacy
• skills for living in the world – citizenship, life and career, and personal and social responsibility

So it’s quite broad then! Clearly, targeting them all would be impossible, so your PBL unit should target the development of a just a few. You’ll also need to plan ways to assess this. Creating a rubric is a good idea. This website offers loads of ready made ones!

3. Need to know

The project has to motivate students to want to learn the new content knowledge or gain new skills. They have to find it meaningful, and they have to find the topic, driving question (see next essential element below) and tasks genuinely interesting and relevant.

You need an exciting and motivational entry event to introduce pupils to the project. If this isn’t dramatic or memorable enough, day one of the project will feel like any other day – in fact, it’ll feel worse, because it'll seem like more work than usual!

4. Driving question (DQ)

The driving question is exactly what it sounds like – the question or stimulus that drives your project. 

Your DQ needs to capture the project’s main focus, but be understandable (not too ‘text-booky’ or academic) and inspiring. It also needs to be open-ended – it can’t lead students towards one particular answer, and students must be able to answer it thoroughly with the resources and time available.

Not a simple task, we’ll admit, but never fear! In the next article in this series of blog posts, we’ll be considering good driving questions and how to go about creating your own.

5. Student voice and choice

The idea behind this element is allowing students to make decisions affecting the content of their project or how it's conducted. Student voice is already quite a common feature of many classrooms, but in PBL, it’s got to be more than deciding how to divide tasks within a team or which website to use for research. Students need the opportunity to express ‘voice and choice’ on more important matters such as which topics to study, the questions they investigate, the resources they use, the product they create, their use of time and organisation of tasks.

Students need to work independently from the teacher, but don’t make them work too much on their own! They’ll need ample guidance from you, especially if they’re new to PBL and its procedures. You’ll also need to provide sufficient feedback and in-depth critiques as the project and their product progress (see ‘Reflection and revision’ below).

6. In-depth enquiry

This element is all about rigour. The project has to be academically rigorous. It can’t just be an extended activity – it has to be an enquiry.

It also needs to be scaffolded, growing deeper as students gather and interpret data to answer the driving question, ask further questions of their own, develop and evaluate their solutions and build evidence for their final answer.

Getting the balance right here can be tricky. The inquiry can’t be too narrow, but it also can’t try and include too many side topics or task.

7. Reflection and revision

There have got to be plenty of structured opportunities throughout the project for students to give and receive feedback about the quality of their work-in-progress. Constructive critiques play a large part in this. You, as a teacher, need to provide them, but students will also need to be taught how to give them themselves to their peers. They also need to be able to reflect on and critique their own work.

Part of the assessment of the students’ final product (see below) should be how well they've used the feedback you and their peers have given to improve and refine it.

8. A final product presented to an audience

PBL is not PBL without a final product and an audience. Students should present or exhibit their work to an audience – and it’s got to be more than just you and their classmates. Get other people involved, both from within and outside the school. You could also have students target an online audience.

Another important part of the final product/exhibition is the students’ explanation of how and why they did what they did. This could be presented orally or in written form – whichever’s more appropriate. This has got to have depth – students need to be able to defend and explain their reasoning behind their choices in detail, as well as make it clear that they understood the inquiry process, and prove that they took the feedback they received throughout the project on board to improve their work.

An intimidating task?

So that’s what makes a good PBL project! Worried?

Admittedly, setting up a PBL unit is no small feat – it’s like conducting a massive orchestra, getting all the instruments to come together at the right time and in the right way – but the rewards can be immense.

In order to help you along the way to those immense rewards, we're launching a brand new series on the practicalities of project-based learning. We’ll be covering driving questions, planning your project, creating the perfect entry event, the art of critiquing and much more.

All the information will be from real teachers who’ve tried this stuff in their classroom – tried it and had the most mindblowingly awesome time with their students they want to share it with the rest of the world.

Our next post (everything you need to know about good PBL driving questions) will be out next week. Keep an eye out!

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The 8 essential elements of PBL featured in this article were inspired by this rubric from the Buck Institute of Education, available to download for free.