Project Based Learning: A powerful way to meet our mission!

Project Based Learning: A way to meet our mission!

"Our mission is to educate, inspire & empower our diverse learners, to shape their futures, to accomplish their dreams and to contribute positively to our local and global communities."

ISD728's excellent mission statement guides us on our journey to make the school experience lasting and powerful for our students. We do a great job educating our students, but an equally important question is how can we better "inspire & empower" them? One way to do this is through Project Based Learning (PBL).

Over the next two months, these tech tips will focus on the elements of Project Based Learning. Even if you don't go "all in" on a "gold standard" PBL experience, implementing strategies that target individual elements of PBL can go a long way to educating, inspiring and empowering our students, and it shifts the responsibility for learning from the teacher to the learner. #studentcenteredlearning

I constantly remind myself that the one doing the work is doing the learning. We need to make sure our students are engaged and empowered and are doing the work of learning. PBL does this.

This first PBL installment will focus on the big picture. What is PBL? Check out this short video to start learning.

Projects vs PBL

If you are not quite ready for PBL, it's OK to begin with student projects. Student projects are capstone activities and experiences that culminate a unit of learning. These often appear after traditional instruction and are guided largely by the teacher. 

This graphic from the New Tech Network nicely illustrates the difference between these two models--Projects and Project Based Learning.

An effective stepping stone in moving from projects to PBL is to replace a final test with a project. This gets the students more authentically engaged, gives them voice and choice and eliminates the redundancy of two summative assessments (test and project). It also buys back some time.

While projects are a great place to start, ultimately moving to a PBL experience shifts the ownership and responsibility for learning to the students right from the beginning of the unit. This is a great way to meet our mission of "educating, inspiring and empowering" our students.