Matt Renwick's List: Project-Based Learning

• work as personally meaningful
• fulfills an educational purpose
• launching a project with an "entry event"
• brainstorming possible solutions
• Students created a driving question
• clear, compelling language

  • What a good driving question requires.
• provocative, open-ended, complex, and linked to the core
• the more voice and choice, the better
• learners can select what topic to study within a general driving question or choose how to design, create, and present products.
• teams of three or four
• In writing journals, students reflected on their thinking

  • We could use the remaining red notebooks for this club.
• collaboration, communication, critical thinking, and the use of technology
• whole class generated a list of more detailed questions
• raised and investigated new questions
• To guide students in real inquiry, refer students to the list of questions they generated after the entry event.
• value questioning, hypothesizing, and openness
• arrange for experts or adult mentors to provide feedback
• nvited audience included parents, peers, and representatives of community, business, and government organizations
• extended process of inquiry, critique, and revision

17 more annotations...

• The term "project learning" derives from the work of John Dewey and dates back to William Kilpatrick, who first used the term in 1918.
• So according to our "big tent" model of PBL, some of the newer "X-BLs" -- problem-, challenge- and design-based -- are basically modern versions of the same concept. They feature, to varying degrees, all of BIE's 8 Essential Elements of PBL (2), although each has its own distinct flavor. (And by the way, each of these three, along with project-based learning, falls under the general category of inquiry-based learning -- which also includes research papers, scientific investigations, Socratic Seminars or other text-based discussions, etc.
• problem-based learning a subset of project-based learning

2 more annotations...

• Children already know how to use technology for entertainment. They need to learn how technology can help them to learn.