Pairing Project-Based Learning & Packaged Curricula

Incorporate PBL into existing tasks and create engaging, meaningful opportunities for your students.

DR. CRISTINA COMPTON
Director of Program Development

Project-based learning is a widely used term in education. Although many educators have a general understanding of what it means, it’s often met with uncertainty and apprehension. 

A simple Google Search of “project-based learning” results in 10 pages of articles or blogs, written by various organizations, institutions, and individuals. For instance, cultofpedagogy describes project-based learning as a combination of standards, best practices of UBD (understanding by design), and formative assessments. ASCD describes a project as meaningful if it fulfills two criteria: that students "feel the work is personally meaningful, as a task that matters" and that the project fulfills a “meaningful purpose.” Edutopia describes project-based learning as learning that tells a story. 

Throughout my 15 years of teaching and coaching, I’ve seen varying interpretations and implementations of project-based learning myself, which have been further complicated by the move to remote and blended learning environments. For educators who are working with packaged curricula, it can be especially difficult to see the opportunities available for introducing PBL in classrooms. But focusing on the core components of this work can support us in establishing engaging, meaningful, and doable project-based learning experiences for our students. 

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Components of project-based learning

​One of the most well-known and admired institutions when it comes to project-based learning is the Buck Institute. They offer what I think are very helpful criteria to inform what project-based learning can look like: 

​In line with much of the graphic, our K-12 coaching team believes that projects are a wonderful way to help students cultivate 21st century skills, focus on a pressing topic or issue, develop their identity as readers and writers, and engage in a writing process that involves extensive feedback, revision, and reflection on their learning. We believe the pedagogy of project-based learning is about: 

• Beginning with a driving question or challenge: What is a pressing topic, issue, or problem that we are thinking about? 
• Revolving instruction around inquiry into an essential topic: How can the driving questions serve as a lens to read, write, research, gather, and explore? 
• Incorporating student voice and choice: What are the ways in which students are a part of the design, the driving questions, the topics and themes? 
• Approaching essential skills from multiple perspectives: What interdisciplinary connections could (or should) we be making? 
• Integrating teacher and peer feedback and revision: How and when are we creating a community of learners that supports one another? 
• Concluding the project with a celebration, ideally public: How are we going to celebrate the learning and share it with a wider audience? 

Now that we’ve laid out some of the basics, we can investigate what project-based learning might look like in action. The questions above can help inspire task revision and allow you to incorporate project-based learning into pre-packaged curricula, without starting from scratch.

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Creating relevant, meaningful tasks

Recently, I partnered with a school in Brooklyn to support them as they designed and reimagined assessments for online learning. As an elementary school, they had adopted a packaged curricula for English Language Arts instruction. My goal was to help them make existing tasks and assessments more engaging and relevant for students, and support them in redesigning the tasks as they were written in order to infuse elements of project-based learning — without compromising rigor. 

We began with a first grade writing task that focused on persuasive reviews based on favorite places, foods, etc. To begin revising this task, we started by examining three important questions, informed and inspired by the Buck Institute: 

• Is it engaging?: Will my students enjoy it? Does it allow them choice? Does it consider modifications of the task for my students? 
• Is it meaningful?: Does it have a real audience and purpose? Is it relevant? Does it reflect real world goals and skills? 
• Is it doable?: Do I have all the resources I need, the time, the considerations? What might I have to teach online that I didn’t consider when teaching in person? This last question was particularly important at the time, given the swift transition to online learning, and the fact that teachers and students had limited access to materials, resources, and technology. 

We used these questions to guide our analysis and revision, referring back to the original task:

• Is it engaging?: Ideally, it is offering students choice, by allowing them to choose what they’d like to review.
• It is meaningful?: As it’s written, the purpose and audience for this task is unclear. 
• Is it doable?: Due to some limitations with remote learning during a global health crisis (students would be unable to participate in field trips, conduct observational research at various locations, etc.), we concluded that we might need to scale down the list of possible topics to help focus what students could reasonably review. 

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Turning the task into a project

Now that we have been able to identify the basic possibilities and challenges with this task, we can continue on to revision, and begin to shift our original task into a project. When it comes to developing authentic and meaningful projects, we like to turn to a promising practice called GRASPS. This stands for:

G: What is the goal of the project? 
R : What is the role of the student? 
A: Who is the audience? 
S: What is the structure of the writing? 
P: What is the purpose? 

In conjunction with our earlier questions, the GRASPS framework is a helpful tool in redesigning tasks and ensures that our revisions are clear. In our example, the responses look something like this: 

• Project goal: Craft persuasive reviews focused on the following topics/ideas: 1) best at-home foods/recipes, 2) best games to be played with family members, and 3) best spaces/places to see in your neighborhood. 
• Student role: Expert reviewer 
• Audience: Reviews will be read by peers 
• Structure: Students will submit reviews in the form of essays 
• Purpose: To share ideas for how to have fun and stay safe during the pandemic

Equipped with these revisions, we can now more easily shift the original writing task to one that is project-based, and understand how we can introduce these ideas to students. This not only generates excitement for students, but teachers as well — our partners in Brooklyn were eager to plan and implement this project within their classrooms, and were excited about the additional possibilities for creativity. 

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​What I hope is evident throughout this process is that project-based learning can have a variety of entry points — whether you’re teaching remotely or in-person, creating your own projects, or reimagining pre-packaged curricula. Regardless of your situation, recognizing how instruction can be meaningful, relevant, and doable — even with the current parameters of teaching and learning — is possible. 

DESIGN LEARNING THAT LASTS

UNPACKING PROJECT-BASED LEARNING

PROJECT-BASED WRITING INSTRUCTION