The Biomimicry project is anchored in the Life Sciences strand of the NGSS standards and also incorporates the Engineering and Technology Sciences strand of the NGSS standards. In other words, it’s an Engineering Design Challe...
Some of the best Project Based Learning experiences are anchored in authentic issues and problems. Students tackle them with original research and a problem solving approach.
We love this project concept that was cleverly titled: The Seagull Squabble that tackled an aut...
The Society Since, at least in many Western countries, most of the population has received some level of formal education, we’ve all been exposed to a competitive way of thinking about success, learning, and growth. Unfortunately, we know that competition has skewed th...
We began our 3-part exploration of competition with our first post focused on competition in the classroom. Now, in this second post, we will explore how systemic use of competition affects students. While teachers have a level of control of how students are...
Healthy competition plays a central role in the way many systems motivate and develop excellence. The space race, sports, war; any situation where two or more opposing powers compete for limited resources has pushed humanity, on various scopes, to new frontiers. If we...
Why is it important that occasionally, teachers let students run headfirst into their own failure? I think one, is because students learn to grow from that failure. In reflection, they recognize the steps they took along the way. They become accustomed to hardship, dev...
I am a Special Educator who has been teaching individuals with ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) for nearly ten years. These students have ranged from those with extremely complex needs to higher-functioning individuals at varying ages - from KS1 to College level. My last...
One of the joys of teaching about the environment is getting my students outside as much as possible. Usually this means excursions to nearby field sites every month or so, which in itself feels miraculous in the typical pace of a high school day. This past year howeve...
Whether it’s your 1st PBL project or your 50th - there are always surprises. The role of a constructivist PBL teacher is to curate a space in which that variation can flourish while still providing and facilitating an effective learning environment for a diverse group...
While Project Based Learning can be a transformative pedagogy, it’s often misunderstood by educators. Here at PBLC, we often joke that PBL should just be renamed: “L” (for Learning….) because when PBL is done well, it’s a lot less about the products and a lot more abou...
LCD is a vital tool to meet the challenges being faced in schools and organizations today. Schools are already making invaluable shifts toward becoming learning communities, in which all of its members are...
“Fasten your seat belts, our staff meeting today is going to be another dreary and unimaginative 80-minute-long assembly-line of paperwork review. Yup, you might want to poke your eyes out with a pencil when you see the agenda we have planned. If you manage to pay att...
Project Based Learning is a methodology of teaching and learning in which students respond to real-world challenges, problems, controversies, scenarios and simulations through a process of focused, student-influenced inquiry with the goals of:
