Top 7 PBL News Stories

 

July 24 - 28, 2017

Each Friday we post a list of articles, blog posts, research studies, and other resources we’ve run across that relate to Project Based Learning.

Here’s what we liked this week:

New Study Shows the Impact of PBL on Student Achievement
Edutopia
This is a big deal. Our friend Nell Duke at the University of Michigan and her colleague Anne-Lise Halvorsen at Michigan State compared a PBL approach with a traditional approach to 2nd grade social studies and found “project-based learning in high-poverty communities can produce statistically significant gains in social studies and informational reading.” An excellent video about this research was recently shown at our PBL World event.  Details on the curriculum – with free downloads of it – are in a related article, "Projects That have Been Put to the Test.

3 Ways to Prepare Educators to Teach PBL
Getting Smart
Nice post by a superintendent near Chicago; his advice is “empower your school leaders,” “shift to skill-based outcomes,” and “provide proper professional development resources.”

Groundbreaking Teacher Training Program for Pre-Service Teachers Launches with Funding from ECMC Foundation
Cision PR Newswire
This press release describes an exciting new development: PBL is finally gaining traction in pre-service education! The Buck Institute is getting support from ECMC to partner with several schools of education to provide PBL professional development to K-12 teaching credential candidates, plus their master teachers and college faculty members.

5 Ways to Support Social-Emotional Learning in the 21st Century Classroom
Education Week
This article reports on a new meta-analysis of social-emotional learning (SEL) in the journal "Child Development" and connects SEL to project-based lessons and global competence.

To Err is Human – and a Powerful Prelude to Learning
Hechinger Report
In the world of PBL and design thinking we often say that a “fail forward” attitude is essential. This research confirms that openly discussing mistakes, valuing mistakes, and keeping a growth mindset improves student performance.

How I Connect Students Through Project-Based Learning
TeachThought
Teacher Rachelle Dene Poth explains how she created collaborative projects involving her Spanish II, II, and IV classes. Love her last line about being a project-based teacher: “While planning is important and leadership essential, the tighter you hold to your vision of things as a teacher, the less ownership students can take over their learning.”

Speak Up for Title II!
Learning Forward
Learning Forward is advocating support for an effort to counter a U.S. House of Representatives proposal to entirely cut funding for Title II, which provides funding for professional learning for teachers and other educators.

 

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