A Step-by-Step Guide to the Best Projects | Edutopia.org

In learning about how PBL works, I found this website by Edutopia extremely enlightening. The content is clearly laid out, and while I don’t teach high school students, I teach university freshmen who are, in many ways, still very dependent on their teachers.

I’m interested in both PBL and flipped learning, and I’m really scratching my head as to how I can start implementing these practices in my university classes. Barriers to this change include unified testing across sections of the course (all students take the same exams), unified grading system and a culture that is heavy on direct instruction.

Last year, however, I had a fair amount of success negotiating content with students and setting them off on their projects when I didn’t have this system to work under. I also had no idea PBL even existed, so there are several things I would do differently if I were running the activities again. I am quite certain the resources included in this PBL Best Practices outline would be quite handy, and I’ll be needing these again as I try to determine how I can escape this direct instruction death spiral that is my teaching environment.