5 Tips for Helping Students Adjust to PBL

Collaborative learning, student agency, and greater ownership of the learning process are just a few of the skill-based outcomes that are an outgrowth of a project-based learning (PBL) classroom. More and more educators are very interested in making PBL a more central part of their instructional model.    

But what if you don’t teach at a school where PBL is the order of the day? 

At this year’s PBLWorks PBL World conference, I met many teachers from across the country who shared this same sentiment: “I’m excited to get started, but how do I get my students comfortable with a learner-centered environment in a school where it’s the exception rather than the rule?” By the end of our time together, we had come away with a list of strategies that we felt would help aid students who need support transitioning to the independent, learner-centered classroom that is emblematic of high-quality PBL.  

1. Deliberately build your classroom culture from day one

Don’t wait to teach or model the kinds of processes that help a learner-centered classroom run. You don’t have to wait for your first PBL project in order to teach like a PBL teacher. Giving small, gradual introductions of new strategies, processes, and structures up front will ensure that your students aren’t overloaded when it’s go time. 

Even while you’re still supporting them, it’s important for you to be transparent about the kinds of things that students will be expected to do by themselves. Things like critique protocols and delegation of group tasks are going to require your help at the beginning of the year, but remind students that they’ll eventually be doing them on their own.

Introduce the kinds of routines and strategies that students will be expected to use in their learning, in a nonacademic context first. Adding grades to the mix only raises the stress and the stakes. If it’s their first time doing a gallery walk, model it first using topics outside the content area. If you want students to complete daily reflective journal entries, make the first couple of entries about things they can all answer rather than making them dependent on concepts that students are learning.   

2. Structure, structure, structure

There needs to be a clear, concise, and easy-to-follow way to do everything. There’s no such thing as unstructured time in a PBL classroom, even during more flexible periods like work time. Always have a plan, and always be up front about it so that your expectations are known. 

Find structures or processes for the major “seasons” in your room. Ideation for design challenges should flow through a predictable design thinking process like the one used by IDEO. Question generation for student-led inquiry could follow the QFT process. Work time isn’t a free-for-all, no matter what it might look like to the casual observer. It should follow something like the workshop model to provide structure and also independence.

Introspection is a key part of PBL. “Preflect” and reflect daily. Begin and end your days with opportunities to share the goal and flow of the day. End your days with reflections that include prompts that prime the pump for the next day’s activities, such as what students need to complete first or a new piece of content knowledge they’ll need to incorporate into their project. 

3. Create predictability through routine

Students are able to manage their own time and learning if they know what to expect, so creating predictability in a learner-centered classroom is crucial. Research shows that a full 20 percent of behavioral issues are a result of not understanding directions or expectations. So, the clearer your expectations are or the more obvious that “what comes next” is, the less you’ll have to intervene and provide redirection. 

It’s also helpful to create a small list of core routines, strategies, or processes and stick to them. This approach provides structure and gives students reliable touch points as you move through the larger instructional sequences common in PBL. Check out resources like Project Zero’s Thinking Routine Toolbox or K20 Learn for more ideas! You can always introduce new items, but stick to your original list as much as possible.

4. Teach and assess skills like content

Most teachers are great at teaching their content, but they rarely teach and assess skills to the same degree. Instead, they rely on experience or “submersion” like assigning group work to their students as a way of helping them develop things like collaboration. This is akin to throwing someone into a lake to teach them how to swim—sure, they’ll probably figure it out, but out of desperation. Give greater emphasis to skill building.  

To do this, use a simple two-part formula: Pick a student-friendly task and a student-friendly criteria tool. For example, you can use one of the rubrics from PBLWorks to define what strong critical thinking looks like and then have students use the tool to evaluate their performance in a task that requires things like analysis, inference, and evaluation. A great resource for such activities is the classic Silver Bullets, which is full of gamified tasks and challenges that can be used as illustrative opportunities to develop skills in most of the 4 Cs: collaboration, creativity, critical thinking, and communication.

When creating your criteria for skill building, use student input. For example, what does effective collaboration look like? Students have done plenty of group projects that have gone well or gone up in flames. Asking them to reflect on these experiences and pick out the characteristics of strong collaboration helps to create understandable, learner-centered tools for grading and evaluation. What's more, if you include their voices and experience in the criteria you use to evaluate them, they have more direct input in the learning experience as a whole. 

5. Always provide models before students perform independently

Expecting high-level outcomes is fine, and we should hold our students to high expectations, but if your learners have no point of reference about what you expect, it’s a roll of the dice regarding whether or not you’ll get it consistently. Provide an example of either the product or the process you’re hoping for to guide their independence.   

Offer practice opportunities before they do it for “real.” For example, if you want students to evaluate their teamwork using a rubric, give them a chance to practice giving similar feedback so that you can provide guidance and support. You can make this fun by using examples from popular culture or media.

I love showing a clip from The Big Bang Theory as a way of giving students opportunities to critique collaboration or this series of student speeches before they provide feedback on presentation skills.