Blogs on Project-Based Learning

After months of planning, city officials in Elk Grove, California, are preparing to open a community recycling center equipped to handle hazardous household waste materials. If the new facility is going to be well used, local residents will need to learn the right way to transport batteries and other hazardous materials for safe disposal.

Separated by thousands of miles, middle-school students in suburban Massachusetts are teaming up with peers in Brazil, Africa, and India on a project with lifesaving potential. By designing and building efficient cook stoves, students are learning about energy and humanitarian engineering.

At Sammamish High School, our staff has dedicated our professional development to building expertise in the key elements of problem-based learning. Previous blog entries by my colleagues have given an overview of this process, as well as exploring how we include student voice and work with authentic problems. Another crucial element of successful problem-based learning is using authentic assessment throughout all stages of a unit to constantly evaluate and improve student learning.

At Sammamish High School, we've identified seven key elements of problem-based learning, an approach that drives our comprehensive curriculum. I teach tenth grade history, which puts me in a unique position to describe the key element of authentic problems.

What is an authentic problem in world history? My colleagues and I grappled with this question when we set about to design a problem-based learning (PBL) class for AP World History. We looked enviously at some of our peer disciplines such as biology which we imagined having clear problems for students to work on (they didn't, but that is another blog post).