Boosting Midyear Engagement With Place-Based PBL

For even the most experienced and invested educators, winter can be a challenge. Students are tired, routines are disrupted by weather and extracurricular events, and motivation wanes. How can educators plan to keep students learning meaningfully through this time?

Instead of relying on simplistic packets or low-stakes activities, teachers can harness the energy of the community with place-based, project-based learning. By building learning experiences that connect students to their communities, foster reflection, and motivate work toward a hopeful future, we can keep engagement high into spring and beyond.

Project-Based Plus Place-Based

Project- and place-based learning may be new frameworks for some school settings, but the educational concepts they’re founded on are timeless. In well-designed project-based learning (PBL), students engage in active, choice-driven learning in order to create authentic—and public—products.

Combining project-based learning with a place-based lens centers projects on the local environment, cultures, and community. We’ve learned that when teachers connect learning to place, they help students take pride in their community’s strengths while also investigating the origin of local challenges. Moreover, they connect student interests and experiences directly to learning. This shift can help students place higher value in—and therefore more deeply engage with—their coursework, leading to better learning outcomes.

When teachers integrate these two strategies, the resulting place-based PBL experiences can transform abstract concepts into real, relevant problem-solving connected to where students live and learn. But how can busy teachers get started on planning these experiences? We suggest focusing on student projects that propose to address the pressing global needs of today and tomorrow by working at the level of the local community.

Thinking Globally, Acting Locally

Students learn best when they can connect local experiences to global themes, and place-based PBL supports teachers in cultivating that connection. For example, students researching storm resilience in their local community can connect their findings with larger discourse around climate adaptation on a regional or national level, perhaps leveraging the knowledge and perspectives of local experts in emergency preparedness. Students learning about food production, the carbon or water cycle, ecosystems, or energy can discover connections to global sustainability initiatives.

The benefits of place-based PBL reach beyond the understanding of content that students develop throughout their coursework. High-quality PBL embeds reflection throughout a project and makes the resulting products public beyond the student-teacher relationship. These aspects of the learning cycle underscore for students that, as young people, they are an important part of a broader conversation about our future readiness as a society.

When we engage students in problem-solving focused on the places where they live, work, and play, we help them develop the confidence, skills, and relationships they’ll need to continue local problem-solving beyond their school days. We also help build the powerful understanding that everyday people are capable of addressing global issues by starting locally.

Examples of Place-Based PBL

In Whitney’s school in Hawai‘i, high school students designed and taught mini-lessons for elementary science classes. The older students identified local phenomena in accordance with Next Generation Science Standards, deepening their understanding of grade-level course content by tailoring their lessons to apply to their own community. And they gained mentoring experience working with younger children, sharing what they’d learned growing up in the same community and making meaningful connections between school and everyday life. This experience helped both older and younger students contribute to a shared community responsibility of learning and leading.

Students can also approach challenges that require disciplinary learning that goes beyond state and national standards. In Kirstin’s school in Indiana, one student couldn’t safely wear her hearing aid during lacrosse practices. She and her friends decided to create a headband capable of sensing and alerting athletes to fast-moving objects behind them, as well as providing protection from impact, weather, and sweat. Even though it was a very busy winter for the students, most of whom were seniors, members of the group immersed themselves in reviewing and extending their learning in anatomy and computer programming, while also exploring material science and electronics for the first time.

Student athletes in the community who use hearing aids were excited to connect with the team and help test the device. The project even got an endorsement from Indiana basketball legend Tamika Catchings, who grew up wearing hearing aids during basketball practice. The team took top prizes at a national STEM innovation competition and is now working closely with the competition’s corporate sponsor to develop their device. Most important, the students continue to receive feedback that their work is needed and valued, in their local community and beyond.

Both of these examples help illustrate how place-based PBL is not a break from rigorous standards-aligned learning. Rather, lessons that use this framework create immersive learning experiences within meaningful contexts, especially when the project helps fulfill a local need.

Getting Started With Place-Based PBL

How can teachers implement midyear place-based PBL? Our first piece of advice: Start small! Even if projects are short, they can be deeply impactful. A two-week inquiry or even a few days of learning following a conversation with a community member can lead to memorable experiences.

Additionally, it’s powerful for teachers to connect with local partners to center projects in their specific community. Consider reaching out to local historical societies, libraries, nonprofits, or government departments that may be able to help you plan and implement.

Finally, we encourage teachers new to PBL to remember to lean into flexibility. PBL does not have to be perfectly executed for learning to flourish; you can always refine projects in subsequent years.

Place-based PBL can empower educators early in the new calendar year, when we are able to reflect on student growth and agency since the start of the school year. And it holds the power to strongly motivate students by showing that their knowledge and problem-solving are needed now, and not just in some distant future.